(Okay, this is not pork, it's brisket that I cooked in my backyard! But it was the only picture I could find.)
I grew up in West Tennessee,
which
could probably claim the title of the barbecue capitol of the world if
anyone was interested enough to put in such a claim. Regardless of what
North Carolina, Kansas City or even Memphis say, it was in the rural
region of West Tennessee, Western Kentucky (west of the Tennessee
River) and North Mississippi that the method of cooking now commonly
known as barbecue or BBQ originated, at least as far as the United
States is concerned. The word itself gives a clue - barbecue comes from
the Spanish word barbacao, which means to cook meat on a grill
over an open fire. The modern use is most often attributed to a certain
type of meat in Hispanic culture, but the original word is Spanish, and
it was also from Spain that the first hogs and the later method of
cooking adopted by white settlers in the region west of the Tennessee
River came. In 1539, only 47 years after Columbus landed in the
Bahamas, Hernando De Soto arrived in Florida to begin his
expedition to explore what is now the Southeastern United States.
Previously, Spanish exploration had been primarily in the Carribean
and along the Mexican and Central American coast. Ponce de Leon
discovered Florida early in the sixteen
century and Spain established a colony. De Soto had spent time in
Mexico and Central America before obtaining permission to mount an
expedition to
explore the region northwest of Florida, which at the time included the
present-day Gulf Coast as far west as Louisiana. To feed his men, De
Soto brought with him a large herd of hogs, which were herded along on
the expedition to serve as a source of meat. The exact route followed
by De Soto's explorers is not
known, but it is believed that they moved north out of Florida, then
traveled west across Georgia and
Alabama into what is now Northeast Mississippi, where they spent
the winter of 1540-1541 on Pontotoc Ridge, a long ridge that extends
out of West Tennessee into Mississippi. De Soto and his party
camped in Chickasaw territory, a region claimed by the most fierce
tribe of the Cherokee Nation. De Soto invited the Chickasaw to a feast.
The main
course was pork that had been cooked over an open pit filled with
coals on a grill the Spanish soldiers constructed using their long
steel
lances. The Chickasaw were taken with the taste of the pork and some
of the warriors slipped in and stole some of the Spanish hogs. In
retaliation, De Soto had the culprits whipped (or executed with
cross-bows-depending on the version of the story.) The Chickasaw at
first let the punishment/slaying of members of
their tribe go since the culprits were guilty of theft, but when De
Soto told the chief he wanted 200 of their women to accompany his
party - and he wanted the youngest and most comely - the Chickasaw
decided they had had enough of the arrogant white men and attacked. The
resulting first Battle of Pontotoc Ridge on March 4, 1541 (the second
was fought between the Chickasaw and French explorers almost two
centuries later) was
one-sided, with the natives killing about a dozen of the Spanish, then
killing or making away
with a
good number of their horses and more than 300 hogs. (Some sources put
the number at more than 400.) The
hogs provided a
new source of meat for the Chickasaw. The Chickasaw were
satisfied with their victory and allowed the remainder of the party to
go on their way. De Soto continued on up into West Tennessee and then
westward
to discover the Mississippi River. De Soto himself would die of disease
within a few weeks in Arkansas - his body was sunk in the Mississippi.
Hernando De Soto and his party introduced barbecued pork to Mississippi and West Tennessee in 1541. For nearly 300 years the region, which also included part of what is now Middle Tennessee and northern Alabama, was Indian Territory. The actual Chickasaw lands only went about fifty miles north into what is now Tennessee to a point south of present-day Jackson, but they claimed the land to the Ohio River for their hunting ground. The Chickasaw were part of the Five Tribes that made up the Cherokee Nation. A few adventurous white men drifted into the area and some intermarried with the Chickasaw. Their children rose to prominence in the tribe. In 1818 Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby negotiated for the purchase of all Chickasaw land east of the Mississippi and north of the Mississippi line and the region, which is now West Tennessee and the Purchase Region of Kentucky, was soon open for settlement. The Chickasaw retained ownership of their land in North Mississippi until the 1830s when they sold it to the US and moved west to Arkansas and, ultimately, Oklahoma, and there was considerable contact between them and the whites who were moving into West Tennessee. It was within this area that the unique style of cooking commonly known as barbecue originated. Although it is not formerly recorded that the whites learned the method from the Chickasaw, it is most likely that they did since true, pit barbecue is rarely found outside of the region. Today small pit barbecue restaurants that serve pork shoulder that has been cooked over a concrete pit are common throughout rural West Tennessee and the Jackson Purchase in Kentucky - the region lying just north of West Tennessee between the Mississippi and the Tennessee. Although some barbecue can be found east of the Tennessee River, it is less common anywhere east of Nashville and Louisville, Kentucky. The meat, which is pulled off the bone rather than sliced, is served usually with nothing but cole slaw and perhaps some potato salad and a slice or two of bread. Barbecue sandwiches are available but plates or meat by the pound is most common.
