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By Root 1315 0

absolutely nothing to do with grilling. Did the Taino Indians grill or did they barbecue? Was the technique of real barbecue known to the North American Indians, or was it developed by Mississippi slaves? The answers are lost in the mists and drizzles of time itself. Backyard grilling (which nearly everybody outside the South calls barbecuing) is quick cooking over intense dry heat (often 500 degrees or higher) on an open brazier. Real barbecue is slow, enclosed cooking at gentle temperatures in moist hardwood smoke. A whole hog typically takes twenty-four hours in a barbecue pit or cooker, a shoulder takes twelve to fourteen hours, and ribs average five or six. Most people grill their meat to rare and juicy. Real barbecue is always well done. Any sign of blood, any trace of unrendered fat, is a serious flaw. All the tough connective tissue must be dissolved. The meat must pull cleanly from the bone and separate in long, moist shreds. Real barbecue never sizzles; it just lies there quietly, slowly and imperceptibly reaching what Boyd Atkinson described to me as a higher plane of existence. Boyd himself cooks an extremely good rib.

The cooker (also known as the pit, the smoker, the rig, or even the grill) must be covered, and the atmosphere inside must be moist. The temperature should range between 170 and 250 degrees. (Some experts advocate even lower temperatures. “But if flies begin to land on your meat,” they warn, “you know it’s not hot enough.”) Sometimes wood is the only fuel; sometimes chunks of hardwood are burned with charcoal or even (but never in Memphis) gas. Especially when large cuts of meat are cooked, the heat is usually indirect, generated by coals and hardwood chunks burned in a separate chamber called a firebox; the heat and the smoke are then piped into the main compartment. A water pan can be used to humidify the air inside the cooker and catch the drippings, but the meat inside a well-sealed cooker will generate its own moisture.

No reputable barbecue cook parboils or presteams his meat, which reliably turns the meat gray and leaches out its sweet pork taste. Sauces can be used for marinating the raw meat, for injecting flavor deep into a hundred-pound hog, for basting, as a finishing sauce when the product is nearly done, and as a table or serving sauce. Some championship barbecue cooks use several sauces, some none at all, instead sprinkling on a layer of dry rub only at the very beginning. The miracle of barbecue is that this ancient process flavors and tenderizes the meat all by itself. The greatest barbecue cooks use sauce in ascetic moderation.

3 and 4. Real barbecue is one of the most delicious foods ever devised by humankind. It takes on various forms and shapes. In Memphis, a pork-barbecue sandwich consists of pulled shoulder (or pulled and then chopped) on a hamburger bun (or a length of what in this country is called Italian bread, a squat baguette with tapered ends, all flecked with sesame seeds), doused with a tomato-based sauce that is tangy, mildly sweet, and barely piquant—and topped with a scoop of coleslaw and the upper half of the bun. In Memphis, coleslaw is raised to a level that, while never scaling the heights to which pork soars in this city, is in my experience without peer or equal. I cannot say the same for barbecued spaghetti, another Memphian speciality.

In St. Louis, potato salad replaces coleslaw and is served on the side. In Kentucky, pork becomes mutton. In some parts of the South, fluffy commercial white bread, often toasted, stands in for the bun or Italian bread. In North Carolina, the mild tanginess of Tennessee spice rub becomes the corrosive power of vinegar, and in South Carolina the tomato-sauce base is replaced by unadulterated mustard. Drive one hundred miles into Missouri, and whole pork shoulder yields to the smaller butt portion. In some places along the Southeast coast, fresh ham replaces shoulder, and if you travel farther west than central Arkansas, pork gives way to beef and poultry. But in Memphis and its culinary sphere of influence in northern