BBQ is served on a piece of butcher paper. Couple slices of brisket, both lean and fatty and a hot link, topped with a couple slices of cheap white bread, all wrapped up by the guy slicing your order. Then you go down the line, picking up pickles, slaw, beans or whatever on your way to a spot at the 40’ long tables in the middle of place. There is no sauce. Nobody uses a fork. The knives are chained to the tables and you get a flimsy plastic spoon if you get the beans or slaw. You will smell like smoke the rest of the week.
Oh, please. Don’t bring your Texas barbecue travisty here.
Barbecue is a pork whole hog slowly smoked over hickory and oak. The sauce is vinegar, red pepper flakes and rendered fat from siad hog. Sometimes, you may add a little bit of ketchup and brown sugar to make the sauce a more Lexington style. It is eaten with slaw.
I’m getting close to getting a couple of pints from the barbecue place up the street, but they frown on me bringing my own sauce.
This is the most Southern thing about me: my sisters and I attended Jefferson Davis Elementary School. The school is now named Barbara Jordan Elementary School.
I own a miscellany of Southern folklore, collected by a noted Library of Congress researcher named B.A. Botkin back in 1940. One of the pieces included in the “Foodways” section is a piece by a man called Ben Robertson, reminiscing about his childhood in Upcountry South Carolina at the end of the 19th century. He wrote that his family firmly believed that any vegetables cooked for less than three hours would kill you.
