SOUTHERN COMFORTS

By CINDA CHAVICH

(RALEIGH, NC) – “Ooooo-wee! That’d make a tadpole slap a whale,” chortles Big Ed (Watkins) passing me a plastic squeeze bottle of his cider vinegar and hot pepper sauce for the pork and collards on my plate.

It’s day five of my southern comfort food odyssey, and before I leave the Carolinas I’m indulging in one last big breakfast and, like every other meal, pork has a starring roll. There’s Big Ed’s own spicy pork sausage, a few slabs of salty country-cured ham, a pile of crispy fried bacon and, just for good measure, some sliced and fried pork tenderloin, piled alongside the fried eggs, golden fried buttermilk biscuits, creamy corn grits and red-eye gravy (a mixture of pork drippings and coffee).

A food tour through the North Carolina countryside has taught me the true meaning of the phrase, pigging out. This eastern seaboard state, sandwiched between the traditional North and South civil war battle lines, still hangs onto its southern country heritage. And that means, when you come to North Carolina,  “Honey, y’all gotta eat pork.”

Which is what I’ve been doing for the better part of the last four days, chowing down on pork in all of its many southern guises. While I’m having my final pork fix in Big Ed’s in downtown Raleigh – a longtime breakfast and lunch spot in these parts – I might just as well be lining up at one of the hundreds of North Carolina pig pits (aka barbecue joints ) scattered throughout the rolling countryside for a paper plate of tender chopped barbecue pork and hushpuppies (aka deep-fried, cornmeal fritters).

“Oh ya, we have people waiting outside, banging on the door first thing in the morning for their barbecue,” Bubba (Keith) Wright tells me as he stokes the pits at Lexington Barbecue, a family-run restaurant on the outskirts of Lexington, NC, a few hours southwest of Raleigh. Bubba’s father-in-law Wayne Monk is one of the icons in the North Carolina barbecue business, and Lexington has a special style of barbecue cooking that aficionados travel way out here to taste.

In fact, touring the countryside along North Carolina’s barbecue trail has become a bit of an armchair sport for pig pickin’ connoisseurs. Barbecue is a noun, not a verb, here in the South. It refers to the quintessential southern slow food – pork that’s cooked for many hours over wood fires until it’s smoky, succulent and meltingly tender.

While other southern states have their own take on barbecue – Texas has its smoky pit-cooked beef brisket and there’s the pulled pork butt and barbecued ribs of Kansas City – in North Carolina, barbecue means pork (either huge shoulders or whole pigs) and there are two distinct styles of cooking it.

North Carolina barbecue may be categorized as Eastern- or Western-style, depending on how it’s sauced and served, and heated debates can occur over which way is right. Asking anyone on one side of the state to comment on the style on the other side is just inviting an argument. Lord help anyone who’d be brash enough to name a single barbecue joint, never mind a single style, as “best.”

Jim Early pussy foots carefully around that subject in his exhaustive book, The Best Tar Heel Barbecue, which critiques 140 of his favourite barbecue restaurants in every corner of North Carolina.

“Which is the best in the state? There’s no correct (politically or otherwise) answer to this question,” he writes. “There are barbecue places in some areas that are equally good as barbecue places in other areas of the state but the style of cooking and sauces are different, good none the less.”

Now that’s a guy sitting squarely on the fence. But it’s not hard to understand why, especially once you’ve talked to Carolinians about barbecue. Everyone who eats it has an opinion on the topic. They’ll drive for miles to eat at their favourite barbecue joint, but few would deign to cross style lines, and purists have warred for generations about which cooking style is correct.

Anyone crazy enough to actually rate barbecue joints would likely just  “git yore tail tore up,” so it’s safest simply to ask a few folks in any given community where they go to eat barbecue – or where they’d drive for barbecue for a special occasion – and plot your stops accordingly.

In the East – that’s anywhere east of Raleigh – barbecue comes with a spicy sour sauce, a watery, vinegary concoction infused with hot chili peppers . Easterners traditionally cook whole hogs in their wood-fired pits and serve the chopped pork with a white cabbage slaw seasoned with celery seed and mayonnaise. With the pork sauced hot and spicy, the slaw, usually served right on top of chopped pork sandwiches, cools things off.

