As Bad As It Gets

The Road Hog says that the worst barbecue he ever had was at my friend’s house in Florida, where my buddy cooked chicken over smoldering pine boughs and used a special sauce that must have had Drano as a key component. There was so much smoke—and he and his wife were wolfing their chicken down so enthusiastically—that I’m pretty sure my friend didn’t see me pull the skin off my chicken and toss it onto the blazing fire. The chicken itself wasn’t so bad, sort of like smoked dog food marinated in Greek Retsina wine. Sorry, Bob.

The worst barbecue I ever had eating out was in a school cafeteria. It must have come from a can. It looked a little like mud paired with grass clippings and tasted — I’d wager, worse—since grass and mud aren’t saturated in liquid smoke. Even Texas Pete didn’t improve it, and it might be the only barbecue I’ve ever been served that I ate no more than two forkfuls of.

Judging barbecue in Summerville, South Carolina, for the South Carolina Barbecue Society, I sampled two barbecues that were excellent and I would have driven 75 miles out of my way to eat, even though the sauce was mustard-based, but I ate two cues that were, in a word, “awful.” One of them was the sweetest barbecue I’ve ever eaten. “You don’t need no peach cobbler with this,” one of the judges said. The other one tasted like the meat variety of baby food, but with a little less texture and not as much flavor. I could go on, but I bet people who have grown up, as I did, in barbecue country, and moved to a land where there’s no tradition of barbecue can furnish better stories than I can.

Crunch for Lunch

Carl Rothrock, a friend from high school who lives in Eastern North Carolina cue heaven has, as far as I can tell, retired from teaching high school so that he can scout ourt new places to eat barbecue and devote his full attention to what he’s going to put on his jet-black cooker for supper.

The other day, we were e-mailing each other about, you guessed it, barbecue, when he observed “B’s BBQ here in Greenville (751 B’s Barbecue Road, Greenville, N.C.; no phone) has the best chicken I’ve ever eaten, but their BBQ isn’t as good. It’s cooked over charcoal but they remove and throw away the outside brown to have “clean” BBQ. Can you believe it? The best I had there was a few years ago when the main guy had health problems and the fill-in didn’t know the right way to do it and left that nasty old bark on it.”

I love bark, as Carl calls it, or “outside meat” or “brown” as it’s called here in the Piedmont. In Lexington I’ve heard it called “crunch.”

One day I’d stopped at what used to be my favorite place in Lexington, which will go unmentioned because they’ve since switched from hickory to natural gas, and as I always do, asked for a sandwich with “crunch” (You get barbecue slaw on it whether you ask or it for not). The waitress asked me rhetorically, “Do you like crunch.” I allowed as how I loved crunch. “Well, honey, I’m going to fix you up,” she said. My sandwich came to the counter where I was sitting with an admonition, “No peeking,” and when I took my first bite, it did, in fact, crunch — rather loudly. As the grease ran down my chin and onto the napkin I’d wisely tucked into my shirt collar, I realized that she’d added a huge pork rind to my outside meat sandwich. I wonder what “crunch” and “bark” are called in other parts of the world and whether they throw it away or put it in front of avid eaters like myself?