Monday, April 30, 2012

How I Cook A Pig

From The Mail Bag

Facebook fan Jennifer writes; "I'd love to read a blog post about the whole goggle thing..."

Dear Jennifer,

Nice hair!  I like it so much that I now wear mine that way.  ;)  Your simple question requires a long answer, and away we go!

The Delwood's Barbecue Sauce recipe traces its roots back to the 1800's and the method of cooking a pig has changed little.  In the 1800's it was cooked in a hole in the ground, now we have old oil drums, and fancy welded equipment.  Wood became charcoal and sometimes fancy gas ovens.  Traditional dress among those who cook barbecue range everywhere from jeans and button up plaid shirts to jeans and t-shirts.  Ball caps have logo's like "Cat" and "John Deer".  Here's some old photos of my dad dressed in the traditional Eastern North Carolina Barbecue style.













Ball cap, jeans, plaid shirt, its traditional to the point it is almost a uniform.  Other traditions include drinking, horse shoes, and having your left over pig stolen over night because no one was sober enough to pack it up when the eating was done so it was decided to come back the next morning to pack it up.  I suppose you would also have to include, stealing left over barbecue to the list of traditions.  The most important and easiest tradition of all to forget is community.  No one ever cooks alone, you are always surrounded by friends ready to drink beer, play horse shoes, and help you flip the pig once it is about ready to sauce.

Coming at this I realized from day one that while I was going to take the traditional knowledge I learned and apply it to make the best barbecue I possibly could, there was a lot of traditions that I was going to be leaving behind.  When I cook a pig, I am on the clock and I will not drink until the last person has eaten.  I am usually cooking alone, so I have to cook my pig skin down the entire time.  I am usually cooking alone because this job doesn't pay enough to pay a second person to sit around with me for six hours and not drink.   Realizing all this really early on I realized that what I was delivering wasn't a traditional "historically accurate" pig picking experience.  I was creating a "historical fiction" of a pig picking tradition that could have existed but didn't.  Plus, being based out of the triad, the expectations have changed, Down East everyone eats right off of the grill.  Up here in the Piedmont, folks like their meat served off of a platter with all the other sides.

Meanwhile, in another subculture called Steampunk you have a "historical fiction" world where the transistor was never invented and the industrial revolution never ended.  It is a world of Jules Verne, HG Wells, and HP Lovecraft.  The Titanic never sank, the Hindenburg never caught fire and the jet engine never got off the ground.  It is a world of adventure and far reaching frontiers.  Men are real dapper gentlemen, women are real ladies of a certain quality, and scientist are all quite mad.  It is populated by an endless number of lords, ladies, professors, tinkers, airship captains, ship captains, submarine captains, mechanics, pirates, explorers, traders, and adventurers of every ilk.

And now they have a cook.


So there you have it.  In a sea of barbecue cooks, I'll be the one wearing goggles standing at the crossroads of two wonderful histories, that just happend to have never actually happened.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Business and Politics Do Not Mix

I see in the news various pieces about businesses out there throwing lawyers, guns, and money at various political interest in order to further their own business interest.  Me being a new business owner and all I thought I'd better see where I stood on issues.

I gathered together everything that makes my business an entity,  a couple of jars of sauce, a bag of charcoal, tongs, cleaver, articles of organization, tax ID document, and my goggles and I asked them all serious questions about how we should move forward.

"Which party are we going to be affiliated with?"  The silence was deafening.  I realized pretty much as soon as the words left my mouth that I had asked a dumb question.  My sauce is meant to be enjoyed by everyone regardless of race, religion, sexual orientations, or political affiliations therefore had to remain non-partisan.  "Unaffiliated then."  I  made a note on my clipboard.

"Are we going to advocate any religions?"  I was batting a thousand.  I realized that the government papers like articles of organization and tax papers must be kept separate from religions.  The steely sheen on the clever reminded me that all of the major religions had an opinion about the status of pork as a food source.  The stiff expression on the tongs reminded me that a lot of people had not forgotten the inquisition.   I wrote "No religious affiliations of any kind."

"Any charity affiliations?"  My checkbook fell off the stool and into the floor.  "No charities then."

"Well, for the record, moving forward do we believe in anything?"  The screensaver on the computer which had been laying down photo's of past barbecues chose that moment to show a slide with my companies, mission statement.

Mission Statement:
To provide time-honored Eastern North Carolina-style sauce, barbecue, and pig picking experiences in a fun and uncommon way using tried and true methods from generations of know how, right to your plate.



"I'm hearing you on FM".


I looked at the bag of charcoal which had offered no opinion up to this moment wondering if it had anything to add. The bag read "Lump Hardwood Charcoal". It was then I realized something that should have occurred to me a long time ago.


