When I first saw John Shelton and Dale Voleburg Reed’s book Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue, my first thought was “Huh. I would have thought it would be bigger.” Because let’s face it, if there is one thing that can start a small war in the South it’s a discussion on what is and isn’t proper barbecue. It is safer to talk about politics and religion. It is safer to talk about college football. It is said that North Carolina has more hogs than it has people, and you can be sure that every single one of those people has an intractable notion as to what belongs on a plate of barbecue. Barbecue is to North Carolina what chicken wings are to Buffalo, cheese is to Wisconsin, and merlot is to Napa Valley. By rights, any book on the subject should weigh in at about the size of one of the pigs it tells you how to cook. (That would be around 250 pounds or more.) But the Reeds’ “Definitive Guide to the People, Recipes and Lore” of North Carolina barbecue is one of those books that is bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. It is a treasure trove, a testament (in the Holy Roller sense), an exuberant celebration of the one thing served in the South that is better than fried chicken. 

It is not, however, a guidebook to the best barbecue joints in the state of North Carolina (although you can tell right away where the authors’ prejudices lie). And it does not hold the secret recipes of every pit master along route 70—known in the state as “the corridor of ‘cue’”—although it does have a few. Instead, the Reeds set out to document the history, folklore and culture surrounding one of the South’s most distinctive dishes. In this it is a complete success, although the authors’ approach teeters, often wildly, between solid investigative reporting and something approaching the kind of stories Southerners tell each other while rocking away a summer evening on their front porch drinking mint juleps. Thus, in the book one can find a fairly detailed and romantic history of the dish dating back to Samuel Johnson who first listed the word in his dictionary, and Thomas Jefferson who apparently invented the first vinegar-and-pepper sauce. On the other hand, the authors feel perfectly justified in listing among their credentials the fact that John Reed once gave a lecture to the University of North Carolina’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies entitled “Science Lies When It Says Hogmeat’s Got Little Bugs In It.”

If you live in the South long enough, you get used to stuff like that.

What is very clear is that John and Dale Reed chose to write a book about barbecue because they are absolutely mad for the stuff. And because such enthusiasm is infectious. There is no way even a casual reader cannot come away without feeling faint from hunger and nigh-on convinced that barbecue is the answer to existential questions about the meaning of life and the solution to the war in the Middle East.

Okay, maybe not that last. People who live in the Middle East aren’t really known for being fond of pork, and as far as John and Dale Reed are concerned, when they say barbecue, they mean pig. Specifically and unbendingly, they mean pig that:

1. Has been cooked for a long time at a low temperature with heat and smoke from a fire of hardwood and/or hardwood coals
2. Is definitely pig. Not beef. Not chicken. Not possum (no, really)
3. Is sometimes basted and always served with a thin sauce of vinegar and red pepper

They are on the fence about whether or not the sauce can have tomato in it. In fact, they report that one of the first questions they were asked by nearly everyone they interviewed for the book was “Where do you stand on the tomato question?” Eastern barbecue, you see, doesn’t have it. “Piedmont” or western barbecue does. And it seems clear that we’re closer to peace in the Middle East than we are to a resolution on the tomato question.

Among its somewhat fanatic enthusiasm for proper pulled-pork barbecue, however, there is an air of sad nostalgia to Holy Smoke! The book concentrates most of its efforts on documenting the many locally famous barbecue pits and family restaurants that thrived along old rural routes in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But it is not lost on the authors that many of these old, beloved institutions are gone for good, sacrificed to our fast-paced, increasingly homogenized lifestyles. Not to mention our increasingly stringent health department regulations. There is nothing fast-paced about barbecuing a whole pig over hardwood coals. Something like that takes at least ten hours, which is nine hours and forty-five minutes longer than a modern person is willing to spend on a meal. It isn’t exactly an antiseptic process either, and Americans are a squeamish lot when it comes to eating. Looking at a whole pig, gutted and spitted, legs splayed and mouth open, as is sizzles and crackles over hot coals, is a bit too, well, primal for most people.

So reading the Holy Smoke! with its careful descriptions of how to build a barbecue pit, its vintage photographs of run down diners, its excerpted interviews with pit-masters long since retired or gone, its quaint recipes for Brunswick stew and Cheerwine cake, is a bit like reading the old Foxfire books on near-forgotten Appalachian crafts (one of which is how to dress a hog). There is a sense that this is a passing way of life, a lost art. A quick look at the index for famous barbecue joints in my town of Wilmington, NC showed two:  Merrit’s, and Skinner & Daniels. Merrit’s closed about fifteen years ago. There is a Wal-Mart where the Skinner & Daniels used to be. The barbecue we are served these days in roadside meat-and-threes and the growing number of franchised concerns that come in as the rural routes slowly turn into suburban sprawl is but a pale imitation of what was. Many of these new places get around the whole “cooked over wood” requirement by throwing a few hickory chips on the gas grill, or even—one can hear the authors’ horrified whisper—by using Liquid Smoke. Such “authentic” barbecue as remains is now only to be found in highly specialized circumstances—in a few holdout diners that are struggling to keep their down-home authenticity in the face of the upscale boutique attentions of food connoisseurs. You’d be amazed how often they are “discovered” by some clueless New York writer for Gourmet magazine. According to the Reeds, even Martha Stewart has a recipe for “North Carolina Barbecue” that the New York Times called “precious.” 

It is hard to shake the feeling that barbecue, despite being the most popular dish in the state of North Carolina, is a kind of endangered species. If it weren’t for the fact that you can still find good ’cue at your average church picnic or political rally, it might well be gone the way of  the old glass-bottled Coca-Cola, (which you can now only find in Cracker Barrel restaurants). 

And yet, for all its sad mourning of a way of life gone by, Holy Smoke! still finds plenty of evidence that the tradition remains strong, if slightly underground. The number of commercial bottled sauces—both with and without tomato—on supermarket shelves have quadrupled. The hog industry has always had a checkered reputation in the state because of the environmental costs of factory-farmed pigs, but small scale, organic and cruelty-free livestock farmers are on the rise. There is a guy at my farmer’s market who takes orders for whole pigs every winter, and comes back with the order filled—dressed, cleaned, and cut—eight months later. And it is still certainly true that people in the state remain just as passionate over what is “real” barbecue as ever. Which explains why, after carelessly mentioning to a friend I had used Tobasco sauce instead of Texas Pete in my barbecue dip,  half a year later she still hasn’t forgiven me, and won’t come back to dinner.

Not that I’m trying too hard to change her mind. It leaves all the more for me.

Books mentioned in this column
Holy Smoke! The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue by John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed (UNC Press)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.