“THIS IS NOT A JOB. IT’S A WAY OF LIFE.”
“We are very proud of that,” Bruce Jones tells me as he tends to the customers who are lined up through the back door. “It takes fifteen hours to fully cook. We don’t use the junk, but if it’s on the hog, it’s in our barbecue.”
A lot might go into their barbecue, but the question remains: “How much?”
Except for the addition of coleslaw sometime along the way, a heap of barbecue with a slab of their cornbread is exactly how Skilton Dennis sold it off the back of a horse-drawn wagon in the mid-1830s at the Eureka Baptist Bible College. That is said to be the first time barbecue was sold in North Carolina.
Bruce finishes up with the lunch crowd and leaves for his other calling—as an ordained Freewill Baptist minister.
Bruce and his cousin Jeff own the place. Jeff did a little bit of everything before buying out his father’s share in 1990. Like his cousin, he has been around barbecue his entire life. Even today, he lives in the house he grew up in, which is directly across the street.
Today, the future looks bright for the Skylight. Bruce’s son Samuel, a seventh-generation practitioner of the art, has officially signed on.
“As a kid, I used to hate this,” says Samuel. “Now I love it. This is my legacy. I was fifteen hours short of finishing at East Carolina when Grandpa’s health started to fail. He worked twelve hours a day, six days a week until he was seventy-five. The family pull was just too much.”
Some time ago, somebody hung the moniker “Barbecue Capital of the World” on Ayden, and though there are several cities that will challenge the title, the Skylight has been all too happy to promote it: the Skylight proudly wears a replica of the capitol’s rotunda on their roof. (Image 112)
Image 112: Skylight Inn 4618 S Lee Street • Ayden, NC 28513 • (252)746-4113
Cooking barbecue the old-fashioned way—or, as Samuel puts it, the only way—is, sadly, a dying art. Modern gas smokers have taken most of the hands-on labor out of a labor-intensive venture, but it is the city ordinances prohibiting large open fires within city limits that have really dampened the coals of the traditional barbecue process.
“We were told that if we shut down during our remodeling in 1984, we could not re-open and cook this way [whole hog over an open pit]. To get around that, we remodeled the left side and then the right, remaining open all the while,” Samuel proudly boasts. (Image 113)
Image 113
NOT EXACTLY THE SKYLIGHT’S CORNBREAD
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Combine dry ingredients (cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) and mix well.
Combine wet ingredients (eggs, milk/buttermilk, melted shortening) and mix well.
Combine wet and dry ingredients. Bake for 30 minutes in a well greased, 12-inch black skillet.