How barbecue has brought together people and cultures
When it comes to barbecue, there’s much to argue about. To which faction do you belong? Is true barbecue Texas brisket, the ribs of Memphis, or perhaps is it slathered in the mustard sauce of South Carolina?
While barbecue can be contentious and smoky, there’s another side of barbecue, a side that brings people together more than it divides.
And if you want an example of the good can come over a plate of this southern fare, look no further than the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.
On Sept. 20 1889, 12,000 people gathered in that area for (what else?) barbecue. A picture of the event shows a field covered in straw hats and parasols. For several years, veterans of the blue and grey gathered to sup and mend the ties after they faced each other over the Sulphur and lead-filled air at the battle fought there in September of 1863. At that barbecue, a commission of 50 individuals came together to create the park we all know today.
The reality is that barbecue is like so much else that makes the South great: Barbecue came about when cultures combined, when northern European foods mingled with Native American and African.
And it’s been bringing people together ever since.
The Taste of Chattanooga
It’s difficult to define Chattanooga’s barbecue. While Memphis, North Carolina and Georgia have evolved into distinct styles, Frank Blair, who works in the technology industry when he’s not barbecuing, believes Chattanooga is more ecumenical.
“I think it’s a melting pot of all of the above,” said Blair. “I don’t know East Tennessee has a defined barbecue standard per se. I say we learn from everybody and try to take the best.”
According to Willie White, a barbecuer with five-year’s experience and a salesperson in the plastics industry, this has to do with Chattanooga’s geography.
“We just have a wonderful city that is full of beauty and surrounded by the mountains and the Tennessee River and that draws a lot of different people and different flavors into this town,” White said.
In a way, that goes back to the Scenic City’s history as a river and then a railroad town. It has always been a transportation hub.
As a result, White said, “we’re our own unique little area that likes our barbecue low and slow and we like our ribs with a little bit of sweetness, but then have to have that spice, have to have that spicy kick to it as well.”
And while Texas barbecue features beef brisket because of the region’s robust cattle industry, Chattanooga experiences a similar situation due to Georgia’s poultry industry. “We do a lot of chicken,” White said. “There seems to be a lot of chicken in the area and people like their thighs and wings. There’s multiple wing competitions. They’re just about added to any kind of fundraiser that any particular group is trying to do.”
Meanwhile, the divisions over which region’s sauce is superior falls to the wayside. According to Hugh Morrow, president of Ruby Falls, “The key to great barbecue is flavor and structure, or texture of the meat, and if it’s overcooked it becomes mushy. There are few people that get that and are able to accomplish it. And really good barbecue does not need sauce.”
Cultures combine
The beginnings of barbecue didn’t have a rosy picture, not when it came to the enslaved Africans that made it, according to Adrian Miller, a.k.a. the “soul food scholar”, who won the 2014 James Beard Award for Reference, History and Scholarship for his book “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time.”
The name “barbecue” has its roots with the Native Americans who cooked meat over the coals on a rack of green branches.
But what they cooked was less-than-appetizing to the modern palate: Fish, lizards and the like, according to Miller. With the coming of European settlers, the subject of the barbecue changed, to domesticated flesh with fat marbling throughout, such as beef and pork.
During Colonial Times and in the early years of the United States, when people such as George Washington gathered for a good ol’ barbecue, it was enslaved Africans who made the meal, Africans whose knowledge of cooking was formed in West Africa.
“I’m not saying that African Americans are the only people that barbecued,” Miller said, “because barbecue has been multi-racial from the beginning, but what I am arguing is that when people thought about barbecue for much of our nation’s history, they were thinking about African Americans preparing it.”
Barbecue was also used as a way for white plantation owners to reward enslaved Africans, giving them an animal to barbecue.
While the meat was from Europe, some of the side dishes of barbecue and soul food are distinctly African, Miller said.
“I would say collard greens are the best example because that is West African people in Americas trying to find something that’s similar to what they ate back home,” Miller said. “The bitter greens from Europe were similar to the bitter leaf that they ate in Africa. So they just adapted the European greens and suited them to their taste.”
After the Civil War
After the Civil War rent the nation’s soul, the way barbecue was prepared changed. Former slaves, pit masters now free, made a career managing the barbecue feasts that sat at the center of southern social life.
To know what barbecue meant to the postbellum South, we only have to look to Bradley County.
At the end of the Civil War, a group in Collegedale raised about $70 to host a barbecue in celebration to “welcome the Bradley boys in blue home.”
