Barbecue: America’s contribution to the world’s culinary landscape. And just like almost everything else American, it is a subject of hot debate amongst Americans.

If you ask a Carolinian what barbecue is, they’ll tell you it’s pork…but they’ll disagree about what part of a pig should be used, how it should be prepared, and they’ll strongly disagree about sauces.

Texans will insist barbecue is beef. Brisket. Salt and pepper. No sauce, thank you very much.

Kansas City folks will side-eye the Texan insisting on no sauce, and us here in Wisconsin may well think “barbecue” is a sloppy joe.

We’re all right, well except us Wisconsinites, as a sloppy joe is NOT barbecue, because American barbecue is a beautiful reflection of the diversity of the regions of America.

The word barbecue gets used many different ways:

A barbecue can mean a backyard cookout.

A barbecue grill is a cooking appliance meant to be used outside for fast, hot cooking with meat right over the flame.

But those aren’t the definitions I’m using for this Dispatch. When I say barbecue, I mean the act of cooking and the food made by cooking low-and-slow with indirect heat and wood smoke for hours until you get gloriously flavorful and tender food.

Now, you might ask: isn't that just cooking meat over fire, and hasn't everybody everywhere done that forever?

Yes. Argentina has asado, Korea has its grill, the Caribbean has jerk, South Africa has the braai. Cooking meat with fire is about as universal as human activities get, and America did not invent “cooking over fire.”

But here's the distinction that makes American barbecue its own thing. Most of the world grills, meaning they cook fast and hot. What we mean by barbecue is the low-and-slow version, the one that takes a cheap, tough cut and coaxes it tender over many patient hours. That technique came to us through the Caribbean, but what happened next is the American part. The world grills. America took slow smoking and turned it into an artform.

This week’s Dispatch shares how an ancient cooking technique turned into regional traditions that are beloved by their adherents. Barbecue has often been spoken of as federalism on a plate: one country, many local flavors, everybody certain their way is best.

Sit back and enjoy the story!

Where does barbecue actually come from?

For something as common as cooking over fire, it’s hard to get a definitive “origin story,” but we have pretty good evidence that long before Europeans arrived, the Taino people of the Caribbean cooked and preserved meat on raised frames of green wood over low, smoky fires.

Spanish explorers wrote the word down as "barbacoa," which appeared in print as early as 1526. Whether our English word descends from that Spanish adaptation or straight from the Taino word "barabicu" is unclear, but by 1661 an English writer was using "barbecu'd" as a verb, and by 1775 Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary defined barbecue as a hog dressed whole "in the West-Indian fashion.”

While we’re glad to have barbecue, the way the food came from the Taino people to our plates today, is unfortunate. In the American South, barbecue as we know it was built in large part by enslaved people. Enslaved Africans, some of them sold north from Caribbean sugar islands, combined West African cooking traditions with American Indian techniques and European livestock, and they did the long, skilled work of the pits. The word "pitmaster" itself originally referred to an older enslaved cook who oversaw the barbecue.

For generations after emancipation, Black cooks remained the craftsmen behind Southern barbecue and the stewards of its legacy. That's the foundation, and everything else in this story is built on it.

How did one technique turn into a dozen different dinners?

Barbecue is a simple formula that can be repeated and adapted to local conditions. Take slow cooking over wood. Add whatever meat was cheap and local. Add whoever happened to settle there and what they brought from the old country. Add whatever came up the river or down the rail line. Change any one ingredient in that formula and you get a completely different barbecue.

So, for the rest of this Dispatch, we're taking a road trip, roughly east to west, the same direction barbecue itself traveled across the country. Each stop gets the history, the why, and a little something you can try at home this week.

Why is barbecue a Southern thing?

Before we start our tour, I’ll let you know that almost every style on our map lives in the South. There's no great New England barbecue tradition, no signature Midwest style (Kansas City is the exception, and we'll get to why). That isn't an accident. It comes down to a few Southern facts stacked on top of each other.

1.     Pigs. The South raised hogs on the cheap by turning them loose in the woods to forage, then rounding them up in the fall, which meant a steady supply of tough, inexpensive pork that practically demanded long, slow cooking to become tender. The North farmed differently, more grain and dairy and penned cattle, so it never had that pile of cheap tough pork to build a cuisine around.

