SHELBY, N.C. â€" I've been breathing
North Carolina air for two hours, and already I've come to the realization: Here, much like the rest of the South, "barbecue" is a noun and not a transitive verb.
What's more, in Seattle (where I was raised), Los Angeles (where I went to college) and Chicago (where I reside), "barbecue" is, if anything, a flavor. Barbecue sauce, barbecue potato chips, barbecue chicken pizza. In 90 percent of America, barbecue connotes KC Masterpiece. It could also be an adjective, and it's usually implied that somebody else is doing the barbecuing, as if it were a service industry like dry cleaning.
So I get the sense that the statement "I'm eating barbecue" has as much specificity here in Shelby, N.C., as "I'm eating spaghetti carbonara."
What's more, there exists a culture war in North Carolina, a divide as vast as the state is wide. In the "eastern North Carolina" style, the hog is smoked whole. Meat from all parts of the pig, including crispy bits of rind, is chopped into a hash of pork textures. The sauce has a base of vinegar and peppers.
Here, in Shelby, it is Piedmont style. The German settlers in the area added ketchup to eastern sauce, and the added sugar gave the sauce a sweet-and-sour profile familiar in German cooking. Rather than using the whole hog, shoulder is the favored cut of pork in the west â€" an inexpensive cut but with a fattiness that lessens the chances that the meat will dry out.
The squabbling goes on today, and really, it's over that lone ingredient.
A friend and I spent two days traversing the western part of North Carolina to sample its particular definition of barbecue.
We arrive in Shelby, a 45-minute straight shot west of Charlotte, on the periphery of Piedmont barbecue country. Jackie Bridges, a columnist at the local daily, The Shelby Star, agreed to meet for lunch at Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge.
There are plenty of Bridgeses living in Shelby. Jackie's husband, Bruce, is a distant fourth cousin of the family that owns Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge, which has been smoking pork for some 60 years. People in Shelby seem to head to one of two places: Bridges Barbecue Lodge or Alston Bridges â€" indeed, yet another Bridges of Shelby in the pork-smoking trade. "A friendly rivalry," Jackie said.
Jackie and Bruce say they prefer Lodge over Alston. They have arguments with friends from Lexington â€" considered the cradle of Piedmont barbecue 80 miles northeast of here â€" about which town serves better barbecue. Zoom farther out, and they fight over Piedmont versus eastern style ("I was just in Raleigh," Bruce says, "and their barbecue is terrible"). Soon, they're defending North Carolina 'cue against the rest of America. No matter what geographic level, there's a friendly argument to be made, a nesting doll of divisions, always with two competing sides. And the folks in Shelby just happen to think they have points won on every rung. They take this belief as gospel.
Other than updating seats from an ugly green to a less-ugly turquoise, Bridges Barbecue Lodge is frozen in 1960s amber. Out back behind a white fence, hickory logs are stacked 5 feet high in a neat row that stretches 40 yards. A wiser man who knows more about barbecue than I told me: "If you don't see a pile of wood in the back, turn around."
Back inside, we sit in a corner circular booth. Jackie and Bruce order pitchers of sweet tea for the table, de rigueur in this part of the world. It is one notch over sweet, but the melted ice corrects the pitchers to just-perfect.
The hush puppies resemble tamarind â€" long pods of dense and crispy fried cornmeal batter, a touch sweet and addictive. I meet Jeanette Ross, who tells me she remembers the first day the restaurant offered hush puppies â€" half a century ago.
I dunk a hush puppy into the house sauce, the first time I've sampled proper Piedmont-style dip. The whiff of vinegar is so pungent it snaps my head back. Then I taste it: There clearly is the concentrated sweetness of ketchup, giving way to tang, before the pepper afterburn, like a sauce performing in three movements. I realize then that the sauces I'm used to, the sweet tomato-based sauces one would find in Kansas City or Memphis, act as a complement: They take meats and bend the flavor to different angles and sometimes overwhelm it (or, in the hands of less capable pit masters, purposely hide it). The vinegar-based sauce here makes pork taste porkier. It operates like salt, as a flavor augmenter.
The inclusion of tomato, an eternal debate among Tar Heelers, is then less about philosophical differences than a matter of personal preference. Do you like your sauce with a hue of red?
The chopped pork is tremendous, but the greater thrill is tasting "outside brown," the crispy, hickory smoke-hardened exterior layer of meat. This is the starting point where all seasoning begins its long journey inward. The ketchup/vinegar-spiked coleslaw, a brighter, crunchier version of its mayo-based brethren, is a proper accompaniment as opposed to a side dish.
The next day, we drive northeast toward Lexington, the heart of Piedmont country. Low on the list of arguments among the barbecue cognoscenti here is debating chopped versus pulled.
We spent the afternoon dining at Richard's Bar-B-Q in Salisbury. Here, meat is offered in two forms: chopped to a mishmash pork chaw or hand-pulled into ropes of meat.
It's essentially two presentations of the same pork shoulder, but somehow each tastes different. With chopped, the texture is uniformly moist, the porcine flavors immediate. Pulled pork seems to require more work. There's an additional three seconds of gnashing before the pork releases its juices, that intoxicating swine wine. And I've never found strings of pork that separate on the grain to be good conduits of flavor.
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