As you travel west of Raleigh, styles change. Western pit masters usually cook whole pork shoulders – mainly over hickory fires – and serve the chopped or sliced meat with a slightly sweeter sauce (or dip, as they describe it), that includes a healthy dose of tomato ketchup. Even the coleslaw  has an odd red tinge in the West, made with a dressing that includes ketchup and barbecue sauce , but no mayo. In this version, it’s the slaw that’s spicy and the sweeter meat that tames the tastebuds.

In Lexington, the style is a unique, modified western style with a light, sweet and sour tomato dip that’s drizzled over  the pork after it’s cooked and chopped. But the further you go west into the hills, the thicker and more tomato-laced the sauces become.

“Lexington is western-style but we’re not as much western as some further west,” explains Wright, trying to outline the subtle nuances to a newcomer like me.

“We’re more of a local style here, I guess, Eastern style is more vinegary and in the West they use a more ketchupy-based sauce. Ours is a mixture of the two and the reason I really like ours is that you can taste the sauce, and you can taste the meat.”

It’s true – the plate of coarsely chopped pork and crackling skin I’m served is nicely balanced by the splash of spicy sauce, and the tomato-based slaw adds just the right sweet and sour counter point to the rich, lean meat. The fluffy hush puppies that Bubba forms expertly like quenelles with two spoons and drops into hot fat to fry, and the sublime peach cobbler, simply guild the lily.

Lexington is really a mecca in the centre of the state for barbecue lovers. It’s here where legendary cooks like SidWeaver first set up outdoor pits in the 1920s, smoking whole hogs outside the country courthouse when the circuit court judges came through town to try their cases. They say the judges knew when to break for lunch, when the aromas of slow-cooking barbecue wafting through the courthouse became too much for anyone inside to bear. Similar cooking has been part of other big gatherings in the South for most of the last century, from political meetings and the annual fall tobacco market to local, communal Baptist suppers.

Other well-known names in Carolina barbecue made their mark in Lexington, too. Warner Stamey and Jess Swicegood tended pits in these parts and today Lexington is known as the area where the majority of barbecue restaurants still cook the traditional way, over carefully-tended wood fires.

“We use hickory and oak, but I like hickory if you can get it,” explains Wright, touring me through his spotless restaurant to the five brick ovens or pits out back. Wood fires are lit in the firebox and as they burn down, hot coals are shoveled into a space below the pits, where 30-40 huge pork shoulders sit on blackened racks.  The pork is simply salted before it’s slow cooked – for at least nine hours – then sliced and chopped by hand on a big chopping block, worn into a hollow where the cleaver has left its mark.

“We cook 75 to 100 shoulders a day,” says Wright, calculating the restaurant serves more than 8,000 pounds of slow-cooked ‘cue every single week, which is nearly half a pound for every one of the town’s 17,000 residents.

“We got people who eat in here most every day, some twice a day,” says Wright, adding Lexington Barbecue  has also fed presidents Reagan and Bush, and 11 heads of state at a recent international summit meeting.

Today there are more than 20 family-owned barbecue restaurants within 16 km of Lexington and every year – the last Saturday in October – 100,000 diners gather for the Lexington Barbecue Festival, an outdoor pig out where 7.5 tons of barbecue is served in the street along with the requisite deep fried hush puppies, 5,000 pounds of their famed red slaw and gallons of sweet (iced) tea.

Along with the spotless white barn that houses Lexington Barbecue on the I-85, there are  several other well-known pig pits in the area. The Barbecue Centre, the oldest barbecue joint in downtown Lexington, sits in a1950s-style drive-in, the kind of dairy bar that still specializes in big banana splits and cooks its barbecue over hickory fires. So does Jimmy’s Barbecue, a longtime Lexington restaurant where you can also find barbecued chicken on weekends.

Heading down to Shelby (near the South Carolina border), you’ll find Bridges’ Barbecue Lodge, another classic spot to stop. Bridges is a restaurant with more than 50 years of history where Red and Lyttle (Mamma B) Bridges learned their craft from the famed Lexington pit master Warner Stamey.

For Stamey’s own style of western barbecue, head north to the pretty city of Greensboro where the legend’s namesake shop is a local landmark. Run by the originator’s grandson Chip Stamey, Stamey’s Old Fashioned Barbecue has 12 huge pits, giving it the largest cooking capacity of any barbecue restaurant in the state. When I stopped at Stamey’s for lunch, the barbecue was flying out of the kitchen as fast as you could order it, and the staff was working like a well-greased machine.  While the chopped pork and bbq chicken platter, complete with crisp corn hush puppies (savoury not sweet) and spicy red cole slaw, was a tasty bargain at $5.10, the peach cobbler made the meal really memorable.

