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

are easier to control, and charcoal cooking seems to give a creamy, soft texture to pork. Regardless, wood in any form is better than gas. With wood I imagine delicate tendrils of smoke and heat encircling the pig, massaging it, caressing it, permeating it.

With gas I imagine Audie Murphy with a flame-thrower, charging a Kraut bunker.

A number of owners who were cooking with wood warned me that their way of life was dying out, which they blamed on nefarious state regulators. The man who answered the phone at Murray’s blamed “the bureaucrats” for driving out people like him. Exaggerating quite a bit, he added, “I’m the last that’s left, and I’m going to be gone.” Laziness could be another cause of the proliferation of gas cooking, because turning a valve is easier than chopping down a tree. Whatever the reason, less and less barbecue is being prepared with wood, and I was somewhat dismayed to learn that I could count on finding only thirteen sandwiches I was certain to like. It didn’t seem nearly enough.

To ensure I wouldn’t go hungry, I made up my mind to look into the impertinent “we’ll-put-our-barbecue-up-against-anybody’s” boast issued by the little-known Bunn’s, in Windsor. I also decided to include Big F O R K I T O V E R

2 1 3

Nell’s and Betty’s, the only establishments in the southeastern part of the state that hinted at the possibility that they might be using wood. I also wanted to eat at B’s, in Greenville, which I’d heard about. B’s is so famous it apparently has no use for a telephone.

I understood from past adventures with barbecue that it was unlikely I’d actually eat at B’s, even if I found it. Going out of your way to visit a barbecue spot you aren’t absolutely sure is open for business is never a good idea. The proprietors of barbecue places wouldn’t be the proprietors of barbecue places if they liked to work regular hours.

Odds are they aren’t going to be at work if there is any excuse for them not to be.

I took a plane into Raleigh-Durham International Airport, which strad-dles the vinegar-ketchup line of demarcation, picked up my rental car, and set off. What I didn’t know at the time but was soon to discover is that all the best vinegar-based chopped-pork-and-coleslaw sandwiches—I’ll just refer to them as sandwiches from here on—are around Route 70. It should be renamed the Barbecue Beltway of North Carolina. My explorations took me as far north as Albemarle Sound and as far south as the South Carolina border, and it turned out that all the sandwiches I preferred were either right on Route 70 or no more than thirty minutes away.

I’d set aside six days for the trip and ended up driving an effortless 936 miles in four days. The eastern North Carolina I recalled from my last trip to the region, back in the eighties, had quite a few back roads, but the transportation grid has been upgraded from asphalt to Auto-bahn. North Carolina has always loved wide highways (one of its nicknames is the Good Roads State) and just about every road I traveled was a four-lane divided highway, even when it didn’t seem to make economic sense—Interstate 40 has one exit leading to Jones Sausage Road. The bridges of eastern North Carolina are even more astounding. They are soaring, arching, futuristic structures much like the kind I used to see in the Flash Gordon comic strips of my youth. Call me an envious Yankee, but we New Yorkers pay $3.50 to go from the Bronx 2 1 4

A L A N R I C H M A N

to Queens, and not once in all my North Carolina travels was there a bridge or highway toll.

The lavish distribution of federal highway funds to this modest region astounded me, but there were other sights to behold. While waiting in a long line to board a ferry, I decided to remain in my car after spotting a danger: quicksand sign. I can’t think of a more effective deterrent to nature walks. While driving along Route 172, I suddenly found myself entering Camp Lejeune, a Marine installation. The sentry looked in my car and seemed taken aback to see the backseat covered with Moon Pies, a packaged cake made in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (I became addicted to them years back in the course of researching why people would eat something so awful.) Every so often, while driving through the camp, I’d pass a diamond-shaped yellow traffic sign that read tank xing, which gave me a thrill of anticipation, until I realized I had no more chance of encountering a tank than I did of coming across a moose at one of those moose xing signs all over Maine.

After heading out of the airport on day one, the Buick set on cruise control, I quickly came upon the first assurance that I was in barbecue country: a pork-packing-plant billboard beautified with a cartoon of a pig wearing a crown. Most of what I saw after that was cornfields, churches, double-wide trailers, and way stations for refilling propane tanks. The prefabricated building thrives in this part of the state, in part because of the ever-depressed economy and in part because of last year’s Hurricane Floyd, which brought waters twenty to thirty feet high. I occasionally passed long-abandoned farm buildings, grayish brown and mummified. The miracle is that they still stand despite the eighty-mile-per-hour winds that have shaken them so many times over so many years.

My first stop was Goldsboro, an hour’s drive east of Raleigh, where I showed up at Guy Parker’s yellow-brick eating spot a half-hour before the opening time of ten a.m. It was closed. Instead of giving up and leaving, I walked around back and started poking my head into windows and doors until Parker heard me trespassing and invited me F O R K I T O V E R

2