I'm talking to a bunch of inanimate objects. Businesses are not "alive" or "sentient" and therefore had no business offering its opinion or support to any religious or political entity. I don't give a wet slap how much some rich tycoon paid to make it a law otherwise. I'm here to make sauce and cook pig and that's about it.


'Nuff said.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Here There Be Whoppers!

I'm not talking about hamburgers either.  I'm talking about the good old fashioned story.  Every word the truth from my lips except those words I change to make the story better for the sake of the telling.

Allow me to furnish an example:

Back in the 1980's my dad and a bunch of his friends got their pig cookers together and cooked bunch of pigs for a church charity fund raiser for someone or other who needed help paying their doctor's bills.  They got together at about dark at a local plantation farm to cook the night away.  The pigs would be done about sunrise, they would let them cool enough to be touched, then they would fall in an chop the whole batch for plates.

I wasn't that old at the time, well, I was old enough to want to go, but not old enough that dad would let me do more than throw wood in the burn barrel.  Just so you know, I was in my twenties before I could shovel coals, and I was in my thirties before I was allowed to actually help cook one.  All under my father's watchful eye.

So here I was not yet driving, but hanging out with these seasoned cooks for a night of wood smoke, conversation and barbecue.  Gas was just starting to come into fashion, so maybe four cookers were gas while the rest were wood coals.

Long about way past my regular bedtime I had about had my fill of talk about politics, philosophy, weather and invention and  made my way back to dad's truck to have a nap in the front seat.  I don't know how long I'd been snoring when the whole area was rocked by a huge explosion.  I jumped up so fast I banged my head on the roof of the truck, and the dent is still there today.

Half dazed, I stagger out of the truck to well ordered chaos, men were gathering buckets here, hoses there,  others doing head counts and trying to find the cause of the explosion.  There was smoke everywhere, but nothing appeared to be damaged anywhere.  All the vehicles were intact, all the cookers were intact, no ruptured gas lines.  As the smoke started to clear folks investigating the scene started to pick up the smell of propane gas.  They traced it to one cooker,  and peaked in the fire door.  These early gas cookers were just wood fired cookers who had outfitted tobacco barn burners into the bottom, so the door you shovel coals through was still there and it was from there that they lit their burners.

This cooker's fire was completely out, but the gas was running and there was the smell of cooked meat about it.  They opened the lid to find a completely empty grill.  There was no pig left.  There wasn't much of a sign that there had ever been a pig there, but they all knew there was.  They all loaded their cookers at the same time and helped each other position the pigs. By flashlight they looked for the pig but didn't find it.

The sun came up that morning and we all set out scouring every inch of the place looking for that pig.  Some of the men even shimmied up ladders and looked on the roof of the equipment barn.  We never found hide nor hair of that blown up pig.

That my friends, was a whopper.  By way of comparison, I'll tell you the absolute truth of the story as it happened.

Back in the 1980's my dad and a bunch of his friends got their pig cookers together and cooked bunch of pigs for a church charity fund raiser for someone or other who needed help paying their doctor's bills.  They got together at about dark at a local plantation farm to cook the night away.  The pigs would be done about sunrise, they would let them cool enough to be touched, then they would fall in an chop the whole batch for plates.

I wasn't that old at the time, well, I was old enough to want to go, but not old enough that dad would let me do more than throw wood in the burn barrel.  Just so you know, I was in my twenties before I could shovel coals, and I was in my thirties before I was allowed to actually help cook one.  All under my father's watchful eye.

My momma set her foot down, I wasn't going, and I didn't.  I watched TV, brushed my teeth and was in bed by 9pm same as it ever was.

Dad and the rest of them got good and rip roaring drunk talking about women, hunting, fishing, eating, and cooking.  Then the place was rocked by an explosion, they all staggered out and found one of the gas cookers with its fire out, and the lid askew enough that one of them thought to open it.  There was no pig, and only just enough meat smeared around the inside to prove beyond doubt that they had put a pig on it.

They never found hide nor hair of that blown up pig.

That is the truth as told to me by my dad and backed up by the solemn word of every other man there that night.  Which story was better?

Here I promise you will always read the better story woven from threads of truth.  Just like the sauce.  Delwood's Eastern North Carolina Style Barbecue Sauce is the absolute truth as taught to me by my father.    How you use it, creates the whopper.  My dad used it for barbecue ONLY most of his life and only late in life did he start to use it on chicken.  If he were alive today and you were to tell him how amazing it was as a marinade, or sauce on vegetables, he would likely accuse you of telling whoppers of your own.  His recipe is truth, but together we're going to tell a better story.
  -Delwood Cavenaugh II
April 16th 2012