by Rick Bragg
This is only how we did it, among my people. But it remains the best barbecue I believe I have ever had, not just the meat itself but the way it all came together on those picnic tables in the afternoon.
The pits were actual pits, shallow depressions in the red dirt, filled with hickory and sometimes cherry, cooked down to coals that glowed a dull red. The men raised the cooking surface by lining the pit with a single layer of smut-streaked concrete blocks. The pit, as I remember, was as long as a pickup truck, and topped with all manner of grates. There were oven grates, perhaps from those derelict stoves, and once I remember a grate from a construction site, with diamond-shaped mesh. It was all cleaned, cleaned again, rubbed with cooking oil, and then laid across the blocks. The secret was a nice, slow, even fire.
My uncle John, who knew hogs, knew barbecue. This was the perfect pit for the kind of meat he was planning to prepare.
It was mostly fresh ham slices, about one-half to three-quarters of an inch thick, and fresh center-cut pork chops, and sometimes big spareribs, or country ribs, which are really not ribs at all. The ham slices each had a disc of marrow inside the bone, which, if it did not melt out in cooking, might be the single best taste—just a taste—I have ever enjoyed.
The pork was dusted with salt and pepper and laid on the grate, slightly off the direct heat, and, right away, swabbed with a homemade sauce made from ketchup, mustard, vinegar, brown sugar, and other spices. They did not stir it; as per our tradition, they mixed it up in quart Mason jars and shook the hound out of it.
Once doused with sauce, the meat was covered with heavy foil, to keep some of the smoke in. The idea of coating the meat with sauce so early in cooking was to keep the meat moist, and catch that smoke. You could have cooked it to crispy doneness in an hour, easy, but he moved the pieces around and around on that grill so that they cooked slow, for hours. I used to stand at one end of that bed of coals, at that grate sagging under chop after chop, slice after slice, and think that, no matter how long I lived or how far I roamed, life would never be this good again.
“Me and your uncle Ed cooked all night this one time,” said my uncle John, remembering, “and every time I’d take up a big tray of it he’d have some, and he ate and he ate, and when it got to be about daylight, he looked a little shaky and said, ‘John, I believe I got to go lay down.’ ”
This meat was not trimmed of fat—it would have dried out quickly. Every ham slice had at least a half-inch or more of white fat, and by the time they took it off the grill, it would have shrunk to half that, dripping into the fire and rising up again into the meat, thank you, Lord.
There would be stories told, of course, and sometimes guitars picked, and as my uncles tended the pit my aunts created the sides, which would have been enough, more than enough, even if there had been no barbecue at all.
They made deviled eggs by the dozens, peeling, splitting lengthwise, and mixing the yolks with mayonnaise, just a taste of mustard, sweet relish, black pepper, and a dash of garlic powder and cayenne.
They stirred up giant pans of baked beans, mixing pork and beans with diced onion, green pepper, ketchup, mustard, brown sugar, onions, and more, then covering the top with thick slabs of bacon, cooking first covered and then uncovered, so that the bacon melted into the beans and then crisped.
They made a simple potato salad from red potatoes, purple onion, and egg, dressed in mayonnaise infused with garlic powder, and skillets of hot and sweet cornbread made with a little sugar and diced jalapeño. And, of course, there was slaw.
* * *
• • •
You read, all the time, about how sweet pork can taste.
Imagine it, fed on Dixie Cream doughnuts.
It is almost impossible to cook pork chops on a grill and, without resorting to fancy infusion and marinating techniques or trichinosis, serve them with any degree of juiciness. Cook them good and done and they have the consistency of boot heel.
These did not.
The ham was crisscrossed with fat, not quite crisp. The pork chops were delicious. The sauce had specks of dark char in it.
One of the first things you learned in the country was that you could not toss a dog a chicken or pork-chop bone, because it would splinter, or hang in the dog’s throat, so I sat on the back steps to my grandma’s house utterly surrounded by pitiful, unrequited hounds, at least till I was sure no one was watching, and I fed them gristle and lean but never fat, because the fat was the best part.
I remember walking up to my mother, to hand her my plate, and how she just stood and looked at me, shaking her head. I do not remember this, but she claims I was covered in barbecue and no small amount of pork fat, from my belly button to my eyebrows, and my shirt would never, ever come clean again.
“Was it worth it?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” I purportedly said.
I believe this is an exaggeration.
I believe my etiquette was better than that.
I do remember how the paper plates sagged in the middle, and how, no matter how hard people tried, something would bleed through onto the knee of some Sansabelt slacks or something called pedal pushers, but there was not much that could ruin those days.
The pork was praised, and praised again.
We are forgiving of drunks here, after all.
• • •
Barbecued Pork Chops and Ham Slices
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
the sauce
2½ cups ketchup
¾ cup yellow mustard
1 cup apple cider
¼ cup diced onion
½ cup Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons salt
½ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon molasses
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
the meat
4 fresh center-cut pork chops, about ¾ inch
4 fresh (not smoked or salted or cured in any way) ham slices, about ¾ inch
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons black pepper
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
Fires vary, grills vary, times vary—everything varies, in barbecuing for us amateurs.
