The Barbecue Heresies

May 20

So much on which to catch up!

Dinner with the Jaspers on Thursday went wonderfully-- Mike is as interesting in person as he is online, and his wife Elizabeth is charming. I always worry a bit about meeting people face-to-face when I've only known them through the ether, but in this case the worries were quite unfounded. We had much good talk about Tolkien, books, writing, Scientologists, college, grad schools, and other lively topics.

Afterward, Meg and I took the long drive home, and went to bed.

Friday I read a bit, wrote a few letters, and Meg and I got barbecue!

I should take a moment to make my barbecue position clear. The word "Barbecue" has widely varied meanings, depending on where the person using the word comes from. When a Yankee says "barbecue" they mean food made in a cook-out-- burgers and hot dogs and chicken cooked outdoors on the grill. There's nothing wrong with that, but the food prepared in that fashion is not "barbecue." If a Texan serves you barbecue, you get a plate of beef ribs. Beef ain't barbecue, y'all, and neither are ribs. If someone in Central or Western North Carolina mentions barbecue, what they really mean is "Lexington Style Barbecue" (or, The First Great Heresy). Lexington barbecue is shredded or pulled pork (a perfectly good basis for the One True Barbecue), which adherents to the Lexington Heresy proceed to ruin with a strange tomato-based sauce-- they basically roll the pork in ketchup, or marinara sauce, or some other tomatoey thing better suited to being served over pasta.

Real barbecue-- Eastern North Carolina barbecue-- is shredded or pulled pork in a vinegar-based medium, and can be embellished with a peppery barbecue sauce. Mmm.

So Meg took me to the one place in Kernersville that serves Eastern-style barbecue. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't perfect. Not vinegary enough. Of course, as my Dad says, "You can go three counties away from home and not be able to get good barbecue." It's true. I'll have to get down to Smithfield or Goldsboro sometime, or else make my own.

We ate our dinner at the drive-in in Mount Airy, before the show. I'd never been to a drive-in before (despite my devotion to Joe Lansdale and Joe-Bob Briggs). We saw O Brother, Where Art Thou and The Mexican (which was an okay film-- I mean, any movie that has James Gandolfini is worth 3 bucks, pretty much regardless of any other factors). I enjoyed the experience greatly.

(Aside: Mt. Airy is the town on which Mayberry, of The Andy Griffith Show fame, is based-- it's Andy Griffith's hometown. It's also the town in which Cheng and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins, settled after their days on the sideshow circuit ended. They became farmers. Mt. Airy is also a linguistic anomaly-- it's the only place (as far as I know) in all of the South where people use the word "pop" when referring to soft drinks-- elsewhere in the South, the common term is "soda" or "coke" (and yes, it's "coke" quite inclusively, regardless of the actual brand of the beverage)).

After the drive-in, I gave Heather a call, because I haven't had much time for phone-or e-mail-based communication with my far away friends, and I missed her. We talked until around 2:30 a.m. (my time, anyway-- it was still nice and early for her out in California). Then I fell into bed, because I had to get up relatively early the next morning for a wedding.

I'll talk about the wedding in its own entry…