At this point let me say a word about the claim made by North Carolinans that barbecue originated there. All one has to really do is look at the origin of the word to see that this is not true. Although there was limited Spanish exploration into parts of North Carolina, they were mostly in the western part of the state except for exploration by ship along the eastern coast. While it's possible that the tribes that inhabited North Carolina might have had been exposed to pork, they weren't provided with the ready source of meat that fell into the Chickasaw's lap thanks to De Soto's arrogance toward them and the ultimate loss of his herd of hogs. It wasn't until 1629, almost a century after De Soto introduced pork to North America, that Europeans arrived in North Carolina and brought hogs with them. Previously, some hogs had been introduced in Virginia by the settlers at Jamestown, but not until after 1611. By that time the Chickasaw had been cooking pork for 70 years. North Carolina most likely was exposed to barbecue by reverse, as the method of cooking spread eastward through the Cherokee Nation into Georgia and the Carolinas. North Carolina barbecue historians admit that the style of cooking was introduced to white settlers by Indians. The Chickasaw themselves were travelers and are known to have visited American settlements on the East Coast, including Charleston, SC and Savannah, Georiga. But it wasn't until the middle of the Twentieth Century and World War II when large numbers of men from other parts of the country passed through West Tennessee, Western Kentucky and North Mississippi and were exposed to pit barbecue that the method of cooking began spreading out of that particular region. Kansas City and Memphis also both like to lay claim to barbecue superiority, but in reality both places are the recipients of the skill and knowledge of barbecue cooks who came to the city from rural areas in Mississippi and West Tennessee and opened up commercial establishments. The migration northward of former sharecroppers as the cotton industry mechanized also contributed to the spread of barbecue into urban areas such as Chicago, St. Louis - and Kansas City. It is a matter of fact that Kansas City barbecue was spawned by Henry Perry, a Negro from Shelby County near Memphis, who opened up a barbecue pit in the city shortly after the turn of the Twentieth Century. In short, Kansas City barbecue came from West Tennessee! Eastern North Carolina barbecue cooking is nearly identical to that of West Tennessee, even to the tradition of using nothing but vinegar for basting. That the two regions have nearly identical cooking styles makes me wonder if North Carolina's Eastern Barbecue style wasn't originated by a West Tennessean, probably a sailor or Marine, who introduced the Chickasaw style of cooking to the East Coast. Or, a frontiersman from the West may have gone back to Eastern Carolina in the 1830s-1840s and took the cooking method with him. North Carolinians can't seem to pin-point exactly when pit barbecue was introduced to the area - they simply claim it started there during colonial times without offering any proof other than that North Carolinans raised hogs (as did farmers in every other colony and, later, state.) Western Carolina Barbecue's origins are known to date back to the early Twentieth Century, at about the same time that Henry Perry introduced West Tennessee barbecue to Kansas City.
Modern "pit barbecue" is cooked over a concrete pit but the regional barbecue for which the former Chickasaw region is famous was originally cooked over a pit dug in the ground. As a boy, I watched our local barbecue cooks dig the pit and cover it with net wire, then fill it with coals from freshly cut hickory trees and place fresh pork shoulders on the wire to cook it for our local community club events. I can't remember for certain, but the pit that my dad and some of the other local men dug in the edge of the woods near the old school house that served as a community club was possibly lined with bricks. (That spot is actually on land I now own but is so grown up with kudzu that I doubt if I can find it.) No doubt the choice of pork shoulders was more economical than tradition, since the shoulders contain more meat per pound than an entire hog. The original barbecue cooks most likely cooked an entire hog since barbecues were normally held for special events and there was no way to process and preserve other cuts of meat. By the 1950s there were slaughter houses where meat could be bought that had already been cut up. There is one "modern" barbecue establishment in Lexington that cooks whole hog, but that particular establishment went into business in 1960. Each community had it's own barbecue cooks but the one with the reputation for the tastiest meat in ours was Elvis "Cuzzie" Seavers, who just happened to be one of our closest neighbors. Probably in his sixties in the 1950s, Cuzzie owned a farm just down the road from ours. He was a coon and fox hunter, and would go out at night and let his dogs track and trail a coon or fox until they ran it up a tree. My mother wouldn't let me go coon and fox hunting because of the dirty jokes and bad language that was common, but we often went to his house where he and other neighbors, including my Uncle Larry, would gather to pick guitars, banjos and mandolins and make music. Our community club was organized not long after we moved to Pleasant Hill Community, the year after the county shut down all of the one-room school houses and left the building on a lot that adjoined our farm available for community use. We met once a month for an add-a-dish dinner and program put on by the local county agent and home demonstration agent. The Pleasant Hill Community Club would put on several fund raisers each year, and as often as not they were centered around barbecue. If not barbecue, it was stew, a stew very much like the Burgoo that is so famous in Kentucky, although the stew served in our community was simply called stew. Sometimes we'd have a fish fry offering Tennessee River catfish.
