Posted on 10/27/2002 5:45:12 PM PST by stainlessbanner
OXFORD, Miss., Oct. 21 — This was no everyday summit conference. For a start, there were a lot more bluejeans than pinstripe suits.
There were dire predictions, of course, and the requisite amount of pointing with alarm. But instead of conference rooms perfumed with cigar and cigarette smoke, there were tents perfumed with oak and hickory smoke, and instead of a final communiqué full of dependent clauses, there was a final speech by Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker, full of one-liners.
More than 300 people, mostly Southerners, some more knowledgeable than others, gathered on the campus of Ole Miss last weekend to praise barbecue, argue about barbecue and gorge on barbecue, which one overexcited speaker described as "the only truly American food." That completely baffled those in the crowd who had never before contemplated the foreign origins of gumbo, cornbread and the P.B.&J.
It was the fifth and largest annual conference sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a multiracial group devoted to the preservation of traditional regional cooking, both high-falutin' and low-down. The alliance operates under the aegis of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
Culinary authorities shed heat, if not necessarily light, on exactly the kinds of questions that baffle diplomats. Precisely where, for instance, is the border between Down East and Piedmont barbecue in North Carolina? That line proved every bit as difficult to define as the one between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
Age-old questions were revisited: Wood or charcoal? Pork or beef (or mutton or goat)? Chopped or sliced? Sauce based on tomatoes, vinegar or mustard? Sauce on top, sauce on the side, or no sauce at all? And what about side dishes? Coleslaw, baked beans and potato salad, not much controversy there; but what about fries? Are they too tainted by McDonald's?
There was no consensus on any of these questions, but McDonald's and the like lurked villainously in the background all weekend, even though the words "fast food" were never spoken. Van Sykes of Bob Sykes BarB-Q in Bessemer, Ala., who sells 800 to 1,000 pounds of barbecue a day, said he had resisted the lure of microwave ovens and gas smokers, clinging to traditional methods of cooking. But he has embraced computers and drive-throughs.
"To survive in the barbecue business today," Mr. Sykes warned, "you have to find ways to fit into people's lifestyles. Either you get them in and out in 30 minutes or they'll go someplace else for lunch the next time."
Bob Kantor, proprietor of Memphis Minnie's in San Francisco, deplores ersatz products like "pork in barbecue sauce" that show up on supermarket shelves. "These attempts to make a great deal of money out of a bastard product," he said, threaten the genuine, handcrafted article.
Lingering doubts about the future were eased, however, by the excellence of the food served here — not only the barbecue from Big Bob Gibson's in Decatur, Ala., the Cozy Corner in Memphis and Mitchell's in Wilson, N.C., but also the irresistible breakfast pies baked by Karen Barker of the Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C.
On Saturday night, the visiting gourmands ate to the stirring sounds of the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, led by 94-year-old Othar Turner.
Scholars like John Shelton Reed of the University of North Carolina and Lolis Eric Elie of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans grappled manfully with the geography and sociology of slow-cooked meat, without reaching any firm conclusions. No issue was knottier than this one: Why is barbecue cooked almost entirely by black men in some regions and almost entirely by white men in others? Migration patterns clearly had something to do with it, speakers said, and maybe racial politics too. But no comprehensive theory emerged.
If anyone addressed the question of why pitmasters seem invariably to be male, your correspondent was out of the room at the time.
Brisket cooked by white men, often of Czech or German descent, has a hammerlock on the affections of Texans, though there was once a vigorous black barbecue tradition in that state. Yet according to Mr. Trillin, who has built a career on exaggerating the virtues of his hometown's barbecue, it can be dangerous in Kansas City to sample the wares of a white pitmaster.
Seated incongruously in the judge's chair in the old Oxford courthouse, he explained: "It's like going to a gentile internist. Things might turn out all right, but you never know."
Mr. Trillin argued that even the most observant of his fellow Jews could feel free to eat barbecued pork because of a little-known "easement" granted by the equally little-known Joplin (Mo.) Rebbe. But it was left to Marcie Cohen Ferris, a young scholar who grew up near Memphis, to disclose, less facetiously, that an Orthodox congregation there has held a kosher barbecue for the last 14 years, and that Corky's BBQ Restaurant has nearly perfected a kosher sauce.
