The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [139]
This much I knew. The daylong seminar in the dark theater on Beale Street concentrated more on the practicalities of judging and the fine points of pork. Our excellent teachers were Mike Cannon (judging chairman of the Memphis in May World Championship) and Steve Gray (chairman of the Memphis in May Sanctioned Contest Network, a circuit of pork-barbecue cooking contests run according to Memphis rules). We started by taking a test of fifty multiple-choice questions. May whole hog be cooked in two or more pieces? What is the red layer below the surface of a piece of barbecue? What cut of meat makes an acceptable shoulder? What is the most difficult aspect of cooking a whole hog? Can natural gas or propane be used as fuel in the Memphis World Championship?
After we had all failed the test, which was our teachers’ intention, we sat in the old New Daisy for the rest of the day, listening to their lectures, watching a film from a meatpacking plant, running through the simulated judging of a real live pork shoulder. Only a small percentage of Memphis judges subject themselves to this seminar, but I don’t see how anybody can hope to be a fair, consistent judge without it. Finally we took the test again—exactly the same questions but in a different order. All but two of us passed. I got a 96.
By Friday morning my wife had arrived, which meant an obligatory visit to Graceland for the complete Platinum Tour. This included the mansion, the Elvis Presley Automobile Museum, the Sincerely Elvis Museum, and Elvis’s two airplanes. We had arrived early to leave time for a late-morning barbecue brunch at Cozy Corner in preparation for a full barbecue lunch at Payne’s. But the Platinum Tour was so excruciatingly comprehensive that we missed brunch and were forced to postpone lunch until three in the afternoon. Two days of anger and depression lifted when I read in the Memphis papers that at the very moment my wife was dragging me around Graceland, the Shelby County Commission had filed suit to reopen the investigation into Elvis’s death. The guides at Graceland never mentioned the King’s fondness for controlled substances. Or that his favorite snack was fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. They did not mention barbecue even once.
Late Friday afternoon my wife and I drove over to Tom Lee Park in downtown Memphis, where all 241 barbecue teams had already set up for the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. The contestants stretched a half mile along the east bank of the Mississippi, and the air was thick with perfumed smoke, pork and hickory and applewood. On its assigned plot of ground, each team had erected its temporary quarters, a tent or a bungalow, a cabin or a cottage, a shed or a shack, a shanty or lean-to, a trailer or a pavilion, a kiosk or an entire prefabricated suburban house. Some structures hugged the earth; others soared three stories toward the skies. Some were rough and homely, others magnificent, with decks and balconies overlooking the great river.
Each team had brought at least one barbecue cooker. Most were painted black, but some came in red, and one in pink; most teams had two or three cookers, some converted from five-hundred-gallon propane tanks, others in the shape of outsized coffins, still others bulbous affairs with tall smokestacks. One cooker was a converted 1975 Datsun with a firebox in the engine compartment and racks of meat in the driver’s seat. The U.S. Porkmasters, sponsored by the Postal Service, had made its smoker from a small mail-delivery van. The Paddlewheel Porkers had the largest display of all, a forty-three-foot replica of a riverboat steamer complete with decks and galleys and a revolving paddlewheel. Each team had a name—the Adribbers and the Big Dawg Hawg, the Crispy Critters and the Great Boars of Fire, the Not Ready for Swine Time and the Party Pigs, the Super Swine Sizzlers and Hazardous Waist. (Swine Lake Ballet was not in attendance this year.) Of the 241 teams, I was told by an insider, 100 are serious