There are other stops of note for those seeking the holy grail of southern cooking. In Chapel Hill, Mildred (Mamma Dip) Council turns out some of the best Southern soul food you’ll find anywhere. Mamma Dip is a legend here and has many famous fans who come to eat her homemade fried chicken,  bar-b-que ribs, collards,  candied yams and fried okra, including former New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne and basketball great Michael Jordan.

Just down the road is another legendary kitchen, Keith Allen’s Allen & Son Barbecue, a serious barbecue joint with big brick barbecue pits out back belching blue hickory smoke and turning out tender, chopped  eastern-style pork barbecue  back in the woods north of town.

For an equally authentic slice of barbecue history, smack dab in the centre of downtown Raleigh, there’s the eastern-style ’cue at Clyde Cooper’s Barbeque. Cooper is no longer around but he lived to the ripe age of 99 on his quality barbecue cooking. The little brick building where he started it all in 1938 still has the same row of stools at the counter, the same hard-backed wooden booths and the same grainy black-and-white photos of old timey Raleigh as it did back then. Businessmen in suits and office workers pack into the place for the coarsely chopped pork that’s seasoned with spicy hot pepper and cider vinegar sauce, and the menu says they’ll sell you a whole pig to take out.

While many of the more modern barbecue restaurants and chains have traded in their fireboxes for electric or gas pits, purists still look for places that cook with wood. Barbecue takes a lot more hands-on babying when it’s cooked in a wood-fired pit and it shows in the subtle smoky flavour and the well-rendered meat that never tastes greasy.

The barbecue joints and other little places serving North Carolina country cooking in small towns across the state are not at all fancy, but they are great way to explore the local history and colourful culture of the rural South. Many, like Lexington Barbecue, do a roaring business in “curbside” service, heading out to deliver meals to customers who flash their lights or honk their horns, making this the ideal way to eat on the road.

After four days of non-stop dining on chopped pork, barbecue sandwiches, deep fried hush puppies and cabbage slaw, you’d think I’d be double dosing on the Pepto-Bismol. But even after days that started with big breakfasts of country ham, eggs, grits and biscuits, and continued through marathons of barbecue, Brunswick stew,  collard greens, chicken and dumplins’, and banana puddin’ (with the odd Krispy Kreme doughnut thrown into the mix), I felt seriously sated but never sick. Unlike trips filled with gourmet goodies like foie gras and fine wine, this food is straightforward, simple and freshly made from scratch, which makes it incredibly approachable.

And lest you imagine this is only carnivore-friendly country, I’d actually recommend the southern barbecue trail to part-time vegetarians. This is the only place I know of where such simple fast food places have Vegetable Plates listed on many menus. You can choose three or four hearty, home-cooked vegetable dishes like black eye peas, creamed potatoes, butter beans and corn, candied yams, potato salad, collard or turnip greens, stewed cabbage, snap beans or pickled beets, with hushpuppies on the side, whenever pork overload sets in.

Just be prepared to be smothered with down home hospitality and told a few tall tales. Big Ed’s wife Lynda has it figured out.

“My wife says I got enough mouth for two sets of teeth,” chuckles this big man with his generous helpings of filling food and nonstop stream of amusing southern stories. Amen.

PRIME PIG PICKIN’

Clyde Cooper’s Barbeque

109 East Davie St.,

Raleigh, NC

919-832-7614

Stamey’s Barbecue

2206 High Point Rd.

Greensboro, NC

336-299-9888

Allen & Son Barbecue

Route 2

Chapel Hill, NC

919-942-7576

Lexington Barbecue

I-85 Business Loop

Lexington, NC

336-249-9814

The Barbecue Centre

900 North Main St.

Lexington, NC

336-248-4633

Jimmy’s Barbecue

1703 Cotton Grove Rd.

Lexington, NC

336-367-2311

Bridges Barbecue Lodge

2000 E. Dixon Blvd.

Shelby, NC

704-482-8567

Lexington Barbecue Festival, Lexington (late October) – call Kay Saintsing at 336-956-1880 or visit www.barbecuefestival.com

(this story originally appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper)

©Cinda Chavich

www.tastereport.com