I didn’t know Cincy was in a Southern State, I must correct my history books.
The French set up house keeping in the Carolina’s before the Spanish got here. The pigs they carried around for a source of meet were fenced in for easy slaughter. “Barbe a queue” was the cooking of the whole-hog over an open fire. Barbecue, is the slow cooking of a “pig” over an open fire of hickory, (spitroasting) been doing it that way since about fifteen hundred in the Carolina’s. The Spanish are the ones that introduced pig to the America’s by letting the pigs run wild and the art of cooking pig, “barbacoa”. By the time the British got here the local inhabitant’s had leaned the art from the French & Spanish. British plantation owners would hunt the wild Spanish pigs to be cook on Saturdays to be eaten on Sundays in-between church services. This all being done while the western parts of Carolina, (now know as Tennessee) was still the happy hunting grounds of the Cherokee. Any pig cooking this way west of the Carolina’s is “Carolina Style Barbecue”. One exception, Tex-Mex pit cooking of pig. I can dig into a slow smoked Texas brisket and beef ribs but that pit cooked cow head is something I can turn down.
Slow roasting, over an open fire, of chicken, sheep, turkey and dead cow is one thing, but putting a BBQ sauce on it and calling it Barbecue is wrong. That’s like being invited to a yankee neighbor for barbecue and he pulls hamburgers and hot dogs off a gas fired grill, Oh good grief!
Pig Pik’n is a true culinary art of the Carolina’s.
The twelve step intervention program starts this friday, we kill four pigs. Graduation on Sunday with a pig pik’n to follow.
Happy Trails!
Tom Martin
P.S. A true purveyor of slow roasted pig (Barbecue joint), Whiskey Bar, Beer, ‘cue (billiards for the uninformed) and pit cooked pig, BBQ, Bar, Beer & ‘Cue.