54 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019
“You cannot replicate that with elec-
tricity or gas. That’s not barbecue. That’s
roast pork,” he says, with emphasis, over
the table. Early is a trim man of medi-
um height who keeps his ash-gray hair
impeccably combed, but it’s not hard to
imagine it getting mussed in a scrap over
what’s barbecue and what isn’t. “You can
put barbecue sauce on it and call it bar-
becue. You can cook it in a Crock-Pot and
put sauce on it and call it barbecue. But
it’s not. Now, I get chastised on that all
the time—about being old-school and a
purist and all that. All I’m saying is, there’s
a totally di erent avor when you’ve got
the fat of that meat dripping onto live
coals. The smoke it creates to season that
pig—that makes the di erence.”
And that’s getting rarer by the week,
because the barbecue joints that do it the
traditional way, in the small towns and
cities near old tobacco farms, are drying
up. Of the hundreds of places Early discov-
ered during his survey, fewer than 30—
the ones he highlighted in his book—met
the formal standard. In March, a er we
speak, he cuts the list to 21 when the N.C.
Department of Revenue shuts down Wil-
ber’s Barbecue, a quintessential Golds-
boro barbecue spot since 1962, for non-
payment of taxes. What’s replacing the
old spots are nouveau-Southern dining
experiences in cities like Charlotte, some
of them even claiming to be “barbecue
restaurants,” which cater to city folks and
o er menu items like beer and chicken
wings and nachos and salads, and which
may also serve what they call Carolina
barbecue. But they use electricity or gas
to cook the meat, and, sorry, to the likes
of Jim Early, that ain’t barbecue.
This is, in part, a long-winded way
to say he doesn’t care for anything you
might nd in Charlotte. “With Charlotte,
because of the banks and the business,
there’s such an in ux of people from all
over the country coming in ...” He pauses,
a look of mild disgust on his face. “Things
are di erent in Charlotte. They just are.”THEY’RE DIFFERENT everywhere you
nd barbecue, really, even if the pitmas-
ters who specialize in syrupy-sauced
ribs in Kansas City and beef brisket in
Austin make sure they cook over coals
like their traditionalist counterparts in
the Carolinas. Barbecue is unique among
traditional American cuisines for its vast
regional variations; at times, as you pore
over the volumes written about barbe-
cue, authors and experts can seem like
naturalists competing to classify the max-
imum number of butter y species.
“Barbecue varies more from region to
region than any other of the national
foods,” says Lolis Eric Elie, a television
writer and former newspaper columnist
whose barbecue travelogue, Smokestack
Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Bar-
becue Country, was published in 1996.
“Fried chicken—there are individual
styles, but you can’t tell me what Chicago
fried chicken tastes like compared to Mis-
sissippi fried chicken.”
In his book, Elie writes that barbecue
is a metaphor for American culture, and
“a more appropriate metaphor than any
other American food.” Why?
“It’s evolving much as the country is
evolving,” he tells me by phone from Los
Angeles, where he works on the writing
sta of the Amazon series The Man in
the High Castle. “Additionally, barbecue
embodies some of the classic American
dichotomies, because on one hand, we
all want to be rich and have a big house
in some fancy subdivision, and on the
other hand, we like to think of ourselves
as everyday people. Well, barbecue at
its highest level involves a great deal of
complicated, di¤ cult, precise work—butwhen it’s served, it’s at a party, and it’s
not a formal party. You pretty much have
to eat it with your hands and get dirty, so
it kind of has that American reaction to
European formality.”
The variations followed patterns of
expansion and apprenticeship, gener-
ally westward. From the Carolinas and
Virginia, barbecue crept to Tennessee
and the Deep South—Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi—by the 1820s, and to Texas
and the Midwest by the 1840s. Until the
turn of the 19th century, it was a non-
commercial, communal food reserved for
holidays and other special occasions, says
Robert Moss, a Charleston-based scholar
and author of Barbecue: The History of
an American Institution. But in the early
20th, as towns sprang up around rail-
roads and markets, farmers set up tents
and sold meat by the pound and plate.
“And those developed into brick-and-
mortar barbecue joints,” Moss says. “If
you think about going from an informal
to a standard business, you have to stan-
dardize how you prepare the food, and
that’s really where you start to see the
regional variations. You’d see this kind
of local mentorship going on—young
people would go to ‘the barbecue guy,’
learn the techniques, then go open their
own places.”
Continued on page 84“All I’m saying is, there’s a totally
different fl avor when you’ve got the fat of
that meat dripping onto live coals.
The smoke it creates to season that
pig—that makes the difference.”—JIM EARLY
Jim Early is a former lawyer, gourmet
cook, and founder of the North Carolina
Barbecue Society.LLOYD AARON