Bradley County did not vote in favor of succession, said Bryan Reed president of the Bradley County Historical and Genealogical Society.
Not much is known about that celebration: Reed knows about it because a man in court used the barbecue as an example for why he was loyal to the Union.
What is known, Reed said, was that barbecue sat at the intersection of food and public life. On the Fourth of July the community would gather for barbecue, an event that included all-day sporting events.
However, those Fourth of July events were segregated.
Barbecue showed up in churches, Miller said, because they served as the social center of the rural South and it was a way to build community.
In the years following the Civil War, as Miller described it, there were few barbecue resturant. You knew a guy that made meat soft and sweet, an alchemist of smoke, fire and bone.
Pit-master work was a traveling job. Around the time of the Great Depression, some pit masters settled down in shacks along the road.
Slow-cooked meat became the nation’s first fast food for a nation that was just beginning to discover its wheels. And in this era of Jim Crow, Miller pointed out, barbecue stands were different. Good barbecue was good barbecue.
“Unlike soul food and other cuisines, I don’t think it was unusual for barbecue joints to be desegregated,” Miller said. “White people would go to a black person and buy their barbecue. Now it may be takeout for everybody, but you start reading these accounts of these longtime barbecue joints and they would talk about how black and whites went to that spot. And even in a lot of white-owned barbecue restaurants, they usually had black pit masters.”
The Fellowship of the Smoke
After 9/11, Miller said, there was a resurgence of barbecue. It’s comfort food and distinctly American. The collective conscience of America was scarred, looking to reaffirm its identity.
Over the recent years, television shows and magazine profiles have explored the barbecue way—but they often make a glaring oversight, Miller said.
“What I just notice is that when barbecue is now featured, for the most part, they’re showing two types of people. It’s either the tattooed, bearded or mustached hipsters of Brooklyn, or it’s Bubbas. And those are offered as the only archetypes for current pit masters.
“And I just wonder why is that the case because it’s not true. I mean, those dudes are doing their thing, but they’re just part of the story. There are so many African Americans out there.”
Miller continued, “The stakes are high because these people who are getting profiled are making a ton of money. At the same time, you’ve got barbecue is tremendously popular, and white pit masters are being profiled, you’ve got a lot of black barbecue restaurants closing.”
While restaurants might be the most visible part of a city’s barbecue culture, it’s not the end-all be-all to a region’s barbecue scene. When Miller has eaten barbecue in Chattanooga (members of his family grew up here), he primarily shared the meal in someone’s home.
“You’ll find among a lot of African Americans in the South that barbecue is more about family,” Miller said. “It’s family reunion, it’s Sunday dinner. It’s summer outings and the holidays. That’s family time. You wouldn’t go to a restaurant for that.”
Another aspect barbecue is the competition. And one of the region’s best before his death earlier this year was Jim Brewer II, owner of The Pulse. In the three years that Ruby Falls held its Battle Below the Clouds, a barbecue competition for backyard chefs, “He always went home with a trophy,” said Hugh Morrow, president of the attraction.
This August, Ruby Falls will host its fourth Battle Below the Clouds to benefit Lana’s Love Foundation, an organization that gives children dealing with pediatric cancer an opportunity to have fun, to get their mind off the disease.
“He truly was the spirit of the whole competition,” Morrow said. “Jim related to these kids. He totally understood where they were.”
Brewer was known for his curveball flavor combinations said White, who often barbecued with Brewer.
At his home, Brewer was known to injected melted butter and amaretto into steaks before grilling them.
“He had a great sense of what would be really good together. He was always coming up with new, creative ideas, using those in the barbecue,” White said.
On the field of barbecue competition, Brewer would dry rub a 10-pound log of bologna, smoke it, cut it into one-inch squares and serve it with a bit of barbecue sauce, according to Blair.
Blair said it was “Something that’s very inexpensive and the crowds always loved it.”But before the avant-garde flavors and the competition wins, Brewer needed to overcome the challenge of cancer.
“One thing that always upset him the most about his fight against cancer was the fact that he did not have all of his taste buds and all of his ways of tasting the food,” White said. “Later, he did not have the ability to chew real well. He lost all of his teeth after his radiation.”
Brewer composed his Ninth Symphony with barbecue.
So just what did barbecue mean for Brewer?
“Oh, it’s very simple. Very, very simple,” Morrow said. “Barbecuing to him was about the fellowship with his friends.”