Each barbecue cook had his own special sauce that he made up with which to baste his meat. Modern barbecue is heavy on sauce but traditional barbecue emphasizes the meat itself, particularly the slow-cooking method of using coals rather than flames. The "sauce," if it can truly be called that, was actually a liquid that was put on the meat primarily to keep it from drying out. The secret to good barbecue is that the meat must be moist - dry meat takes away from the flavor, which is why modern cooks depend on heavy sauces made primarily of tomato sauce or ketchup. So-called "Carolina Barbecue" is nothing but meat heavily basted with a tomato-based sauce (except in the eastern part of the state, which is traditional.) Cuzzie's sauce had no tomato sauce at all. In fact, if I remember correctly, it consisted primarily of vinegar and Coca-Cola laced with pepper. My dad used to complain about cooks who used too much cayenne pepper in their sauce, which leads me to believe that Cuzzie probably used simple black pepper in his. Some cooks might add Louisiana hot sauce to their mixture while others kept it sweet and mild. Cuzzie probably had some kind of rub that I don't remember what it was, although it no doubt was made primarily of salt.
It is important to understand that unlike modern BBQ, which is usually cooked in commercial smokers, true barbecue is not smoked, but is cooked over coals. The smoke flavors the meat but the cooking is actually done by the heat of the coals. The process is slow; at our local community club barbecues Cuzzie started cooking late in the afternoon or early evening and cooked the pork shoulders all night and into the next day, a 24-hour process. He timed it so the meat would be ready to serve late the next afternoon or early evening when people started gathering. Pork barbecue has to be thoroughly cooked to prevent the possibility of Trichinosis, a disease caused by eating under-cooked pork. Long, slow-cooking also makes the meat tender, and easy to pull off of the bone. The pits were open, and usually out in the edge of the woods, although in an area that had been cleared of leaves and underbrush to prevent the possibility of a forest fire. While they watched the meat, the men would while away the time spinning yarns in the frontier tradition. Those who had a taste for alchohol might bring a pint or even a jug to sip on. When the meat was ready it was pulled off the shoulders and piled on paper plates and taken inside where it was served. I don't recall what the price was, but it wouldn't have been more than $1.00-$2.00 a plate and a cold drink was probably thrown in for free or a nickle at most. There was no beer or alcohol. Side dishes were freshly made slaw - served on the side - and perhaps beans and potato salad along with a slice or two of light bread.
My recollection of barbecue is mostly centered around the community club events, but there were some local barbecue cooks who would cook up a mess of barbecue before holidays such as the Fourth of July and Labor Day and then drive around the community selling the meat out of the back of their pickup truck. There were some barbecue joints around and once in awhile Daddy might pick up a pound or two. Later on after I left home and went into the Air Force my folks would by a shoulder from one of the establishments that came and went around Carroll and Gibson Counties. At some point a local Negro everybody called Chinaman because of his oval face moved back home from Chicago and set up a barbecue pit by his house. It really wasn't a barbecue joint in the traditional sense of a restaurant since Chinaman sold his meat primarily by the shoulder or by the pound. Chinaman drifted away from the traditional light sauce and sold a sauce he made himself that was heavy on the tomato, but not to the extent as the sauces found in North Carolina and even Texas. Chinaman once told me that he had cooked barbecue in Chicago. A few other people had concrete pits made and produced commercial barbecue for sale by the pound or by the plate.
Having spent 12 years in the Air Force and then a lifetime traveling around the United States as a corporate pilot, I've had every possible form of barbecue imaginable. I've had Carolina Barbecue, Kansas City Barbecue, Chicago Barbecue, Hawaiian Barbecue, Carribean Barbecue, Texas Barbecue - you name it, I've ate it. I've eaten barbecue in Georgia, Alabama, Florida and even in Indiana, where a local Holiday Inn offered "Jackson, Tennessee barbecue." And I can say with certainity that none of them can hold a candle to real, West Tennessee/Western Kentucky barbecue.
Speaking of Texas, that is now where I make my home and while I truly love Texas barbecue, it is entirely different from the West Tennessee barbecue I remember so fondly from my youth. For one thing, until recently when you said "barbecue" in Texas you were talking about beef, beef brisket to be specific. Texas barbecue joints/restaurants also serve a lot of sausage, which is not surprising since Texas Barbecue is really German smoked meat and is cooked in a metal smoker rather than over an open pit. Texas has a culture all it's own, a culture that is a mixture of West Tennessee, Mexico and European, particularly Germany and Czechzlovakia. After Texas Independence was won by settlers who had immigrated to the former Mexican state from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama and by local people of Mexican descent, large numbers of Germans and Czechs immigrated to the region and were assimilated into the culture. While the Tennesseeans and Mexicans were already familiar with barbecuing meat over coals in an open pit, the Germans and Czechs had a tradition of sausage making and smoking meat to preserve it. The three cultures merged into a special style of cooking that is now called Texas Barbecue, although Smokehouse Barbecue is probably a better term. Smokehouses were not unique to the German culture - smoking pork, particularly ham and bacon, was common throughout the South, particularly in Virginia and the Carolinas. The Germans introduced stuffed sausages, with the result being Texas barbecue that includes smoked sausages that are not entirely different from Bratwurst.