Noting that one of the nation's largest Orthodox congregations lives cheek-by-jowl with dozens of restaurants devoted to "the pure unadulterated pig," Ms. Ferris asked, "Did a higher power place these Orthodox Jews in Memphis to test their faith?"
Right from the start, it was clear that for this group at least, the moratorium on New York-bashing that prevailed after Sept. 11 has ended. Mr. Elie, who comes from a tertiary barbecue capital himself, suggested that New York would never be "part of barbecue country" because it had no indigenous regional tradition, just techniques imported from somewhere else.
There were also barbs for Texas — "They only use beef because you can't lasso a pig," someone said — and for Atlanta. The metropolis of the New South, Dr. Reid said, "is what a quarter of a million Southern soldiers died to prevent": an overcrowded place with no soul and inferior barbecue. But all of this sounded tame and good-humored compared with the barbecue war between the Bessinger brothers of South Carolina, sparked by the decision of one of them, Maurice, to fly the Confederate flag over his pits in Columbia and the fury this engendered in his older brother, Melvin, of Charleston.
Maurice Bessinger, whose main restaurant, Piggie Park, has served as a state campaign headquarters for Pat Robertson, distributes a leaflet maintaining that Abraham Lincoln was the product of a mystical congress between John C. Calhoun and a Southern woman on her way north to Illinois. He told Jack Hitt, a writer who documented the Bessinger brouhaha, that the recipe for his mustard-based sauce was in the Bible.
"The parable of the mustard seed?" Mr. Hitt inquired helpfully.
Politics is never far from barbecue, and never far from Oxford, either. Forty years ago, on Oct. 1, 1962, James Meredith integrated Ole Miss after a night of rioting, and the memories of those events have lingered in town ever since. To the literati, Oxford may mean William Faulkner, who lived here and upon whose grave here students like to pour bourbon after a big night out; but for much of the country, Oxford still stands mostly for racial strife.
There are still a few reminders of those dark days, including the Mississippi state flag, prominently displayed at the symposium, which incorporates part of the Confederate flag. But Robert C. Khayat, the university's chancellor since 1995, has worked hard to promote racial harmony, and Mr. Meredith returned to Oxford for an anniversary commemoration early this month, along with many of the federal marshals who protected him in 1962. An oral history project got under way, and a civil rights monument will be dedicated in April at a prominent site on campus.
Yet as Curtis Wilkie, a retired journalist who teaches here, readily acknowledged, the woods only 10 miles away are "full of unreconstructed rednecks," and 25 miles to the west lies the largely black Mississippi Delta, an area of wretched, unrelenting poverty. Sometimes, said Gregory A. Schirmer, an English professor, "I feel as if I were living in West Berlin before the wall came down."
For Toni Tipton-Martin, the outgoing president of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Oxford's past was a problem, she said, and she accepted a leading role in an organization based here "with a lot of misgivings." Ms. Tipton-Martin, who was among the first black food editors in the country when she worked at The Cleveland Plain Dealer, said she fought some battles to ensure that the alliance remained truly multiracial, "but doing this job was the best thing I ever did."
Mr. Trillin has always been out there, but this piece is downright loopy.
Someday, I would love to try some of your mesquite, my friend - If you know BBQ like you know computers, I know it's mighty fine!
A recipe for healthy tofu barbecue with a side of kidney-bean chili?
Pardner, you need reach for the sky....;>)
/john
...but an ice-cold Shiner Bock is better. ;-)
You know, that's the only time I drink beer. Tending three briskets, five slabs of ribs, and a pork shoulder with an ice-cold Corona just go together.
Bump
/john
You see what I'm saying?
Where was the Brunswick Stew?
At least you eat meat. And when you run out of mesquite, it's ok to use hickory. If you have to. ;>)
/john
That is about the prettiest picture I can have in my head: fields and fields of bluebonnets, gnarled and twisted live oaks, warm breezes, live music, and tables piled high with family service (that means, you pay one price per person, and y'all get big platters, and help yo'self!) bbq, tater salad... and an ice cold Shiner Bock. *sniff* I can't wait for Spring to come back...
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