Allen and Son Barbecue

Allen and Son Barbecue is a local barbecue joint near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  It is famous for its traditional pit-cooked Eastern North Carolina style barbecue.  North Carolina is home to the most scrumptious barbecue I have ever eaten.  There are a few requirements for something to be considered Eastern North Carolina style barbecue.  First off, barbecue is always pork, ideally pit roasted whole pig or cooked in a specially outfitted 50 gallon oil drum.  You see these contraptions outfitted with wheels and a little chimney being pulled behind pick-up trucks once the "pig pickin'" season starts, usually in early May.  The pick-up truck will pull up to an outdoor gathering and long tables will be set up at one end of the party with the barbecue, hushpuppies, slaw, Brunswick stew and sweet tea.

There is one essential requirement of Eastern North Carolina barbecue--NO TOMATO SAUCE.  The pig is gutted and cooked whole with no sauce applied during cooking, which is usually over hardwood, often hickory, charcoal.  It will often take upwards of 24 hours for the whole hog to cook.  After the pig is done, it is removed from the pit or the cooker and the meat is prepared one of two ways for consumption.  Either it is chopped, which means it can be left in large chunks, or it is "pulled" which means that the meat is shredded.  The pork is so tender that it is falling off the bones.  Once you fill your plate with barbecue, then you have the option to apply sauce and hot sauce.  The traditional sauce for this type of barbecue is a vinegar based clear sauce.  If you like your barbecue spicy, there is usually a pepper sauce of some type available.

Once your plate is full of barbecue, it is time for the side-dishes and condiments.  Pork barbecue is traditionally served with slaw (coleslaw in the rest of the US) with a vinegar and mayonnaise base, hushpuppies (nuggests of cornmeal seasoned with salt, pepper and bits of sauteed onion), Brunswick Stew (a tomato-based vegetable stew) and sweet tea.   Sweet tea represents a culinary Mason-Dixon line.  Any place that serves iced tea which is sweetened when it is brewed, often with so much sugar it makes your teeth hurt (!) is in the South.  Any place that adds the sugar at the table, when the tea is already iced is in Yankee-Land.  Iced tea spoons are unknown in the South.  You don't even have to open your mouth to be outed as a Yankee around here, you just have to add sugar to your tea at the table.  Nuff said!

Barbecue shacks are often homey places with hunting and fishing trophies on the wall.  There's usually a compliment of Bubbas seated at at least one table and waitresses who'll call you "Hun" and try and get you to eat some sort of pie for dessert.  As Momma Dip, who runs the local eating establishment "Dip's Country Kitchen," says, "Put a piece of the South in y'ur mouth."  If it's Eastern North Carolina Barbecue--so much the better!

Photos by H. Kent Craig