A word about smokehouses and smoked meats, which are routinely confused with barbecue. Smoking of meat is an age-old method that was developed to PRESERVE meat, not to cook it. Methods can vary from drying strips, as in making "jerky", to large-scale smoking of hams and bacon or side of beef. Since there was no refrigation until the early part of the Twentieth Century, farmers had to have some means of preserving meat for their own family's consumption or to sell. Some farmers and plantation owners had ice houses that were filled with ice cut from rivers and ponds in the winter, but they were out of reach of most people. "Long hunters," who made long journeys into the frontier from the east, smoked their kills and made jerky that they depended on to get them by until they made their next kill or when they didn't want to take time to stop and cook a meal. Eventually methods were developed for preserving meat by injecting or rubbing it with various "cures", including salt, sugar and other mixtures of spices that had been found to have preservative powers. The original method, however, was smoking, and all farms prior to the mid-Twentieth Century when America became dependent on technology and industrial methods of meat preservation, featured a smoke house. The smoke house was not used for cooking meals, but was a special building that was designed so that ham, bacon, sausages or sides of beef could be hung from the rafters and smoked by smouldering coals that were shoveled under the floor of the building. It was not a method of cooking, but a means of preserving meats for future consumption. Not a few smokehouses caught fire during the process! Our place had a smoke house as did my grandparents, although by the 1940s when I was born meat was being preserved using "sugar cure" or other methods such as brine injection.
Sauces are now almost synonomous with barbecue, but this has not always been the case. Kansas City barbecue historians attribute their style to the addition of rich hot sauces that were introduced when a Texan became involved with the barbecue place originally established by West Tennesseean Henry Perry. Somewhere along the line some North Carolina cooks adopted a method of using vinegar combined in a jar with tiny peppers (a form of vinegar that is traditional in the South for use on other items, particularly greens.) As mentioned previously, West Tennessee cooks in the 50s used mostly vinegar combined with cola, salt and pepper and flavored/spiked with cayenne or black pepper to baste the meat while it was slow-cooking over hot hickory coals and keep it moist. The more recent reliance on sauce is no doubt due to the tendency to dry out meat when cooking it by commercial methods, particularly when it is cooked by smoke. After all, the whole intention of meat smoking in the first place was to dry and preserve it! Not a few BBQ joints rely more on their sauces than on their cooking methods and it's not at all uncommon to find otherwise dry meat that is moistened by a tomatoey sauce. My first introduction to "Carolina Barbecue" was some stringy pork that had been chopped up and mixed with a sauce, then slapped on a bun at an eating establishment just out the back gate at Pope Air Force Base near the town of Spring Lake, North Carolina. It was nothing like West Tennessee barbecue, which is meat pulled off the bone and served either on a plate or on a bun with nothing on it at all.
If you go on the Internet and look for something definitive about the origin of barbecue or even the root of the word, you'll find a variety of opinions on both. Websters New World Dictionary, however, 1970 edition, states that is derived from the Spanish word "barabacao" and while it has a variety of meanings, the primary is a "raised grill or grate used for the cooking or drying of meat over an open fire", which is exactly how De Soto's party cooked their hogs before the Chickasaw drove them off into the woods. Incidentally, in the Nineteenth Century a common Chickasaw saying was that De Soto brought pork and hominy, which also originated with the Chickasaw, together. There is no doubt that the word found its way into the English language, at least in North America, during the Seventeenth Century but this is most likely due to commerce between the Virginias and Carolinas with the Caribbean, where some believe the word originated and where there was a strong Spanish influence. In the Caribbean, "barbacao" had also come to mean a feast centered around roasting an animal over an open fire and did not refer specifically to a method of cooking pork. In fact, "barbecues" were common throughout North America, particularly in regions that had been influenced by Spaniards. After all, it was in Texas that the West Tennessee and Mexican barbecue cultures merged, then further evolved when the new culture integrated Czech and German meat smoking into the equation.
The taste for barbecue spread throughout the United States during the Great Depression and, especially, World War II as men from every region of the country were molded into single units in the WPA and the armed forces. Military bases sprang up all over the country, including in the vicinity of Memphis and Clarksville, Tennessee/Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Noted author James Jones refers to West Tennessee barbecue in his book Whistle, which is based on his experiences while recovering from wounds in a military hospital in Memphis, then at the US Army balloon base at Camp Tyson. Men from New York, California, Oregon, and every other state were exposed for the first time to barbecued pork cooked in the West Tennessee style. Men who served in Texas were treated to Texas beef BBQ. After the war they took the taste with them, and some of them began constructing backyard barbecue grills behind the homes they bought using their benefits under the GI Bill of Rights. The 1950s saw a huge migration of men from the South, white as well as black, who moved north to Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati and St. Louis looking for work in the automobile and other manufacturing plants that brought prosperity to the industralized regions of the nation. These men took a taste for barbecue with them, and it wasn't long before some of them began opening up barbecue joints in northern cities. Others took the delicacy to southern cities and towns, and opened up barbecue (or BBQ) places that catered to more upscale urban residents.