2.     Labor. Back to the unfortunate origins of barbecue, real pit barbecue is brutal work: butcher the animal, dig the pit, haul and chop the wood, then tend a fire all night long. In the South, that skilled overnight labor was done by enslaved people, and after emancipation by their descendants, so the craft took deepest root exactly where that labor was concentrated.

3.     Community. Long before there were restaurants, barbecue was the South's great communal event, the thing you cooked for a church gathering, a harvest, or a political rally where a candidate roasted whole animals to draw a crowd.

4.     Climate. As we discussed in the “Ham & The American Smokehouse” Dispatch, before modern refrigeration, hams, bellies, and sometimes shoulders got preserved in salt, and everything else needed to be cooked. A barbecue was a good way to feed a lot of people working hard to do the preservation and use the fresh cuts that wouldn’t go in the salt. It kept the bugs away and cooked a lot of meat fast in a hot environment!

So what about the western outliers?

Kansas City barbecue is really transplanted Southern barbecue, carried north from Memphis by one man we'll meet shortly, then adapted to a beef-and-stockyards town.

Texas barbecue is a German and Czech butcher-shop tradition set down in cattle country, so the meat became beef, but the low-and-slow DNA is still Southern-rooted.

And California's Santa Maria style is the genuine exception, because it doesn't descend from Southern barbecue at all, it comes from Mexican rancho grilling, which is why it always feels like a cousin rather than a sibling.

The short version: barbecue is Southern because it's the child of Southern hogs, Southern climate, and above all the Southern people, many of them enslaved, who did the work.

One State, Two Styles: North Carolina

Eastern North Carolina is barbecue's old country. Pigs were the practical livestock of the colonial Southeast: you could turn them loose in the woods to feed themselves, then round them up when the community needed a feast. In the years before the Civil War, Southerners ate roughly five pounds of pork for every one pound of beef. Cooking the whole hog made sense when one animal was the centerpiece for the whole gathering, and the sauce stayed simple as could be: vinegar, salt, red pepper, black pepper. No tomato, because this style was locked in long before ketchup was cheap and everywhere.

But if you drive an hour or two west into the Piedmont, you’ll hit barbecue's first great schism: around Lexington, cooks switched from whole hog to pork shoulder and stirred a little ketchup into the vinegar. Locals call it "dip," not sauce, and the change only became possible once mass-produced ketchup arrived around the turn of the twentieth century. Two styles, one state, and a debate families will happily argue over. I love this country.

Taste it at home: Eastern-style vinegar sauce is a pantry job. Warm a cup of apple cider vinegar with a tablespoon of brown sugar, two teaspoons of red pepper flakes, a teaspoon of salt, and a few good grinds of black pepper until everything dissolves. Splash it over slow-cooked pulled pork shoulder and serve on a soft white bun with slaw right on the sandwich.

South Carolina: The Yellow Sauce

If you head south, and cross into South Carolina, you’ll notice that the sauce turns bright mustard-yellow. The usual explanation is German settlers. Starting in the 1730s, the colony of South Carolina actively recruited thousands of German families, even paying their ocean passage, and they settled in a band of counties that barbecue folks still call the Mustard Belt.

Germans loved pork, Germans loved mustard, and the marriage stuck. The paper trail on this origin story is thin, but the circumstantial evidence is charming: German surnames like Shealy, Hite, Sweatman, and Zeigler still hang over the doors of Midlands barbecue joints today. The sauce now gets marketed as "Carolina Gold," it's tangy with a little sweetness, and has a lot in common with Honey Mustard sauce.

Taste it at home: Whisk together half a cup of yellow mustard, a quarter cup of honey, a quarter cup of apple cider vinegar, a tablespoon of brown sugar, a dash of Worcestershire, and plenty of black pepper. Simmer five minutes. It’s great on pulled pork, smoked sausage, and, of course, chicken tenders.

Memphis Ribs: They Do The Dry Rub

Memphis is a river town, and its barbecue is a port city's barbecue. Sitting on the banks of the mighty Mississippi, Memphis had cheap pigs, plenty of hardwood, and barrels of molasses and spices moving across its docks. That combination made the sauces sweet from the molasses and the seasonings adventurous, thanks to the volume of trade.

Interestingly, the record here is super clear about who built the barbecue culture, and he has a background that you probably wouldn’t associate with barbecue!

