Q&A / JOHN SHELTON REED, DALE VOLBERG REED: Barbecue scholars serve up a fun book

John Shelton Reed, the noted authority on the South, once gave a lecture called “Science Lies When It Says Hogmeat’s Got Little Bugs in It.” He doesn’t remember what the lecture was about; he just loved the title.

Clearly, this is a man with more than an academic interest in pork. Now retired from the University of North Carolina, the sociologist and much-published author has followed his gut and written an entertaining volume on Carolina barbecue with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed, and former UNC student William McKinney.

Part cultural history, part cookbook, “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue” (University of North Carolina Press) may be the best tome ever written about pulled pork. The Reeds talked about it from their home in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Q: Why should Georgians care about a North Carolina barbecue book?

John: We maintain that eastern North Carolina barbecue is the Ur-barbecue. This is where the Southern barbecue tradition started: eastern Carolina and Virginia. The Carolina vinegar sauce is what you found everywhere, including Georgia, through the 1800s. You still find it in a number of cultural backwaters where they never changed.

Q: You mention a Barbecue Presbyterian Church near Fayetteville. Is that a sign of divine inspiration?

Dale: We think so.

John: It’s named after the Barbecue Swamp. The man who named that saw the mist rising off the water, and it reminded him of barbecue smoke.

Q: We have several places in Atlanta that purport to serve Carolina barbecue. What is that exactly?

Dale: It has to be pork. It has to be cooked over real wood or charcoal. And it has to come with a vinegar sauce. In the Piedmont, they put a little ketchup in it and make it sweeter.

Q: North Carolina really has two styles, doesn’t it —- one in the east and another farther west in the Piedmont?

John: Yes. They’ve got those different sauces. And they cook shoulders in the Piedmont and whole hogs Down East. They go at it hammer and tong debating which is better. There’s an old political, religious and cultural rivalry between those parts of the state that overlay the competing barbecue styles, so it gets wound up in regional identity.

Q: The most famous barbecue center in North Carolina has to be Lexington, below Winston-Salem, which has an incredible number of barbecue places for a town of 20,000.

John: Something like 19. People always ask us about our favorite restaurants …

Dale: We could name six in Lexington easy.

John: We spent several days there. It’s like a big family. They’d tell us where we ought to go and which ones aren’t cooking with wood anymore.

Q: They told on each other like that?

Dale: Oh, yeah. They don’t want you going to places that aren’t doing it right.

Q: Why have some restaurants stopped using wood?

John: It’s easier and cheaper. A lot of newer places use hybrid cookers where gas and electric heat regulate the temperature, but there’s still wood smoke in there. It turns out a good product; as we said in the book, you don’t lose much except your soul.

But what really gripes me is that some of the best-known barbecue places in the state don’t use wood at all anymore. They’re basically cooking roast pork and putting vinegar-based sauce on it and calling it barbecue. There ought to be law.

Q: Do you name the offending restaurants?

John: No. But we’ll hear from places wondering why they weren’t in the book, and that’s why: They stopped cooking with wood.

Dale: We thought of a subtitle after the deadline that would have been perfect: “The Sacred and the Propane.”