Home › Barbecues › Border Barbecues

Border Barbecues

A big pit barbecue, the kind they throw in Texas to celebrate almost anything from a baptism to an election, calls for the skilled services of a couple of fire-hardened pit experts. They pick out the prime steer or steers for roasting whole and then put in a twelve hour night and day to have everything ready for the ravenous crowd who arrive around noontime with their jaws raring to go.

These specialists know their stuff as well as a strip tease knows her burleycue, and it's hot stuff, too, for first the carcass is soaked or marinated in peppery "chile-ajo" sauce that's standard along the Mexican border and then a wash tub or two of pepper, garlic, herbs, tomatoes, lime juice and sundry condiments are tossed up according to magic private formulae for basting the beast. And it's the constant sloshing of this A-1 brand of barbecue sauce on the roasting meat which imparts that unbeatable hunter's style flavor, making tame beef taste as gamey as venison, or Mary's little lamb like Rocky Mountain sheep.

The veteran barbecuers are picturesque plainsmen who arrive around midnight, loaded down with pitchforks, shovels, brooms, rakes, plenty of pepper and bottles full of Worcestershire and Tabasco. They work like imps around their pit fires, shoveling earth, raking the coals level, readying everything for avid eaters who'll mob the place with their sticking knives, six shooters and flasks on the hip. The pit or pits most likely have been dug the day before and cords of good hard wood stacked handy, so all there is to do is whoop the fires up hotter than Hades and mix the sauce a trifle hotter. When a smooth, smokeless bed of coals is finally obtained, after several hours of steady firing, the enormous beef is run through from beard to tail, or "barbe" to "cue' in the original French, with a sharp steel spit and hung in place over the glowing pit. Then it's kept. turning by dextrous jabs of the pitchfork and basted evenly by dipping a new broom in the tub and swabbing down the sides.

After the first quick seering to keep the juices in, it roasts. slowly, from dawn till high noon, when the chief barbecuer sharpens his carving knives and, in shirt sleeves, begins the fancy work, just at the moment when it's cooked right. through to the bones and the outside crust is thick and spicy. Everybody crowds close to watch the knife wielder, each expecting to get the choicest tidbit as it's expertly dipped in the hot sauce and slipped onto slabs of yaller bread. In this clash between sharp knives and sharper appetites corn liquor passes freely and everything is hotsy-- totsy. The tang of the fires and odor of crisping beef whip up Gargantuan appetites, especially if the artful barbecuer throws an armful of sage on the dying coals at the finish to scent the whole roast-then the amount of lusty snacking such a mob can do is only limited by the size of their rounding eyes and whether the feast is free or not.