“Get it hot off of the pit”: a celebration of barbecue

As we head steadily towards the summer months, my thoughts turn increasingly to the backyard barbecues I plan to have with my friends and family. Growing up, I remember these taking place almost every weekend. We would gather at my uncle’s farm and spend the day playing volleyball, picking blackberries, and desperately hoping that this would be the year that our uncles wouldn’t char the chicken and burgers beyond all resemblance of actual food. That never really happened but, happily, my cousins took over the job of tending the grill fairly early on, and we were spared from eating what had essentially become charcoal.

Luckily, the examples of barbecue that can be found throughout the American Folklife Center’s archival collections look a lot more appetizing than the hockey-puck-like hamburgers and briquette-flavored chicken I remember from my youth. As we head into the last week of National Barbecue Month (and as a belated celebration of May 16th’s National Barbecue Day), let’s dig into the Center’s collections for some inspiration. Hopefully, these items will whet your appetite and get your gears turning about what makes for the best barbecue!

There are several different “schools” of barbecue in the United States. The main ones that I was most familiar with are:

• Carolina
• Memphis
• Kansas City
• St. Louis
• Texas

Barbecue styles are not limited to only these varieties and, in fact, there are even some additional differences within some of these styles. For instance, ask anyone from the Carolina region (as I asked our former Carolinian, Doug Peach) and they will point out the differences between not only North Carolina and South Carolina barbecue styles, but also the difference in eastern North Carolina barbecue. Texas, too, has differences that reflect regions within the Lonestar state. In addition to these main “schools” of barbecue, you’ll also find additional categories such as Hawaiian, Korean, Alabama, and more! Each of these are distinct, and reflect regional approaches to the choice of meat, its preparation and, often, its final presentation. Some people are vehemently in favor of one barbecue school over the others. Others – like myself – find something to love about each of them.

In July 1977, as part of the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project Collection (AFC 1982/010), fieldworker David Stanley interviewed Jack Dempsey, the 58-year-old proprietor of Dempsey’s Barbeque in Enigma, Georgia. Though Dempsey’s Barbeque had been in operation for seventeen years at the time of the interview, Dempsey himself had actually begun learning the trade in Texas, at the bright young age of nine. His years-long mastery of the art of barbecue began with a series of odd jobs at a barbecue stand run by “a red-headed, freckle-faced, black-eyed Texas Irishman” who took a very hands-on approach to teaching his employees: if they made a mistake after claiming they knew what they were doing, he would punch them in the nose. Luckily for Jack Dempsey, he was first tasked with dirty jobs that were less likely to earn him a broken nose. “In other words,” Dempsey clarified, “he put me from cleaning the stoves, mopping the floor, cleaning the grease rack, cleaning the garbage cans. He put me on every dirty job that he could put me on to see if I’d stay and stick it out with him.” By the time Dempsey was allowed to learn how to cook, he had picked up on his mentor’s teaching style and knew not to tell his boss he knew how to cook the dishes until he was sure he understood it and could do the job without a punch in the face. “I stayed with him three years,” Dempsey told David Stanley, “and got a chance to better myself, so I went out on my own and from then on I’ve been a-cookin’ barbecue off and on all my life.”

Dempsey shared his approach to barbecue:

“I cook it the old-fashioned way. There’s nothing no better to me than the old red oak, scrubby oak wood, what they call out on the sand ridges where the rattlesnakes is at. The old big leaf red old wood, to me, is one of the finest woods to cook with there are. Some of ’em like hickory. I’ve used hickory and everything that could be possibly got ahold of in the hardwood line for barbecue, but I’ve never found nothing that would come up with the old scrub oak, blackjack wood, here in south Georgia. I take and burn my coals in a big furnace – down – burn my wood down to coals. And I trim, re-trim the meat, leave a thin layer of fat on the back to cook it with, and I always place the fat side of the meat down first. I sprinkle my coals underneath my pit with the hood on it, sealed in, like you’re smother-frying a chicken with the lid on it. And I sprinkle the coals under there, evenly, all the way across it as the farmers says in wind rows. I have even heat, anywhere you touch it on top of that hood. I start it off at a big bang, to sear and to seal that side of the meat. I cook that about three hours that-a-way, and I turn it over and do the same way to the other side of the meat, then when that browns and sears over, I turn it back to the flesh side of the meat, and I drop the heat down and let it cruise from then on until it’s done. And about two thirds of the way, I begin to mop the sauce on it, so the sauce won’t get too brown. Most of the people wouldn’t know when a piece of meat was done. They would take it up too quick, but I can look at a piece of meat and tell when it’s done. Without ever sticking a fork in it. I never stick a fork in a piece of meat until I pick it up, to dish it up to sell to the customer. Because if you put your fork in your meat, punch a hole in it, you let all your good seasoning and flavor go out.”

The whole process takes an entire day, starting hours before dawn and ending late in the afternoon, when most people started coming in for suppertime. “Get it hot off the pit,” Dempsey said.

Another barbecue owner and operator documented in the same collection, Gladys Dorsey of Dorsey’s Barbecue, starts her workday in the morning as well.