Kentucky is a state that has a very convoluted barbecue tradition. The western region, the area known as The Purchase because it was part of the 1816 purchase from the Chickasaw, has the same barbecue tradition as its neighbors to the south in West Tennessee. But as you move eastward, the style and type of meat changes considerably. Central Kentucky barbecue often consists of mutton or goat, as well as chicken and the pork may be ham rather than barbecued pork. The further east one goes in Kentucky, the less likely they will even find barbecue at all. (That may very well be changing due to the emergence of barbecue chains.) The same can be said of Tennessee. Barbecue country is mostly west of Nashville, although restaurants offering some form of barbecue can be found in larger cities and towns.
In short, barbecue is like gourmet ice cream. The author of an article in Atlantic about the famed gourmet ice creams that appeared in the 1980s closed his article by saying "and if you really want the best ice cream, take a trip down to Texas and get some Blue Bell." You can get barbecue anywhere, but if you really want the best, head on down or over to the former Chickasaw Territory in West Tennessee, Western Kentucky and North Mississippi. That's where it started and where you'll find the best today. Forget the sauce - it's the meat!
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Hernando De Soto and his party introduced barbecued pork to Mississippi and West Tennessee in 1541. For nearly 300 years the region, which also included part of what is now Middle Tennessee and northern Alabama, was Indian Territory. The actual Chickasaw lands only went about fifty miles north into what is now Tennessee to a point south of present-day Jackson, but they claimed the land to the Ohio River for their hunting ground. The Chickasaw were part of the Five Tribes that made up the Cherokee Nation. A few adventurous white men drifted into the area and some intermarried with the Chickasaw. Their children rose to prominence in the tribe. In 1818 Andrew Jackson and Isaac Shelby negotiated for the purchase of all Chickasaw land east of the Mississippi and north of the Mississippi line and the region, which is now West Tennessee and the Purchase Region of Kentucky, was soon open for settlement. The Chickasaw retained ownership of their land in North Mississippi until the 1830s when they sold it to the US and moved west to Arkansas and, ultimately, Oklahoma, and there was considerable contact between them and the whites who were moving into West Tennessee. It was within this area that the unique style of cooking commonly known as barbecue originated. Although it is not formerly recorded that the whites learned the method from the Chickasaw, it is most likely that they did since true, pit barbecue is rarely found outside of the region. Today small pit barbecue restaurants that serve pork shoulder that has been cooked over a concrete pit are common throughout rural West Tennessee and the Jackson Purchase in Kentucky - the region lying just north of West Tennessee between the Mississippi and the Tennessee. Although some barbecue can be found east of the Tennessee River, it is less common anywhere east of Nashville and Louisville, Kentucky. The meat, which is pulled off the bone rather than sliced, is served usually with nothing but cole slaw and perhaps some potato salad and a slice or two of bread. Barbecue sandwiches are available but plates or meat by the pound is most common.
At this point let me say a word about the claim made by North Carolinans that barbecue originated there. All one has to really do is look at the origin of the word to see that this is not true. Although there was limited Spanish exploration into parts of North Carolina, they were mostly in the western part of the state except for exploration by ship along the eastern coast. While it's possible that the tribes that inhabited North Carolina might have had been exposed to pork, they weren't provided with the ready source of meat that fell into the Chickasaw's lap thanks to De Soto's arrogance toward them and the ultimate loss of his herd of hogs. It wasn't until 1629, almost a century after De Soto introduced pork to North America, that Europeans arrived in North Carolina and brought hogs with them. Previously, some hogs had been introduced in Virginia by the settlers at Jamestown, but not until after 1611. By that time the Chickasaw had been cooking pork for 70 years. North Carolina most likely was exposed to barbecue by reverse, as the method of cooking spread eastward through the Cherokee Nation into Georgia and the Carolinas. North Carolina barbecue historians admit that the style of cooking was introduced to white settlers by Indians. The Chickasaw themselves were travelers and are known to have visited American settlements on the East Coast, including Charleston, SC and Savannah, Georiga. But it wasn't until the middle of the Twentieth Century and World War II when large numbers of men from other parts of the country passed through West Tennessee, Western Kentucky and North Mississippi and were exposed to pit barbecue that the method of cooking began spreading out of that particular region. Kansas City and Memphis also both like to lay claim to barbecue superiority, but in reality both places are the recipients of the skill and knowledge of barbecue cooks who came to the city from rural areas in Mississippi and West Tennessee and opened up commercial establishments. The migration northward of former sharecroppers as the cotton industry mechanized also contributed to the spread of barbecue into urban areas such as Chicago, St. Louis - and Kansas City. It is a matter of fact that Kansas City barbecue was spawned by Henry Perry, a Negro from Shelby County near Memphis, who opened up a barbecue pit in the city shortly after the turn of the Twentieth Century. In short, Kansas City barbecue came from West Tennessee! Eastern North Carolina barbecue cooking is nearly identical to that of West Tennessee, even to the tradition of using nothing but vinegar for basting. That the two regions have nearly identical cooking styles makes me wonder if North Carolina's Eastern Barbecue style wasn't originated by a West Tennessean, probably a sailor or Marine, who introduced the Chickasaw style of cooking to the East Coast. Or, a frontiersman from the West may have gone back to Eastern Carolina in the 1830s-1840s and took the cooking method with him. North Carolinians can't seem to pin-point exactly when pit barbecue was introduced to the area - they simply claim it started there during colonial times without offering any proof other than that North Carolinans raised hogs (as did farmers in every other colony and, later, state.) Western Carolina Barbecue's origins are known to date back to the early Twentieth Century, at about the same time that Henry Perry introduced West Tennessee barbecue to Kansas City.
