One time is all it took, and I was hooked on smoke.
No, I’m not talking about the Lucky
Strikes of my youth. One puff of that smoke, and I was done forever.
I’m talking
about a fresh pork ham, dripping juices on hickory coals, and that smoke’s doing its magic. The genesis of my barbecue love affair began
in 1957 in the barnyard of my grandmother’s farm—about a Hank Williams
double-spin on Camilla’s WCLB-AM—down Highway 91. Newton, Baker’s county seat, squats on the
Flint River’s bluff in Southwest Georgia.
It was an
all-nighter.
My mother’s
brothers, Joe (we called him Bubba) and Billy Vines, had dug a hole in the
ground. In the late afternoon, they
stacked hickory logs in the pit and struck a match to some kindling. By dark thirty, the wood was crumpling into a
bed of white-hot embers.
Next, my uncles stretched a swath of
wire fencing over the hole. Gently, they
placed a yellowish, white splayed hog which had been butchered while the rooster
was crowing that morning.
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Jim Auchmutey’s new book is hot off the
University of
Georgia Press
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Hog-killing
time is usually after the first frost, so I was shivering. And I was shivering
from excitement. I was just a 9-year-old
boy, and they were men who had invited me to join them in what was to be my
first all-nighter.
When Bubba
and Billy asked me to swab on the sauce, I felt as if I was almost ready to
shave. As the hours inched through the
night, they’d point to the pit, and that was my signal to mop on more homemade
sauce.
All the while, my nostrils were celebrating
the aroma of the pork dripping on hickory coals. And for the next 61 years, every bite of
barbecue has been compared—no, judged—to the culinary reward of my
first smoke-filled all-nighter.
When I returned from lunch Friday,
there was a gift on my desk. Its shape
signaled a book. Our son Eric knows that
books—like barbecue—are among my favorites.
When I peeled off the wrapping, I smiled. It was a double doozey: SMOKELORE,
A Short History of Barbecue in America by Jim Auchmutey.
With
the book hot off the University of Georgia Press, I couldn't wait to turn the
pages. Walking over to Eric’s office, I plopped down
next to him, struggling to keep the drool off my chin. He laughed as I read excerpts aloud.
Eric and his
older brother, Alan, never got to spend an all-nighter with their great-uncles,
but they inherited those Baker County barbecue-loving genes. The three of us are known to ignore the GPS
if there’s a rumor of a good barbecue joint “somewhere over there” and not on
our satellite-guided route.
By the time
I got to page 138 in SMOKELORE, I was
salivating. Right there was Mr. Wesley Jones’ Barbecue Mop recipe. The instructions of the then-97-year-old pit
master from Union, South Carolina, had been written down in the 1930s and
printed in 2019.
I stopped
reading and started dreaming of a barbecue pit on our farm and hickory smoke.
Where’s my
shovel?
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