Charlie Vergos, the Greek-American founder of the famous Rendezvous restaurant, told a Memphis newspaper in 1989 that Black people invented barbecue, and that he'd grown up watching Black Memphis families cooking pork all over the city. That part is expected, but Vergos's own contribution is the unexpected part.

In 1948 he opened a bar in a downtown basement, found an old coal chute in the corner, and turned it into a smoker. When his meat distributor suggested pork ribs in the late 1950s, Vergos didn't know how to cook them, but one of his employees, a man remembered as Little John, did. Together they worked out a hot, fast cooking method, and Vergos finished the ribs with a spice blend based on the seasoning his father had once used for Greek chili, with paprika added for color.

No sauce, just spice: the Memphis dry rib was born. A Greek immigrant's twist on a Black Southern craft, sold out of a basement down an alley. That's about as American as a sentence can get.

Today, your Memphis-style ribs will be dry-rubbed and then maybe glazed with a little sauce at the end. Their sauce is tomato-based, but thinner and tangier than many other styles. Perfect for glazing and letting that dry rub pop!

Taste it at home: For a Memphis-style rub, mix two tablespoons of paprika with one tablespoon each of brown sugar, salt, and black pepper, plus a teaspoon each of garlic powder, onion powder, dried oregano, and cayenne. Coat pork ribs before a low, slow cook, then when they’re almost done, brush on your sauce, and let it glaze on to the ribs.

Kansas City Barbecue: The Capital of American Barbecue

Barbecue was a relatively late comer to Kansas City, but it is now synonymous with barbecue.

Henry Perry was born near Memphis in 1874, learned to cook on Mississippi River steamboats, and landed in Kansas City in 1907. The next year he started selling smoked meat to workers in the garment district from an alley stand: 25 cents for hot barbecue wrapped in newsprint. He eventually set up shop in an old trolley barn at 19th and Highland, in the same 18th and Vine neighborhood that gave the world Kansas City jazz, and he smoked just about anything the nearby stockyards and countryside could supply, beef and pork and, yes, possum and raccoon.

Historians agree that Perry, a Black entrepreneur they call the father of Kansas City barbecue, created the city's style and was the first person there to make a real living selling it. I love when we get a clear answer like this!

Perry also trained the next generation, which is why his fingerprints are still on the city's menus. His apprentices Charlie and Arthur Bryant carried on his restaurant after his death in 1940, and it became Arthur Bryant's, which one famous food writer later called the best restaurant in the world.

Another Perry cook, Arthur Pinkard, ran the pits for the first Gates Bar-B-Q. Between Bryant's and Gates, Perry's students still define Kansas City barbecue. I’ve been to both, and I must confess that Bryant’s is my all-time favorite barbecue restaurant. It’s not the best barbecue I’ve ever had, but the quality of food, atmosphere, and historic importance make it my clear favorite!

Today, Kansas City barbecue covers pulled pork, pork ribs, beef brisket, brisket burnt ends (their particular addition to barbecue), and even turkey and chicken! The defining feature that pulls them together is the sauce. It’s a thick and sweet ketchup and molasses-heavy sauce that was popularized by grocery store brands that wanted to sell something to American consumers that could be added to almost any food to make it tasty.

Taste it at home: Simmer a cup of ketchup with a quarter cup of molasses, a quarter cup of apple cider vinegar, two tablespoons of brown sugar, a tablespoon of Worcestershire, and a teaspoon each of smoked paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, and black pepper for fifteen minutes. Brush it on ribs or chicken at the very end of the cook so the sugars don't burn.

Texas: The Butcher Shop’s Special

Unlike the hog-based traditions of the rest of the south, Central Texas barbecue was born in meat markets.

German and Czech immigrants settled Central Texas in waves starting in the 1840s, opening butcher shops in all sorts of small towns and bringing European meat-smoking and sausage-making traditions with them. Before refrigeration, a butcher's headache was the meat that didn't sell, so they smoked it to keep it from spoiling, and the smoked leftovers got so popular that the meat markets became destinations in their own right.

Texas Monthly's historical research found that the first Texans advertising barbecue for sale after the Civil War were butchers and meat markets adding smoked meats to the counter. Southside Market in Elgin, opened in 1886, is considered the oldest barbecue joint in Texas still in operation. There are so many good ones to visit, and I hope to make a trip of it some day!

