National Post (National Edition)
THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF BBQ'S FIRST PITMASTERS
African-Americans were barbecue's principal cooks and `most effective ambassadors' after emancipation, so how did that story disappear?
Texas brisket, Memphis ribs, Kansas City burnt ends, Carolina pulled pork, Alabama white-sauce-soaked chicken. Such charcoal-kissed American specialties set barbecue devotees' hearts aflutter. They've inspired international flights and the establishment of restaurants far from their points of origin. Toronto pitmaster Darien List of Beach Hill Smokehouse, for example, has devised a way to create Texas-style barbecue in sub-zero temperatures.
Tours and crawls, pre-pandemic, were a natural way for the barbecue enthusiast to spend vacation days; the opportunity to pull up a chair at Scott's Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, S.C. was reason enough to board a plane. Barbecue TV has added fuel to the fire, and the popularity of competition shows such as BBQ Pitmasters have turned judges into celebrities.
“There is something exceptional about American barbecue. Because if it was the same as stuff that's happening around the world, then why are all these people coming to the United States to eat this stuff?” says Adrian Miller, James Beard Award-winning author, attorney and certified barbecue judge. “To me, that just speaks to barbecue's exceptional quality.”
Awareness of regional styles may have spread far past the 50 states, but how much do barbecue enthusiasts actually know about its origins, and the people who made it the culinary cornerstone it is today?
In his third book, Black Smoke (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Miller delves into the history of barbecue, which starts with Indigenous meat cooking techniques prior to colonization. He examines how African Americans built on what they learned from Indigenous cooks to become “barbecue's primary experts” and questions why, in today's barbecue-obsessed culture, they've been largely written out of the story.
“I think most people are like me, before I got onto this path of writing this book. My deepest thinking about barbecue was, `Oh, that tastes good,'” says Miller. “Very few people are going to take the time to bone up on the history, except to the extent that they generally know regional tradition. They kind of know what meats get served in a particular state and where that place is. But barbecue is so popular right now that I think … people want to know more.”
Growing up in Denver, Colo., Miller only ate barbecue at home or at church events. It wasn't until he attended a “life-changing” Southern Foodways Alliance barbecue excursion in Austin, Tex. in 2002 that he saw it as having meaning in the broader context. Compelled to dig deeper, Miller became a certified barbecue judge with the Kansas City Barbeque Society in 2004: “Best conversation starter I've ever had,” he says; and this is coming from someone who once worked in the White House as a special assistant to U.S. president Bill Clinton.
While writing his first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time (The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Miller considered including a chapter on barbecue, since it's common for soul food restaurants to offer barbecue options, and so many Black-owned barbecue spots have soul food sides on the menu. But he soon realized that barbecue warranted its own thorough examination.
In the name of research, he ate barbecue at more than 200 restaurants across the U.S., interviewed people in the barbecue industry, judged competition barbecue, and scoured books, cookbooks, newspapers, oral histories and other sources. Paying special attention to representation in barbecue media, he started questioning why Black barbecuers, pitmasters and restaurateurs had been pushed to the margins.
“One of the pivotal moments was watching the Food Network in 2004 and watching Paula's Southern BBQ. An hour-long show and when the credits rolled, no African Americans featured on-screen. And I was like, `How does that even happen?'” recalls Miller. “I felt like maybe I got it twisted. Maybe it was Paula Deen's Scandinavian Barbecue. So I just started paying attention to other food media, and the problem is rampant.”
Rodney Scott's World of BBQ (Clarkson Potter, 2021) — of the aforementioned Scott's Bar-B-Que in Hemingway, and Rodney Scott's Whole Hog BBQ in Charleston, S.C. — is the first cookbook by a Black pitmaster to be published in 30 years, Miller says. In Black Smoke, he notes food media's preference for “four types of White Guys Who Barbecue” — the Urban Hipster, the Rural Bubba, the fine dining chef, and hybrids of the above — which wasn't the case prior to the 1990s.
Miller refers to an image he includes in Black Smoke of African American barbecuers at work, which was published in Harper's Weekly on Nov. 9, 1895. Two men are turning the meat, another is shovelling coals, two others are rehearsing for after-barbecue entertainment, and another is making side dishes in two large cast-iron kettles. He contrasts this image with another he features in the book, “Who's Who in American Barbecue” from Bon Appétit, July 2003.
“How do we go from that image in 1895, very Black-centric, to an image in 2003 that doesn't include any African Americans at all?” says Miller. “I jokingly tell people, remember the Where's Waldo? illustrations of the '90s? The virtue of that is that Waldo was actually in the illustrations in one place. But that doesn't happen with African Americans and barbecue.”
In sharing the history of barbecue and the people who have influenced it, Miller aims to dispel the myth that African Americans are “bit players in the barbecue story.” As enslaved people, they were barbecue's principal cooks, he says. After emancipation, they became its “most effective ambassadors” — bringing a taste of Southern barbecue with them as they moved to the Northeast, Midwest and West during the Great Migration.
It was also important for him to highlight the Indigenous foundations of barbecue, and the fact that this much-loved American cuisine was a collaborative development: “It was the Americas, Western Africa and Western Europe all coming together to create a certain thing.”
Throughout the book, Miller intersperses profiles of some of the people who have been instrumental in the development of what has become one of America's most widely celebrated foodways. One such pioneer is pitmaster Marie Jean — or Mary John, as her name was often anglicized — an enslaved African American woman in 1840s Arkansas who was featured in the local newspaper for superintending “an immense barbecue.”
“Superintending was the word back then for what we call pitmaster today. So dig this: An enslaved Black woman in charge of barbecue, telling dudes what to do. She ends up buying her freedom and then stays in Arkansas, runs a restaurant, and when she dies, she gets eulogized by the white newspaper as a great chef,” says Miller. “I just thought that was a remarkable story.”
After having eaten at so many different restaurants, and seeing so many barbecuers at work, Miller believes there is an African American barbecue signature. One that's somewhat at odds with the current definition of barbecue. While conventional wisdom dictates it be cooked “low and slow,” for example, many Black pitmasters favour “hot and fast, then slow” to char the meat and develop a deep charcoal flavour.
Along with a lack of capital and professional teams to help navigate tax laws and health codes, “a significant challenge is that with the advent of fine dining chefs, Central Texas barbecue and also just the proliferation of white guys in barbecue, barbecue is being redefined away from the African American aesthetic,” says Miller.
Black Smoke is about bringing balance back, he adds, and not only celebrating one segment of barbecue culture. “Just seeing the newspaper accounts of these people doing this work 200 years ago, and seeing how today's barbecue people are part of that legacy really deepened my appreciation for not only the cooks, but the contributions they've made. This is a really popular food and we're one of the main reasons why. I just didn't want that story to get lost.”
Miller manages to encapsulate the joyous experience of eating barbecue as much as he does the perseverance, entrepreneurship and creativity behind it.
For those who appreciate the making as much as the eating, Miller features 22 recipes “straight from the pit.” As culinary travel inspiration, he also shares a list of his favourite African American barbecue restaurants by region. From barbecue spaghetti in Memphis, Tenn. to turkey tips on Chicago's South Side, his passion for barbecue and dedication to fieldwork shines through.
“I know that there are different interpretations of things like `What's the best place to get barbecue?' and how certain traditions arose,” says Miller, “but that experiential part was key. Because otherwise it would just be a theoretical understanding of the cuisine, and there's some merit to that. But it's nothing like getting into a place, eating it, seeing how it speaks to a place and speaks of tradition and community.”