A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [58]
7. To serve, slice the tenderloins ½ inch thick, slightly on the bias. Fan out on heated dinner plates and top each portion with some of the hot marinade.
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BARBECUE
Arguably the best barbecue in the state, perhaps the South, maybe the world.
—Morgan Murphy, Southern Living, on Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, Decatur, Alabama
Of course, every southern state believes its barbecue to be “the best in the world” and as a Tar Heel, I devoutly make that claim for North Carolina.
Fellow Tar Heel, fellow cookbook author, and good friend James Villas agrees: “Generally, I’m so prejudiced about NC ’cue that I don’t even seriously consider the stuff in other states—except the resolutely superior dry-rubbed ribs in Memphis.”
Even in North Carolina there are two factions: easterners insist that their peppery, smoky, vinegary pit-cooked whole hogs beat the Lexington or western-style shoulders swabbed with a thicker sauce containing—dare I say it?—a smidge of tomato. Whether eastern-style or western, “pulled pork” is what most Tar Heels prefer—smoky bits of meat, plucked from the bones and served with sweet slaw and hush puppies straight from the deep-fat fryer. I do admit, however, to hankering for an occasional plate of ribs.
As a rule, the farther south you travel, the thicker, the redder the barbecue sauce, and some South Carolina pit masters add a bit of mustard. Once again Villas agrees: “You’re probably right about sauces getting thicker and more tomatoey the farther south you go…Georgia really piles on the tomatoes.”
I seek out barbecue wherever I travel and am pleased to say that some of it has been superb. Particularly memorable was a plate of chopped barbecue I ate some years ago in the western Kentucky town of Cadiz. It had the perfectly balanced sweet-sour, smoky pit-cooked taste I associate with North Carolina’s best. Blindfolded, I don’t think I could have distinguished it from the revered pulled pork of Lexington, North Carolina.
Every Tar Heel has a favorite barbecue joint and will pit its ‘cue against all others: Lexington Number One in Lexington, Stamey’s in Greensboro, Short Sugar’s in Reidsville, Melton’s in Rocky Mount, Parker’s in Wilson, Flip’s in Wilmington, Wilber’s or Scott’s in Goldsboro, Skylight in Ayden. To which I’d add the A & M in Mebane and Scott Howell’s Q Shack—the new go-to place in Durham. Note: ’Cue connoisseurs eagerly await the reopening of Ed Mitchell’s in Wilson, shuttered by legal problems several years ago. To them, its Eastern-style, pit-barbecued whole hogs are incomparable.
Unique among barbecue joints, Q Shack serves six styles of barbecue—North Carolina pulled pork; Texas chile-rubbed beef brisket; mesquite-smoked chicken, turkey, or beef sausage; and St. Louis–cut pork ribs—all of them prepared fresh every day and all of them “tender as a mother’s love.”
Talk about eating high on the hog.
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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1818
Peanuts are grown commercially for the first time in North Carolina in the sandy flats around Wilmington.
Kentucky stages its first agricultural fair at Lexington.
1820
Napoleon’s nephew, Prince Charles Louis Napoleon Achille Murat, flees Bourbon France and buys a townhouse in New Orleans and a sugar plantation near Baton Rouge. An enthusiastic cook, he concocts an alligator tail soup and a turkey buzzard stew.
1820s
Baltimore surpasses Philadelphia as the country’s busiest flour-milling center.
Agricultural reformer Edmund Ruffin begins publishing results of experiments on his Virginia farm. To salvage depleted soil, he recommends crop rotation, good drainage, proper plowing, and the use of fertilizer. Many heed his call and within 30 years, Ruffin is both commissioner and president of the Virginia State Agricultural Society.