This is a rough outline, at best.
First, place all your ingredients for the sauce in a jar, and shake it till blended. There is no need to warm it.
Prepare your fire. If you use charcoal, and wood chips for smoke, bear in mind that you will need about 1½ to 2 hours of cooking time. You will need to move the slices, if you are using a small grill, to control your cooking temperature.
Lightly salt and pepper each chop or slice, and swab sauce on both sides. Place on the grill. This will help the sauce cook into the meat a little. You are not grilling the meat, and then putting sauce on it at the last minute.
Be sure to mind the fire closely, and use a squirt bottle to prevent flare-ups. A little char is fine later in the cooking process, but not at the beginning.
Cover as it cooks, but check every few minutes. This is not something you can walk away from, like so many of my mother’s recipes.
Swab again with sauce after about 30 minutes, then again when the meat is almost done.
“The thing about chops and ham is, you don’t have to cook all day if it’s a small batch,” my mother said. “Just don’t get in no rush, and don’t let it fry on the grill, and don’t let it get tough, especially them chops, and…and don’t cook nothing really good on a brand-new grill. I’d rather taste rust than taste paint.” Break in your grill on a pack of hot dogs or some hamburgers, and then barbecue.
Over the years, she was almost, almost able to find again that luscious, sweet flavor of the pork.
But, then, all her pork was sober.
Deviled Eggs
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 dozen eggs
1 cup mayonnaise
1 teaspoon yellow mustard (no more)
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons minced sweet pickle
; 1 teaspoon dill pickle juice
About 1 tablespoon cayenne pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
This will make twenty-four halves, but if they’re any good, it’s better to have too many.
Hard-boil, cool, peel, and split the eggs. Remove the yolks and, with a fork, mash and stir them till they are mostly smooth. “It won’t hurt if there’s a little bit here and there that don’t get mashed,” my mother said.
Stir in all the other ingredients except the cayenne, and mix it until it goes mostly smooth. Using a spoon, fill the empty whites with the mixture. You do not have to be exact. Dust each one—slightly, slightly—with a little cayenne. Some people like smoked paprika.
They will still be good the following day, but the day after they will not. Eat ’em up.
Baked Beans with Thick-Cut Bacon
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
Two 15-ounce cans pork and beans
1 green bell pepper, diced
1 medium sweet onion, diced
1 cup ketchup
½ cup yellow mustard
¼ cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon garlic powder
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 pound thick-cut bacon
HOW TO COOK IT
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Search through the pork and beans for the single little cube of pork in each can, and discard—you have your own pork. Mix all the ingredients except the bacon, and spoon the mixture into a large baking dish. You want the beans to be only a few inches deep. For one thing, the larger surface allows for more bacon.
Cover the top of the beans with whole slices of thick-cut bacon, but try not to overlap.
Bake, covered with foil, for about 40 minutes, or until the bacon has begun to render into the beans. Then uncover, and cook another few minutes, until the bacon has begun to take on color. You do not want the bacon to crisp through, like well-done breakfast slices. But if it still seems too limp, just leave it in the oven a little longer.
The fat in the bacon should be almost buttery soft and the beans will be thick and should have taken on the rendered fat, and taste, of the bacon.
Do not be concerned if you can see the bacon fat pooling on top of the beans. This is the point.
“This here, and a skillet of fried taters and a pan of biscuits, is pretty good by itself,” my mother believes.
This is not a delicate dish.
You can, of course, cut back on the bacon.
You can.
Jalapeño Cornbread
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 cup self-rising cornmeal
½ cup milk
½ cup buttermilk
1 egg
¼ cup diced onion
¼ cup diced green onion
2 jalapeño peppers, finely diced
¾ cup grated sharp cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons bacon grease
1 tablespoon melted butter
HOW TO COOK IT
Mix all the ingredients except the bacon grease and the melted butter.
Preheat your oven to about 400 degrees.
Grease a 9-inch cast-iron skillet and, on top of the stove, heat it until the iron is hot and the fat sizzles. Turn off the stove eye, and pour the cornmeal mixture into the hot skillet. Drizzle the melted butter over the top, and carefully place the skillet in the oven.
Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the cornbread browns.
This is, of course, far, far too much trouble for a pan of cornbread, and I have to beg a long time to get her to bake it for me, but I am not above it—not a bit.
She wants it said that she only puts in the sugar under protest. “But it won’t hurt if it’s in muffins.”
* * *
• • •
The Dixie Cream was shuttered long ago. The hogs went cold-turkey.
Now and then, we still have good barbecue, but it is not, of course, the same. Well, one thing is. I still cannot eat it without wearing it, though I am better now. I have not gotten any barbecue sauce in my eyebrows in years.