Modern "pit barbecue" is cooked over a concrete pit but the regional barbecue for which the former Chickasaw region is famous was originally cooked over a pit dug in the ground. As a boy, I watched our local barbecue cooks dig the pit and cover it with net wire, then fill it with coals from freshly cut hickory trees and place fresh pork shoulders on the wire to cook it for our local community club events. I can't remember for certain, but the pit that my dad and some of the other local men dug in the edge of the woods near the old school house that served as a community club was possibly lined with bricks. (That spot is actually on land I now own but is so grown up with kudzu that I doubt if I can find it.) No doubt the choice of pork shoulders was more economical than tradition, since the shoulders contain more meat per pound than an entire hog. The original barbecue cooks most likely cooked an entire hog since barbecues were normally held for special events and there was no way to process and preserve other cuts of meat. By the 1950s there were slaughter houses where meat could be bought that had already been cut up. There is one "modern" barbecue establishment in Lexington that cooks whole hog, but that particular establishment went into business in 1960. Each community had it's own barbecue cooks but the one with the reputation for the tastiest meat in ours was Elvis "Cuzzie" Seavers, who just happened to be one of our closest neighbors. Probably in his sixties in the 1950s, Cuzzie owned a farm just down the road from ours. He was a coon and fox hunter, and would go out at night and let his dogs track and trail a coon or fox until they ran it up a tree. My mother wouldn't let me go coon and fox hunting because of the dirty jokes and bad language that was common, but we often went to his house where he and other neighbors, including my Uncle Larry, would gather to pick guitars, banjos and mandolins and make music. Our community club was organized not long after we moved to Pleasant Hill Community, the year after the county shut down all of the one-room school houses and left the building on a lot that adjoined our farm available for community use. We met once a month for an add-a-dish dinner and program put on by the local county agent and home demonstration agent. The Pleasant Hill Community Club would put on several fund raisers each year, and as often as not they were centered around barbecue. If not barbecue, it was stew, a stew very much like the Burgoo that is so famous in Kentucky, although the stew served in our community was simply called stew. Sometimes we'd have a fish fry offering Tennessee River catfish.
Each barbecue cook had his own special sauce that he made up with which to baste his meat. Modern barbecue is heavy on sauce but traditional barbecue emphasizes the meat itself, particularly the slow-cooking method of using coals rather than flames. The "sauce," if it can truly be called that, was actually a liquid that was put on the meat primarily to keep it from drying out. The secret to good barbecue is that the meat must be moist - dry meat takes away from the flavor, which is why modern cooks depend on heavy sauces made primarily of tomato sauce or ketchup. So-called "Carolina Barbecue" is nothing but meat heavily basted with a tomato-based sauce (except in the eastern part of the state, which is traditional.) Cuzzie's sauce had no tomato sauce at all. In fact, if I remember correctly, it consisted primarily of vinegar and Coca-Cola laced with pepper. My dad used to complain about cooks who used too much cayenne pepper in their sauce, which leads me to believe that Cuzzie probably used simple black pepper in his. Some cooks might add Louisiana hot sauce to their mixture while others kept it sweet and mild. Cuzzie probably had some kind of rub that I don't remember what it was, although it no doubt was made primarily of salt.
