John T. Edge
I grew up in central Georgia, near Macon, one-half mile from Old Clinton Barbecue, a tin-roofed, sawdust-floored roadhouse shrouded in hickory smoke. Mittie Coulter, mother of proprietor Wayne Coulter, worked the chopping block. By the time my Schwinn hit the gravel parking lot, I could hear the measured and percussive thwack of her cleaver. It carried through the dining room, past Wayne's collection of antique cash registers, as she hacked fat and skin from hams, chopped the flesh to smoky bits, and doused it all with a thin, ketchup-tinged sauce that tasted of cider vinegar and red pepper.
I can see the granny glasses Mrs. Coulter wore. I can see that cleaver, too, spangling beneath the overhead fluorescent lamp. But I can't picture the black men who worked for her, tending the massive pit out back, shoveling hardwood coals beneath those hams. From the time I was two until I left for college, at 17, I ate the food those pitmasters cooked. But their stories are lost to me. I don't know their last names. I don't even know their first names.
A good measure of my work with the Southern Foodways Alliance—a University of Mississippi—based nonprofit that documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South—has been an attempt to pay down a debt of pleasure owed to those unnamed pitmasters, to honor their labor, to frame their life experiences so that a broad swath of Americans may recognize barbecue as a great national food and pitmasters as unsung culinary and cultural heroes.
Not all of the stories are lost, of course. Titans of barbecue, with strong tethers to the past, still walk among us. I was reminded of this on a recent swing through the heartland of barbecue culture, to visit some of the men and women whose work has long inspired me. Talking with these pitmasters as they cooked, and meeting their families and their customers, I realized that their life stories evoke larger-picture American stories, ones that touch on race, class, gender, labor, change, and continuity.
James Jones, in the Arkansas Delta town of Marianna, is one pitmaster I'll always go out of my way to visit. The 66-year-old oversees the hip-high cinder-block pits at Jones Bar-B-Que Diner, carrying on a family tradition that began in the early 20th century. Jones's father, Hubert Jones, recalled in a 1986 interview that the family's initial barbecue apparatus was "a hole in the ground, some iron pipes, and a piece of fence wire and two pieces of tin."
Continue reading here: http://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/BBQ-Nation
I grew up in central Georgia, near Macon, one-half mile from Old Clinton Barbecue, a tin-roofed, sawdust-floored roadhouse shrouded in hickory smoke. Mittie Coulter, mother of proprietor Wayne Coulter, worked the chopping block. By the time my Schwinn hit the gravel parking lot, I could hear the measured and percussive thwack of her cleaver. It carried through the dining room, past Wayne's collection of antique cash registers, as she hacked fat and skin from hams, chopped the flesh to smoky bits, and doused it all with a thin, ketchup-tinged sauce that tasted of cider vinegar and red pepper.
I can see the granny glasses Mrs. Coulter wore. I can see that cleaver, too, spangling beneath the overhead fluorescent lamp. But I can't picture the black men who worked for her, tending the massive pit out back, shoveling hardwood coals beneath those hams. From the time I was two until I left for college, at 17, I ate the food those pitmasters cooked. But their stories are lost to me. I don't know their last names. I don't even know their first names.
A good measure of my work with the Southern Foodways Alliance—a University of Mississippi—based nonprofit that documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South—has been an attempt to pay down a debt of pleasure owed to those unnamed pitmasters, to honor their labor, to frame their life experiences so that a broad swath of Americans may recognize barbecue as a great national food and pitmasters as unsung culinary and cultural heroes.
Not all of the stories are lost, of course. Titans of barbecue, with strong tethers to the past, still walk among us. I was reminded of this on a recent swing through the heartland of barbecue culture, to visit some of the men and women whose work has long inspired me. Talking with these pitmasters as they cooked, and meeting their families and their customers, I realized that their life stories evoke larger-picture American stories, ones that touch on race, class, gender, labor, change, and continuity.
James Jones, in the Arkansas Delta town of Marianna, is one pitmaster I'll always go out of my way to visit. The 66-year-old oversees the hip-high cinder-block pits at Jones Bar-B-Que Diner, carrying on a family tradition that began in the early 20th century. Jones's father, Hubert Jones, recalled in a 1986 interview that the family's initial barbecue apparatus was "a hole in the ground, some iron pipes, and a piece of fence wire and two pieces of tin."
Continue reading here: http://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/BBQ-Nation
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