· 32 ·
THE RUNAWAY
Roast Turkey
Aunt Jo
1970
I HAD ONE JOB. I had to lug the twenty pounds of marble-hard frozen turkey from the checkout counter at the A&P to the Chevrolet Biscayne, without dropping it. You’d think a boy could do one job.
* * *
• • •
Everyone else had more than one job during the holidays. My mother had four or five, I believe. She pushed herself hard in the fall, to give us a good Thanksgiving and Christmas. She did not do a lot of shopping, because there was never money for that, but she took in laundry, and still cleaned houses, and cooked for people in town to make a little extra money, so she could “go see Santa Claus.” I was eleven and already having some serious doubts about a fat man in red velvet whose sleigh had to be pulled with a tractor down the main drag during the Christmas parade. Then I found out that my mother had to go see Santa Claus at the Mason’s Department Store and make payments on Christmas. I all but wrote him off. I say “all but” because it is unwise to bad-mouth Santa anywhere close to the holidays, even if you catch him smoking a Marlboro next to his red kettle in front of the TG&Y, and know for a fact he stored his sleigh, in the off-season, in a chicken house out on the Roy Webb Road.
She still found time to cook for us, and her kitchen and the kitchens of my aunts were rich with the smell of pumpkin and sweet-potato pies, pecan pies, peanut-butter cookies, spice cakes, more. They stirred together simple treats from cocoa, butter, and uncooked oatmeal, and made drop-crust cobblers with buttered biscuit topping from the fruit they canned in the late summer and early fall. She made ham and biscuits and wrapped them in foil on a stove that stayed on almost all day, to keep them warm, and Ava made tea cakes and hung them on a nail, and the whole house smelled of peeled oranges, and chocolate-covered maraschino cherries, which are as much a part of the holidays down here as blown fuses, plastic snowmen, and three-legged reindeer. Outside, in the distance, you would routinely hear the boom of a 12-gauge shotgun—not from deer hunters, but from people trying to blast mistletoe down from the high trees.
Everybody had jobs, multiple jobs. My uncles climbed ladders and nailed up strands of big fat antique Christmas lights, and spent hours, days, untangling wads of wiring that, they swore, had not been that way when they put them away last year. They finally gave up, griping, leaving one forlorn string of lights dangling from the gutters to the ground, to go put up their mommas’ Christmas trees.
Even my brother Sam, who thought he was grown, had numerous jobs. His most important task was to go cut our tree, usually off someone’s land or the state right-of-way, which might have been stealing, but not the way we reasoned it out. The way Sam saw it, we paid state taxes to pave the roads and maintain that right-of-way, so they were all our trees, in a sense. Whether it was legal or not, he allowed me no say in its selection whatsoever. It was always a cedar, but I have to concede that, though it may not have been beautiful to some people, it seemed—and smelled—that way to us, year after year. I was not even allowed to help drag it home. I did not have sense enough even to drag a tree.
“How come you never let me cut down the tree?” I asked him, later.
“Toes,” he said.
I do not know if he meant mine, or his.
I had one job.
I was turkey boy.
* * *
• • •
I had volunteered as soon as I was big enough to know what a turkey was, and what it stood for. It was not just a matter of selecting poultry for a dinner. Our holiday season began with that great meal, not one minute before. The whole season, a whole Christmas, depended on my mother and me, and the Thanksgiving dinner, the holiday kickoff.
It was not just us. Working people started looking forward to this meal as soon as the weather slipped below ninety-two in the
shade, and saved for it, in coffee cans and Christmas clubs.
The turkey was the foundation. It was not unheard of for 911 operators to receive this call:
Caller: “I need help.”
911: “Yes, ma’am, what is your emergency?”
Caller: “I need help with my turkey.”
911: “What kind of help?”
Caller: “I can’t get it out of the oven.”
911: “Why not?”
Caller: “I’m old.”
Apparently, putting it in there had taken quite a bit out of her.
My mother had turkey down to a science, and an art. First and foremost, it was important not to be premature. You had to wait, and wait, till you saw the first of the Christmas lights illuminate the dark country roads, hung from little frame houses and mobile homes and wrapped around the bare trees, till the city workers strung them from the streetlights on Pelham Road. They had to light our way.
My mother never bought a turkey early, believing that if you waited till the last minute you would somehow get a turkey shipped to the grocery as part of a second or even third wave, which she believed to be fresher, and not one that had been frozen rock-hard since before Halloween. There is logic in it, I suppose.
Sometimes it was a one-turkey holiday season and sometimes a two-turkey one; sometimes we had a big baked ham for the Christmas meal. It often depended on the people my uncles worked for, who gave a coupon for a ham or a turkey as a holiday bonus. But 1970 was a turkey-excursion year, pure and simple, and, as per tradition, I had been allowed to assist in the selection and transfer of it. Mostly, this consisted of bouncing up and down as my mother tried to make up her mind, and shouting, “Get a big ’un!”