I’m nearly out of gas. The Ford Ranger died, and I’ve eaten at nearly every barbecue place in the state. I gained twenty-five pounds and lost twenty of them. I’ve talked with some wonderful people, soiled several shirts with dripping grease and sauces, improved my photography skills, and cultivated some strong opinions about what makes excellent barbecue.
It’s common in books such as this to ponder the future of the subject at hand. Here’s a stab at it.
In “A History of Barbecue in the Mid-South Region,” a chapter of Veteto and Maclin’s The Slaw and the Slow Cooked, barbecue historian Robert F. Moss traces the development of barbecue traditions in the middle South, paying special attention to Arkansas and Memphis. He writes, “The region’s barbecue is best looked at not just as something to eat but as a social institution. It has long had a remarkable power to bring people together from diverse walks of life, helping them to celebrate important events, debate contentious issues, and have a good time.” Reading this, I think of Kentucky’s long-standing barbecue festivals and summer church picnics, key events in the cultural life of many western Kentucky communities, including the huge Fancy Farm picnic in Graves County that kicks off the political election season. I’ve watched young people helping the well-seasoned pit tenders at these events, promising that the traditions will carry on.
While I expect the festivals will keep going strong, using the same cooking traditions they’ve used for years—especially at the International Bar-B-Q Festival in Owensboro, where the (mostly) church teams still cook mutton on open pits and stir huge cauldrons of burgoo—I can’t say what mom-and-pop barbecue shacks, joints, and restaurants will look like in fifty years. Some of my favorite barbecue in the state is prepared by men in their seventies. What happens when the venerable old-school barbecue masters like Red Grogan, Cy Quarles, and Oscar Hill finally hang up their hickory-coal shovels?
I expect barbecue to remain an important part of Kentucky cultural life—the festivals and picnics—and also to evolve as a food culture. While there might be a decline in traditional western Kentucky style as the old pit masters retire, a move away from the masonry pits toward less labor-intensive methods, I don’t think cooking with wood is going to disappear. First, you have several younger pit masters keeping the masonry pit coals alive, people like Ricky Prince in Bardwell, Ray Leigh in Future City, and Eric Binson in Benton. Moreover, plenty of barbecue folks are cooking with big tank units or homemade steel pits fired by huge piles and stacks of wood, still abundant in Kentucky, fortunately for us: men like Marc Hatcher at Pit Stop BBQ south of Murray, Dave Webb of Dave’s Sticky Pig in Madisonville, and Dustin Curtis at Texican’s BBQ Pitt in Crestwood. I expect the convenience of the manufactured cookers—the popular Ole Hickory and Southern Pride brands, for example—will draw more people into the barbecue business, as less humanpower and wood are needed to cook meats on these units—and because of this there might be some watering down of barbecue, a move toward less smoky meats. But maybe we’ve seen this trend already, based on the spread of barbecue chains like Famous Dave’s and the success of Louisville’s Mark’s Feed Store, which offers good-quality food across the board but measures only mild to medium on the smoky scale. And most barbecue fiends I know love the smoke. That’s what makes it barbecue instead of “oven baked.”
I’ve also noted the increasing popularity of beef brisket and expect this trend to continue, and I hope along with it the importation of other delights associated with Texas, like smoky sausages. Furthermore, considering the wild success of Hammerheads in Louisville—open for less than two years but packing the house nightly—I predict we’ll see the spread of “new” (as in new to most Kentuckians) barbecue styles—more smoked lamb ribs, pork bellies, and duck. And I’ve a hunch that Alton Brown, Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, and other national food personalities are playing a considerable role in shifting the barbecue styles of this still-rural state, as the Internet and television bring faraway foodie expertise and international flavors into our homes. Take, for example, Hot Rod B.B.Q. in Cumberland County, Kentucky (home to 6,850 people, according to 2010 census numbers—95.4 percent “white,” 2.6 percent “black,” 0.1 percent “American Indian”). I’m pretty sure they didn’t create their super-hot barbecue sauce made with ghost chilies out of thin air. Maybe one of the owners traveled to India, where the so-called ghost chili thrives. But I’m guessing the doctor of this sauce got the idea from popular media like Man v. Food.
Finally, as Kentucky—an overwhelmingly Caucasian state—becomes home to more and more immigrants from Mexico, Burma, Bosnia, and south Florida, I expect (and hope) to see barbacoa and other “new” styles adding to and transforming the Commonwealth’s established and proud traditions. I just love barbecued beef tongue, garnished with cilantro and lime, on top of corn tortillas. Yes, please. I’ll have some of that.