Home › Barbecues › Pit Barbecued Pork

Pit Barbecued Pork

The genuine article in this line consists of luscious thin slices of crackling hot roast pork, and pork only, with just enough crisp, mellow fat on it so butter becomes redundant. It has to be generously stacked between slices of good wellknit bread or a split biscuit, piping hot, and everything lavishly sluiced with a real barbecue sauce that has pep, zest, oomph, what it takes and then some. It should taste "the most more-ish" as Nantucket Islanders say of their chicken, corn and clam chowder "squantum," which is another specialty of outdoor fires listed under Clambakes. The mingled savor of pork and hickory wood rising from a home barbecue pit sets the returning commuter's nose twitching half a mile away and starts the old taste buds to blossoming out like sunflowers. And when finally you bite into that Old Style Sandwich at home or en route, it answers back sharply to the caveman appetite that yips and yaps way down deep within the best of us. So, once well pit-barbecued, you stay barbecued anyway till the next filling station.

All sorts of substitutes are palmed off, of course, so beware a Greek bearing barbecues, for the so-called Greek stands, even if manned by micks, have only one word for anything from ham or hamburger to canned oysters, if it's dressed with what they call barbecue sauce. What with half of us famishing on the road to somewhere, catching our meals on wheels and hardly able to wait for the next snack counter, that's always just around the corner, barbecue stands have grown thicker than Coca Cola tanks, especially as we cross the Mason and Dixon line. And from there on to the Mexican border the sauce gets hotter and hotter, or, we might say chili-er and chili-er.

But this is as it should be, since those little red peppers that serve as the real base of our greatest All-American culinary art are native to Mexico and most Mexicans are dabsters at tossing up a salsa de barbacoa. And that's the tastiest stuff we've ever dabbled a crackling brown slab of roast pork in. The recipe should be on the tip of every tongue-