It is important to understand that unlike modern BBQ, which is usually cooked in commercial smokers, true barbecue is not smoked, but is cooked over coals. The smoke flavors the meat but the cooking is actually done by the heat of the coals. The process is slow; at our local community club barbecues Cuzzie started cooking late in the afternoon or early evening and cooked the pork shoulders all night and into the next day, a 24-hour process. He timed it so the meat would be ready to serve late the next afternoon or early evening when people started gathering. Pork barbecue has to be thoroughly cooked to prevent the possibility of Trichinosis, a disease caused by eating under-cooked pork. Long, slow-cooking also makes the meat tender, and easy to pull off of the bone. The pits were open, and usually out in the edge of the woods, although in an area that had been cleared of leaves and underbrush to prevent the possibility of a forest fire. While they watched the meat, the men would while away the time spinning yarns in the frontier tradition. Those who had a taste for alchohol might bring a pint or even a jug to sip on. When the meat was ready it was pulled off the shoulders and piled on paper plates and taken inside where it was served. I don't recall what the price was, but it wouldn't have been more than $1.00-$2.00 a plate and a cold drink was probably thrown in for free or a nickle at most. There was no beer or alcohol. Side dishes were freshly made slaw - served on the side - and perhaps beans and potato salad along with a slice or two of light bread.
My recollection of barbecue is mostly centered around the community club events, but there were some local barbecue cooks who would cook up a mess of barbecue before holidays such as the Fourth of July and Labor Day and then drive around the community selling the meat out of the back of their pickup truck. There were some barbecue joints around and once in awhile Daddy might pick up a pound or two. Later on after I left home and went into the Air Force my folks would by a shoulder from one of the establishments that came and went around Carroll and Gibson Counties. At some point a local Negro everybody called Chinaman because of his oval face moved back home from Chicago and set up a barbecue pit by his house. It really wasn't a barbecue joint in the traditional sense of a restaurant since Chinaman sold his meat primarily by the shoulder or by the pound. Chinaman drifted away from the traditional light sauce and sold a sauce he made himself that was heavy on the tomato, but not to the extent as the sauces found in North Carolina and even Texas. Chinaman once told me that he had cooked barbecue in Chicago. A few other people had concrete pits made and produced commercial barbecue for sale by the pound or by the plate.
Having spent 12 years in the Air Force and then a lifetime traveling around the United States as a corporate pilot, I've had every possible form of barbecue imaginable. I've had Carolina Barbecue, Kansas City Barbecue, Chicago Barbecue, Hawaiian Barbecue, Carribean Barbecue, Texas Barbecue - you name it, I've ate it. I've eaten barbecue in Georgia, Alabama, Florida and even in Indiana, where a local Holiday Inn offered "Jackson, Tennessee barbecue." And I can say with certainity that none of them can hold a candle to real, West Tennessee/Western Kentucky barbecue.
Speaking of Texas, that is now where I make my home and while I truly love Texas barbecue, it is entirely different from the West Tennessee barbecue I remember so fondly from my youth. For one thing, until recently when you said "barbecue" in Texas you were talking about beef, beef brisket to be specific. Texas barbecue joints/restaurants also serve a lot of sausage, which is not surprising since Texas Barbecue is really German smoked meat and is cooked in a metal smoker rather than over an open pit. Texas has a culture all it's own, a culture that is a mixture of West Tennessee, Mexico and European, particularly Germany and Czechzlovakia. After Texas Independence was won by settlers who had immigrated to the former Mexican state from Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama and by local people of Mexican descent, large numbers of Germans and Czechs immigrated to the region and were assimilated into the culture. While the Tennesseeans and Mexicans were already familiar with barbecuing meat over coals in an open pit, the Germans and Czechs had a tradition of sausage making and smoking meat to preserve it. The three cultures merged into a special style of cooking that is now called Texas Barbecue, although Smokehouse Barbecue is probably a better term. Smokehouses were not unique to the German culture - smoking pork, particularly ham and bacon, was common throughout the South, particularly in Virginia and the Carolinas. The Germans introduced stuffed sausages, with the result being Texas barbecue that includes smoked sausages that are not entirely different from Bratwurst.
A word about smokehouses and smoked meats, which are routinely confused with barbecue. Smoking of meat is an age-old method that was developed to PRESERVE meat, not to cook it. Methods can vary from drying strips, as in making "jerky", to large-scale smoking of hams and bacon or side of beef. Since there was no refrigation until the early part of the Twentieth Century, farmers had to have some means of preserving meat for their own family's consumption or to sell. Some farmers and plantation owners had ice houses that were filled with ice cut from rivers and ponds in the winter, but they were out of reach of most people. "Long hunters," who made long journeys into the frontier from the east, smoked their kills and made jerky that they depended on to get them by until they made their next kill or when they didn't want to take time to stop and cook a meal. Eventually methods were developed for preserving meat by injecting or rubbing it with various "cures", including salt, sugar and other mixtures of spices that had been found to have preservative powers. The original method, however, was smoking, and all farms prior to the mid-Twentieth Century when America became dependent on technology and industrial methods of meat preservation, featured a smoke house. The smoke house was not used for cooking meals, but was a special building that was designed so that ham, bacon, sausages or sides of beef could be hung from the rafters and smoked by smouldering coals that were shoveled under the floor of the building. It was not a method of cooking, but a means of preserving meats for future consumption. Not a few smokehouses caught fire during the process! Our place had a smoke house as did my grandparents, although by the 1940s when I was born meat was being preserved using "sugar cure" or other methods such as brine injection.
