A Southern Barbecue, a wood engraving from a sketch by Horace Bradley, published in Harper's Weekly, July 1887.
“My great-great-great grandfather came from North Carolina. His grandson, my great-great uncle George Catchings, had an elaborate marinade and slow cooked the meat (beef, chicken and goat) on a chicken wire covered pit. He was the absolute best barbecue man in Copiah County, Mississippi,” writes Willie Thigpen. He’s comment on a post I did on barbecue reminds me of the wood engraving from a sketch of a late nineteenth century Southern barbecue scene. In my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/tableOfContents, I show that barbecuing has a long history and association with people of African descent dating back to African foodways. What’s interesting is in Africa, young women did labor extensive barbecue cooking using all kinds of meats that males hunted and trapped. However, in the antebellum south barbecue and other forms of outdoor cooking became male dominated crafts. Also interesting is the fact that, like religious revivals, and harvest festivals during the antebellum period, barbecues were integrated events in the south and ones in which the elites and commoners might interact. Enslaved Africans did the labor involved in barbecuing. They prepared and barbecued meats over a very hot open pit which most often took hours if not a day when one barbecued a whole hog, and they served the food to whites first. After slavery, catering barbecues for white elites hosting holiday barbecues, weddings, and other special events, became a lucrative business for some African Americans in the south and after they migrated to places like New York and Chicago. Below is great Mississippi barbecue link that offers allot of great cooking tips.
Mississippi barbecue: http://nmisscommentor.com/food/mississippi-barbecue-est-omnis-divisa-in-partes-tres/
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