Garner - Foods that Make You Say Mmm-mmm

Bob Garners Book of Barbecue

North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time

Bob Garners Guide to North Carolina Barbecue

Published by

JOHN F. BLAIR,

PUBLISHER

1406 Plaza Drive

Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103

blairpub.com

Copyright 2014 by Bob Garner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, address John F. Blair, Publisher, Subsidiary Rights Department, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2014019226

ISBN: 978-0-89587-629-4

ISBN: 978-0-89587-630-0 (ebook)

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in China through Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, Kentucky

DESIGN BY DEBRA LONG HAMPTON

COVER IMAGE: FILE404 / SHUTTERSTOCK

I have had the pleasure of working with Mike Oniffrey in his role as a UNC-TV videographershooter, in our parlancesince 1990. Ive always particularly appreciated his high energy and the extra effort he puts into the finer points of lighting non-studio situations. He is also a talented and prolific still photographer who routinely goes above and beyond the requirements of a video shoot by pulling out one or several still cameras and snapping away at practically everyone within range. He is extravagantly generous at sharing these images via email and online, and he always ends up brightening the overall experience for nearly everyone involved with one of our TV projects. Mike took several of the photographs in this book and also shot much of the UNC-TV video footage from which some additional still images were captured. (As a sideline, he is quite adept at creating neckties and other items of clothing, as well as transforming white sneakers into black dress shoes, with the aid of black gaffers tape.) He has a special touch with creating engaging images of food. Im glad that readers of this book will be able to enjoy them as much as I have.

Several of the subjects in the book first appeared in different form in my articles in Our State magazine. I am indebted to Our State for the opportunity to share my passion for traditional North Carolina foods with so many of its readers. What a loyal and approving bunch they are!

I also want to thank UNC-TV once again for putting me in a position to write about food in the first place, and to express my appreciation to David Hardy and Galen Black of the UNC-TV staff for particular help with challenges associated with this book.

My first (and still only) wife, Ruthie, provided invaluable assistance, as she always does. And I thank my terrific children and grandchildren for their constant and refreshing encouragement.

To all the viewers who follow me on my food travels via UNC-TV: getting to meet and chat with you is one of the biggest pleasures of my life. Thanks for watching.

The way in which certain foods become associated with certain regions is an oddity. Since North Carolina is a Southern state, we share a deep devotion to all sorts of commonly enjoyed regional favorites, with the exception of certain barbecue peculiarities found elsewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. But the allure of certain foods among those favorites attaches itself with particular strength and stubbornness to the consciousness of those from the Old North State.

It certainly has something to do with geography and available food resources. Our long Atlantic coastline, our sounds and estuaries, and our inland rivers have dictated that fish and shellfish be assigned a place near the heart of our foodways. We cherish oyster roasts, digging clams, and our own Outer Banks style of clam chowder. Along some of the rivers flowing into Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, residents have kept alive a tradition revolving around pine bark fish stews, or muddles. Every autumn, coastal insiders begin to look forward to that smoky specialty called charcoal mullet, which celebrates the former prominence of what is now considered a baitfish. And even if we live well removed from the coast, we love fried fish served up in fish camps.

In the third of the state closest to the ocean, the sandy soil lends itself to prolific grape production. Indeed, our coastal plain was home to the first cultivated grapes in America. Our sandy loam is also ideally suited for the cultivation of big, meaty Virginia-type peanuts and perfectly pickle-able cucumbers.

Settlement patterns also had much to do with the history of our favorite foods, and certainly with the emergence of our single most popular food: pork barbecue. The earliest English settlers near the coast found Native Americans barbecuing returned-to-the-wild pigs over pits of glowing hardwood embersa legacy from the Spanish, who had introduced domesticated swine into the Southeast a hundred years earlier. Today, whole-hog-style is still the signature barbecue presentation of eastern North Carolina. In the Piedmont, on the other hand, later-arriving German settlers imported a preference for the taste of pork shoulder, which is the cut celebrated in the Lexington school of barbecue-ology. Both eastern and Piedmont (Lexington) styles of barbecue are responsible for many spin-off dishes: a bewildering array of barbecue sauces of every description, along with hot sauces and specialty spice sauces; Brunswick stew; hush puppies and corn sticks; and our favorite barbecue desserts, banana pudding and peach cobbler.

The wave of German migration to the North Carolina Piedmont also brought us an enduring fondness for livermushthe poor mans pt, a kissing cousin of that Pennsylvania Dutch favorite, scrapple.

Meanwhile, the Moravians, originally from what is now the Czech Republic, kept their area of settlement remarkably compact, centered around present-day Winston-Salem. But the popularity of some of their baked goods, especially Moravian cookies and sugar cake, has become national and even international in scope. Moravian chicken pie, a dish best known more locally, is loved no less than the sweet specialties throughout the north-central Piedmont. And although Krispy Kreme doughnuts had nothing to do with Moravian tradition, these sweet treats sprang from the same Winston-Salem area that brought us warm, gooey sugar cake.

The existence of four well-defined seasons, particularly in the foothills and mountains, is reflected in North Carolinas long love affair with what was originally climate-cured country ham aged over a full year. In our more hurried modern society, the curing process has been pushed to keep up with our personal pace, but North Carolinians still love a ham biscuit as much as anyone on the planet.

The hot, muggy climate in much of the state certainly had something to do with the emergence of certain foods and beverages as icons. Not one but three well-known, refreshing soft drinks were either invented or first bottled here: Pepsi-Cola, Cheerwine, and Sun Drop.

In the classic description, North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mountains of conceitin reference to more aristocratic Virginia and South Carolina. Such a place as North Carolina would figure to be the perfect setting in which equally humble collards could be accorded a place of reverence. Collards were originally considered food for poor people, black and white, not only because they lingered on into the winter, when everything else in the vegetable patch had given up the ghost, but also because they could be made even tastier when seasoned with almost any kind of pork scraps. The strong odor of cooked collards is by itself enough to keep the hardy vegetable out of the kitchens of elite diners, unless they can get someone to cook the collards elsewhere. The same can be said of ramps, or wild leeks, a springtime favorite of many old-time mountain settlers and, nowadays, adventurous festival-going tourists.