Because this was cattle country, the meat was beef, and because these were butchers proud of their product, the seasoning stayed humble: salt, coarse black pepper, post oak or mesquite smoke, no sauce required, served by the pound on butcher paper. Several of those Texas markets are on their third and fourth generations today, and as a third-generation guy myself, I tip my cap to them. It’s hard to keep up the quality over so many years.

Taste it at home: Texas brisket may take all night to smoke, but the seasoning takes ten seconds to make: equal parts kosher salt and coarse black pepper, applied generously to the whole brisket. That's it. Low heat, oak smoke, and patience do the rest. No sauce, or if you must, keep it thin and unsweet, on the side.

A word about rubs: it's not just sauce

We spent a lot of time talking about sauce, and not as much time on rubs. Rubs are just as important as sauces, but are generally a bit more standard across regions: a dry mix of salt, pepper, sugar, and spices. You pat the rub onto the meat, put the meat on the smoker, and let the rub turn into flavorful bark as the meat cooks low and slow. It becomes part of the meat.

The sauce is more of a condiment. Applied either at the end of the cook or served at the table, a sauce gives you more pop and sweetness. Since the sugars in the sauce won’t transform over the long cook the way sugar in a rub does, it’s easier to pick up on flavor differences in the sauce, plus the vinegar / ketchup / mustard debate is a fun, simple way for people to stand up for their favorite styles!

Barbecue elsewhere in America

The map of American barbecue includes more than we discussed. Here are a few quick hits:

·       In northern Alabama, Bob Gibson started dunking smoked chickens in a tangy mayonnaise-and-vinegar "white sauce" in Decatur in 1925, and the state has been loyal to it ever since.

·       Around Owensboro, Kentucky, the barbecue meat of choice is mutton, served with a Worcestershire-heavy dip, a legacy of the region's sheep farming.

·       And on California's Central Coast, Santa Maria-style barbecue grills beef tri-tip over red oak coals, a tradition with roots in the region's Mexican rancho era. This may be my death row meal – I love it so much!

There are many, many other barbecue styles and traditions that I’m skipping past, so please, take a road trip through the South and visit any hole-in-the-wall barbecue place you see. I’m sure they’ll have their own unique traditions, and I’m sure they’ll think it’s the best way of making great food.

Time to eat!

We took one ancient technique, carried on Taino wooden frames, in West African cooking traditions, German smokehouses, and Mexican ranchos, and every region turned it into something unique and beloved. 

Each of these styles is a record of who showed up in a place and what they had to work with. Carolina vinegar is colonial pigs in the woods. South Carolina mustard is German immigrants. Texas brisket is Czech and German butchers with cattle instead of hogs. You can read American immigration right off a barbecue map, and everyone on that map is proud of their roots. I love that, and I wholeheartedly support it.

But under all the sauces and rubs and regional pride, barbecue is really about the people. From the enslaved cooks who perfected the craft and were never paid for it, to a Black entrepreneur wrapping ribs in newsprint in a Kansas City alley, to the Greek and German and Czech immigrants who made it their own, barbecue has always been people turning what they had into something worth gathering around.

That's the part I hope sticks with you. So pick a regional style, or invent your own hybrid, grab some pork or beef or chicken, and get cooking. Low and slow.

Have a great week. Cheers!

Nick

Book Recommendations:

There are so many wonderful books about barbecue, it's hard to just pick a few, but these are my top picks:

• Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto by Aaron Franklin and Jordan Mackay - Franklin Barbecue is one of the absolute best barbecue restaurants in America. This book does a fantastic job of explaining the science behind barbecue and making it accessible at home.
• Rodney Scott's World of BBQ: Every Day is a Good Day by Rodney Scott and Lolis Eric Elie - Rodney Scott is a master of whole hog barbecue, and his book delves into the historical traditions behind the start of American barbecue, plus he shares tips on how to make this practical at home.
• Barbecue: The History of an American Institution by Robert F. Moss - this is the comprehensive source on the history of barbecue. It's readable, interesting, and fun. 

Sauce Recommendations:

On "The Discussion" podcast, which you can watch above or listen to here, we tried six different barbecue sauces, several of which came from Lillie's Q, a specialty food manufacturer that makes quality rubs and sauces reflecting various barbecue traditions. 

If you'd like to try the taste of several different regions, you can visit their store and get a sampler pack to enjoy at home!

Please note if you make a purchase using our links, we will earn a small commission. Thank you for your support!