Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

since no other sandwiches were available. On a few awkward occasions a waitress—never a man, not in those parts—would ask if I wanted coleslaw on it, and I would tell her that of course I did. It should never be served any other way.

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I thought sadly of the lengths to which we New Yorkers have gone to transform sandwiches into culinary adventures. Even our bread has become complicated, whereas the eastern North Carolina sandwich requires only a packaged sandwich bun. Knowing that other good things come on hamburger buns, like hamburgers, for example, I had tried sup-pressing my desire for chopped pork by eating chopped beef as often as possible, but that didn’t work. So thoroughly had I mythologized the eastern North Carolina sandwich in my mind that even the hamburgers I once loved had become a cruel joke.

I’d started proselytizing, informing those few friends who would listen that the eastern North Carolina sandwich was America’s greatest regional dish, surpassing even the jumbo-lump crab cake of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. I welcomed debates on the importance of the sandwich in the panorama of indigenous American food. Others championed fried chicken, lemon-meringue pie, even bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. I conceded any of them second place. A friend suggested a freshly picked ear of corn, and I mocked her for advocat-ing a foodstuff that could be stored in a silo.

My fixation became so overwhelming that I realized only a visit to North Carolina would end it. I prepared to go, even though it was the dead of summer and I recalled that the establishments making the sandwiches I so loved had little in the way of ventilation other than the hot breezes stirred by a few haphazardly placed electric fans. It would be me, a sweating pitcher of sweetened ice tea, a fat sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and a few flies torpid from the heat. I so looked forward to the trip. I could consume unfathomable numbers of sandwiches in the course of determining who made the best, not that I expected any to be less than magnificent.

Barbecue, of course, is America’s greatest gift to the culinary world.

The French, the Spanish, and various others seek praise for inventing it, but we perfected it. I speak now of meat slow-cooked over wood or charcoal, not supermarket cuts of beef incinerated in backyards by suburbanites cooking over briquettes soaked in lighter fluid. By selecting the eastern North Carolina sandwich as the beau ideal of barbe-F O R K I T O V E R

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cue, I was placing it above pork ribs and beef brisket, the industry favorites.

I had no qualms about my commitment, for this sandwich is barbecue at its most sublime. I believe the reason it has never received proper acclaim is that it is little known outside the coastal regions of North Carolina, which are seldom visited, except by devastating hurricanes.

Before setting off, I tried to make certain I wouldn’t make the calami-tous mistake of eating barbecue prepared with gas or electricity. Barbecue without wood is like French food without butter, inappropriate and insulting. I wanted to detour around all such cookery. In addition, I decided I would only seek out places east of U.S. 1, the north-south highway that passes through Raleigh, the state capital.

I have at times enjoyed a meal in central and western North Carolina, where the hush puppies (undersized deep-fried cornmeal cakes) are superior to those in the east, but the barbecue there is fatally tainted by ketchup. Long ago, settlers in eastern North Carolina feared the tomato, believing it to be poisonous, and they were right, at least where barbecue is concerned. When a piquant vinegar-based sauce is mixed into chopped pork, the sweet, wood-cooked flavor of the meat is intensified. When the heavy, tomato-based sauce obligatory in central and western North Carolina is added, the flavor is masked. It goes without saying that either is preferable to the mustard-based sauce of South Carolina, which makes a chopped-pork sandwich taste like a ballpark hot dog.

I telephoned every barbecue spot east of U.S. 1 that I could find and asked this question: Do you cook with wood, gas, or electricity? I reached fifty-nine of them, and fifty-six were kind enough to give me a straight answer. By that, I mean they didn’t insist that I telephone their public relations firm, which is what every New York City restaurant would have done. At Bunn’s, the fellow who answered the phone pugnaciously replied, “We don’t give out our secrets, but we’ll put our barbecue up against anybody’s.” Now, I understand the South has a lot of secrets it doesn’t want us Yankees to know, but there is no secret to 2 1 2

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how barbecue is cooked. If there isn’t a pile of wood behind the place, the owner isn’t cooking with wood, and if the pile of wood is so neat it looks as though it hasn’t been touched, it’s probably there to fool people like me into thinking the cooking is done with wood.

The woman who answered the phone at Betty’s Smoke House Restaurant ambiguously said, “We use smoke,” which could mean anything, including a cook with a three-pack-a-day habit. The woman at Big Nell’s Pit Stop allowed that hers was “open-pit,” a coy barbecue come-on. Open-pit is a non-fuel-specific term used to crowd-pleasing effect in the South, in much the same way that chefs up north label their own cooking as “gourmet.”

Thirteen people assured me that they used wood, although in this region wood cooking is usually indirect. Oak or hickory is burned down to charcoal, and the charcoal is then moved to the open pits where the whole hogs are cooked. Smoldering charcoal adds less smoke flavor than a flaming log, but the fires