Sauces are now almost synonomous with barbecue, but this has not always been the case. Kansas City barbecue historians attribute their style to the addition of rich hot sauces that were introduced when a Texan became involved with the barbecue place originally established by West Tennesseean Henry Perry. Somewhere along the line some North Carolina cooks adopted a method of using vinegar combined in a jar with tiny peppers (a form of vinegar that is traditional in the South for use on other items, particularly greens.) As mentioned previously, West Tennessee cooks in the 50s used mostly vinegar combined with cola, salt and pepper and flavored/spiked with cayenne or black pepper to baste the meat while it was slow-cooking over hot hickory coals and keep it moist. The more recent reliance on sauce is no doubt due to the tendency to dry out meat when cooking it by commercial methods, particularly when it is cooked by smoke. After all, the whole intention of meat smoking in the first place was to dry and preserve it! Not a few BBQ joints rely more on their sauces than on their cooking methods and it's not at all uncommon to find otherwise dry meat that is moistened by a tomatoey sauce. My first introduction to "Carolina Barbecue" was some stringy pork that had been chopped up and mixed with a sauce, then slapped on a bun at an eating establishment just out the back gate at Pope Air Force Base near the town of Spring Lake, North Carolina. It was nothing like West Tennessee barbecue, which is meat pulled off the bone and served either on a plate or on a bun with nothing on it at all.
If you go on the Internet and look for something definitive about the origin of barbecue or even the root of the word, you'll find a variety of opinions on both. Websters New World Dictionary, however, 1970 edition, states that is derived from the Spanish word "barabacao" and while it has a variety of meanings, the primary is a "raised grill or grate used for the cooking or drying of meat over an open fire", which is exactly how De Soto's party cooked their hogs before the Chickasaw drove them off into the woods. Incidentally, in the Nineteenth Century a common Chickasaw saying was that De Soto brought pork and hominy, which also originated with the Chickasaw, together. There is no doubt that the word found its way into the English language, at least in North America, during the Seventeenth Century but this is most likely due to commerce between the Virginias and Carolinas with the Caribbean, where some believe the word originated and where there was a strong Spanish influence. In the Caribbean, "barbacao" had also come to mean a feast centered around roasting an animal over an open fire and did not refer specifically to a method of cooking pork. In fact, "barbecues" were common throughout North America, particularly in regions that had been influenced by Spaniards. After all, it was in Texas that the West Tennessee and Mexican barbecue cultures merged, then further evolved when the new culture integrated Czech and German meat smoking into the equation.
The taste for barbecue spread throughout the United States during the Great Depression and, especially, World War II as men from every region of the country were molded into single units in the WPA and the armed forces. Military bases sprang up all over the country, including in the vicinity of Memphis and Clarksville, Tennessee/Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Noted author James Jones refers to West Tennessee barbecue in his book Whistle, which is based on his experiences while recovering from wounds in a military hospital in Memphis, then at the US Army balloon base at Camp Tyson. Men from New York, California, Oregon, and every other state were exposed for the first time to barbecued pork cooked in the West Tennessee style. Men who served in Texas were treated to Texas beef BBQ. After the war they took the taste with them, and some of them began constructing backyard barbecue grills behind the homes they bought using their benefits under the GI Bill of Rights. The 1950s saw a huge migration of men from the South, white as well as black, who moved north to Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati and St. Louis looking for work in the automobile and other manufacturing plants that brought prosperity to the industralized regions of the nation. These men took a taste for barbecue with them, and it wasn't long before some of them began opening up barbecue joints in northern cities. Others took the delicacy to southern cities and towns, and opened up barbecue (or BBQ) places that catered to more upscale urban residents.
Kentucky is a state that has a very convoluted barbecue tradition. The western region, the area known as The Purchase because it was part of the 1816 purchase from the Chickasaw, has the same barbecue tradition as its neighbors to the south in West Tennessee. But as you move eastward, the style and type of meat changes considerably. Central Kentucky barbecue often consists of mutton or goat, as well as chicken and the pork may be ham rather than barbecued pork. The further east one goes in Kentucky, the less likely they will even find barbecue at all. (That may very well be changing due to the emergence of barbecue chains.) The same can be said of Tennessee. Barbecue country is mostly west of Nashville, although restaurants offering some form of barbecue can be found in larger cities and towns.
In short, barbecue is like gourmet ice cream. The author of an article in Atlantic about the famed gourmet ice creams that appeared in the 1980s closed his article by saying "and if you really want the best ice cream, take a trip down to Texas and get some Blue Bell." You can get barbecue anywhere, but if you really want the best, head on down or over to the former Chickasaw Territory in West Tennessee, Western Kentucky and North Mississippi. That's where it started and where you'll find the best today. Forget the sauce - it's the meat!
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