Free Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) by Unknown Page B

York Times. "The pulled pork
sandwich you eat is now taken as an index of where you stand, on the flag, the
Civil War and on Maurice Bessinger."
    Last summer, the New York Times picked the top four barbecue joints in
Texas: Kruez Market, Louie Mueller's, Cooper's, and the Salt Lick. All of them
are white-owned. The article, entitled "Stalking 4-Star Barbecue in the Lone
Star State," appeared on Wednesday, July 24, 2002. A barbecue survey that excluded black establishments anywhere else in the South would have no doubt
drawn angry charges of racism from Brent Staples.
    So why is Texas barbecue different?
    In the myth of Texas that most of us know, the state was settled by brave Anglo
pioneers and rugged cowboys. And since they were there all by themselves,
Texas barbecue must have been invented by Anglos too. Lacking any specific
details, many creation stories have emerged. In all of them, the inventors of
barbecue are white Texans.
    In the proposal for The Chuck Wagon Cookbook of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch, author Jane Sherrod Singer wrote:
    In the cattle-raising country of Texas, each owner of a ranch brands his
calves with his own insignia, a Texas kind of heraldry. Legends says that in
the early days, a cattle owner, a Mr. Bernarby Quinn, used a branding iron
with his initials B.Q., with a straight line under the B. He also served the
best steaks for five hundred miles around. Thus the Bar-B-Q is synonymous with excellent cook-out foods.

    The Bar-B-Q ranch story is also recounted in Jane Butel's 1982 cookbook,
Finger Lickin' Rib Stickin' Great Tastin' Barbecue. Only in Butel's version, the
rancher is named Bernard Quayle.
    In the early 1940s, the Texas Writers Project submitted material for a book
called America Eats, a collection of food folklore from around the country that
was never published but can still be found in the Library of Congress. The liberal writers were staunch defenders of the rights of minorities. But they evidently had no idea that barbecue even existed in the Old South. The Texas
chapter had this to say about Texas barbecue history:
    Precisely when and where a barbecue was first served in anything like its
present form falls within the realm of folklore. Texans concede that some
simple form of barbecuing meat doubtless came from below the Rio
Grande-or perhaps from French Louisiana-but believe that its present
form is a Texas development. Wherever it came from, and whatever in the
beginning may have been its recipes and customs, the barbecue fell into
friendly hands when it met the Anglo-American pioneers who were settling in the Southwest.
    Until the friendly hands of Anglo-American pioneers got ahold of it, Texas
barbecue was just Mexicans burying cow heads, the logic goes. But of course,
nobody believes those old creation stories anymore. Now it is widely held that
it was old German butcher shops that date back to the turn of the century and
before, like Southside Market in Elgin and Kruez Market in Lockhart, where
the current form of Texas barbecue was invented.
    When I started writing the Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook, I believed
these meat markets were the birthplace of Texas barbecue, like everybody else.
But there were a few problems with the story. For one thing "barbecue" isn't a
German word or a German concept. So how did wurst and Kassler Rippchen
suddenly turn into Texas barbecue?
    Several old-timer pit bosses tipped me off. It was the hoards of black and
Hispanic cotton pickers who once roamed the state that started calling German smoked meat barbecue, they said. So I combed through Texas libraries
and museums looking for archival material about black cotton pickers and
barbecue. What I found were narratives in which former slaves talked about
cooking barbecue on Texas cotton plantations before the Civil War and turnof-the-century photos of blacks cooking barbecue in earthen pits.
    It wasn't what I was looking for. In fact, it ruined my