At the time of the interview, she had been barbecuing meat for twelve years. Her first foray into the technique was not as successful as Dempsey’s had been. “The first time I cooked it […] I hurried up and cooked it, and it was just black, and raw on the inside. About a hundred pounds of it!” Over the years, she fine-tuned her technique and at the time of the interview she would cook for the business twice a week. Like Dempsey, Gladys Dorsey preferred to use oak for her barbecue, but the green oak – which she claimed burned slowly with smoky coals – was hard to get.

More recently, Candacy Taylor interviewed Ollie Gates, purveyor of Gates Bar-B-Q, for her Archie Green collection, The Green Book: Documenting African American Entrepreneurs (AFC 2018/029). When she asked what made the barbecue there so good, Gates replied:

“Personality. Personality. That’s all. Barbecue is personality. What you like in a town and the guy that’s fixing it. It’s very reasonable, as you probably know, but the popular item is the way that you cook it and the wood that you cook it in, more than anything else. A lot of areas in the country, you can’t get hickory and oak, those are the basic woods, and that’s the basic flavor. That’s the only thing that makes Kansas City any different than anybody else. We got a toe hold and we did good. […] It’s very regional, like I say, Tennessee has a flavor, east coast has a flavor, west coast has a flavor, everybody, Texas has a flavor. They’re all different…It’s the wood, basically, hickory and oak.”

In addition to selling barbecued meat across six locations (over a period of 72 years!), Gates Bar-B-Q has also been bottling and selling their barbecue sauce since the 1970s. Gates considers it a separate business altogether, though, as the family isn’t looking to grow the Bar-B-Q locations beyond the Kansas City area, but the sauce is sold in grocery stores in a 240 mile radius from the city.

Interestingly, self-proclaimed vegetarian Jess Lamar Reece Holler interviewed a number of kitchen workers for her Archie Green collection, Kitchen Workers in Central Ohio (AFC 2017/020), including folks who worked at barbecue restaurants. Among those interviewed was Kurston Cook, who started working at City Barbeque’s Gahanna, Ohio location in 2007. She walked in as a teenager and has never worked anywhere but City Barbeque. Like a lot of people, I’m sure, Cook thought that sauce was what defined barbecue. Over the next ten years, she learned that it is about “taking the time, and slow-cooking the meat, and making sure it’s at the right temperature.” That doesn’t mean that sauce doesn’t still factor into the flavor, of course. A quick perusal of City Barbeque’s website shows at least five different barbeque sauces available for sale, and a photo associated with Kursten’s interview appears to show a few more.

Of course, lest you think that barbecue is only for the carnivores, there is a growing trend for “vegetarian” barbecue – as indicated in another photograph associated with Kurston’s interview. Although I haven’t yet tried it, I know that one of my favorite go-to barbecue spots offers a pulled barbecue jackfruit, which stands in for pulled pork.

 

In addition to the professional businesses, routinely smoking and basting meats (and coming up with some vegetarian options, as pictured above) to feed daily customers, the Center’s collections also include the barbecuing work of…well, I hesitate to call them amateurs but I’m not sure what other word we could use. The Paradise Valley Folklife Collection (AFC 1991/021) includes a video and a series of photographs that document the 96 Ranch Rodeo and Barbecue.

As explained in the notes on the event:

“The Ninety-Six Ranch barbecue and rodeo followed the fall roundup and the sale of cattle, and marked the end of the ranch’s agricultural cycle. It was an event that permitted the family to play host to the Paradise Valley neighborhood and the wider region. Eventually over two hundred guests attended. This was more than could be comfortably accommodated and, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the scale of the event was greatly reduced. Les said his job was to run the rodeo, while this father concerned himself with the barbecue. Fred Stewart learned this method for barbecuing beef from Mexicans in California. The meat is cooked in a pit without sauce, but Stewart’s secret barbecue sauce was on the table as a condiment. Les says that Gus Ramasco learned the cooking method when he worked on the ranch, and subsequently introduced it to the volunteer Paradise Valley Fire Department. Their annual Father’s Day barbecue picnic has become a very successful fundraiser.”

While the men who prep and cook the meat do not do so as part of their daily job, the sheer size of the event and the skill required to carry it out each year certainly put them in a different category than casual backyard barbecue dabblers. Cooking the amount of meat required to feed everyone necessitates the digging of and laying coals in enormous pits.

The meat is prepped – including basting it with sauce, and wrapping it in cloth,

before it is lowered into the barbecue pits, on top of the hot coals, and covered with metal sheeting.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting about the ranch’s approach is the use of sagebrush in the barbecue fire.

Not only is it a widely available plant in the area, it likely imparts an absolutely wonderful flavor to the meat! Sadly, I no longer live in an area where I have easy access to sagebrush, but I might have to file away this idea for the next time I visit my cousins out west during barbecue season.

Further Reading

Curious to know more about the history of barbecue?

• Check out the post Beyond Father’s Day: The Story of the Backyard Barbecue by Rachel Gordon, over on the Library’s Minerva’s Kaleidoscope blog
• Watch these lectures by Steven Raichlen on the subject, recorded at the Library of Congress:
  • Barbecue: A History of the World’s Oldest Culinary Art – recorded June 24, 2005
  • Man, Food, and Fire: The Evolution of Barbecue – recorded July 24, 2012
• Visit the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Reading Room and view the reference copy of Jim Auchmutey’s Smokelore: a short history of barbecue in America