Teaching the Great Barbecue: Ideas about Southern USA Foodways (with Apologies to Vernon Parrington)

I’m team-teaching a course on the foodways of the Southern United States with a dear friend of mine this semester. My friend usually teaches literature and writing in our English department. Sue has a better feel for foodways than I do, especially when it comes down to how to actually read a cookbook. Our shared passion for the subject has remedied most of the difficulties that come with teaching new things.

Our survey goes from the Atlantic World of the 18^th century on up to the present day. (If any readers are interested, I’d be glad to share a syllabus. Come to Nashville for our October conference, and maybe we can talk about it over some local food.) The class includes first year students in their second semester of study. It filled up fast. The group seems enthusiastic and eager to learn, at least from I can gather. It can be hard to tell when teaching during the plague. When we planned the course, we figured we’d break bread with one another, have a potluck or two, the odd cooking demonstration, that kind of thing. I like to cook, and so does my friend Sue. A couple of times we held up foods to look at on Zoom. This was every bit as pathetic as it sounds.

One product of the “foodie revolution” portion of the culture industry prevalent in recent years has been a crusade by some regional boosters to change stereotypical attitudes about Southern foodways (cf. Sean Brock). No, not everything is fried and fattening. Yes, Southerners eat vegetables and prepare them in creative ways. A good start for the uninitiated might be to read Edna Lewis’ cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking cover-to-cover like a work of literature. It’s at turns utopian, nostalgic, and elegiac. I can’t recommend it enough, mostly because I’m still working out what it all means. Like any good work of art, that book keeps on giving. Miss Lewis (as she was called, in keeping with that polite form of Southern address) definitely was onto seasonal ingredients and farm-to-table before most people used those terms.

If you don’t have some degree of ambivalence about the experience of Southern foodways, then you’re not doing it right. You have to belly up and get with it. We want to imagine a South better than the many fanciful, silly, crude, and stereotypical options rolling around in many young minds nowadays: a more complicated and often painful one, the kind that might get students eating and thinking differently. If they end up less alienated from the circumstances of the production of what they eat in and around Nashville, and if they think critically about the origins of what they consider “Southern food,” then we’ve set them on the right path.

I’ve found that a little theory helps the readings and discussions along. I also grow impatient and even get a little perverse without a big idea or set of ideas to chew on (sorry). It doesn’t have to be heavy-handed. Here’s some tortured logic: If Larry McMurtry could write Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen then Jacques Derrida’s “Of Hospitality” can help us think about Southern Hospitality.

Barbecue Service

And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.

Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.

And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.

Mark 5: 9-12 (KJV)

Recently, we discussed barbecue. Like any number of foods in the Southern U.S., barbecue has an exceedingly complicated history (Corn anybody? Rice? Sugar? Sorghum? I mean, holy moly. It doesn’t stop.) Obviously I don’t have the space to give barbecue what it deserves. No one does. Like any reasonably astute historian might expect, the foodway reflects a dynamic collision of cultures: Native peoples, Africans and Europeans, and with no shortage of exploitation of—and violence against—the first two groups by the last one. Barbecue also happens to be, yet again, testament to the miraculous creativity of Black Southerners under the worst circumstances. The foodway’s background numbers among the many achingly beautiful-for-being-so-mixed-up-and-messed-up stories that make up the region’s history as a whole.

It’s perilously easy to romanticize barbecue in the Southern US. After all, lots of other cultures have really great barbecue traditions. Southerners too often think the region has a monopoly on it. Exceptionalism like that can be galling. One day, we read a couple of articles about barbecue as a Southern religion. I found most of the arguments too clever by about half. Anyhow, none of the formal articles we read could touch the James Applewhite poem “Barbecue Service,”  the best representation of the flawed barbecue-as-religion position. A small taste: The transformation may take place/At a pit no wider than a grave,/Behind a single family’s barn./These weathered ministers/Preside with the simplest of elements:/Vinegar and pepper, split pig and fire.

I mean, c’mon.

The mostly masculine, mostly silly subculture of Southern barbecue fundamentalism begins with weird, pointless disputes over the spelling of the word: barbecue or barbeque. (If your library has access, check out the OED. It’s enlightening, and it’s barbecue.) Dogmatisms are legion. In most of the Southern US, according to this or that microregional doctrine, barbecue means pork. Memphis is known specifically for ribs. In Texas it means beef, especially brisket. In the Carolinas, depending upon the location, barbecue sauce requires a vinegar base, in other parts mustard based sauces. Alabama has a tasty white sauce, while the further west one moves, tomato based sauces tend to come along with varying degrees of heat. Preparation is hotly debated. There are earnest concerns over whether or not whole hog is the best or only true pork barbecue, whether said pork should be pulled or chopped, and so on. Anyone who eats a brisket in Texas knows it must be sliced. If it shows up chopped, someone failed that day. The fatty or “point” portion of that cut of beef is good, but the talented pitmaster can prepare a consistently tender “flat” or non-fatty portion. Wood sources are contested—hickory versus mesquite, for example. Debates rage over the proper temperature and time for smoking, how and in what apparatus the smoking should take place, so on. “Pitmasters,” we learned, can take on the character of mystics or charismatic evangelists  (sign me up for the churches of Aaron Franklin, Tootsie Tomanetz and Rodney Scott).

A compelling argument concerned the general blandness or moral asceticism of lots of Southern evangelical faiths. A barbecue, being an especially rich, ritualistic, celebratory event works as a substitution—barbecue as Roman Catholic eucharistic cultural practice-envy. I don’t know if this is true, but I find the argument fun. At least it suggested a substitute rather than an equivalence. With the possible exception of monstrously dedicated subculture cranks, barbecue hardly counts as a religion for most people in the Southern US. I spent a chunk of class boring students to tears with a quick explanation of language games. Barbecue language games do have strong family resemblances to certain religious language games, but the cultural practices aren’t the same. Generally speaking anyway, religious disputes among those Protestants who believe in hellfire and damnation at bottom lack the playfulness of arguments about barbecue. Barbecue has its orthodoxies, but it also resembles the folk tradition of the dozens. When you play the dozens you can freely say awful stuff about somebody’s mama because everyone knows the rules going in. The best joke about somebody’s mama wins, but you only rarely get in a scrap over it. If I tell you I think brisket barbecue is the best in the world (because it incontrovertibly is), that doesn’t mean I think you belong in the fiery pit. The meat goes over the fiery pit, silly. Call me a heretic and a sinner, but if someone offers me barbecue from said pit, I’ll eat it no matter what sect I belong to.

I’ll say more about the foodways course next time out.