I stood over a once-forgotten pit that had been in my family for almost a century. It hadn’t been warmed by wood coals for at least six decades. We had missed out on so much potential camaraderie, food, and joy while it sat dormant, and I felt honored to resurrect it on a chilly March morning in 2018. The hogs on the pit were whole, and the fuel was nothing but hardwood. The hog cooks who came before me wouldn’t have had it any other way, and neither would I.
The men who dug this pit are long gone, but I hope somewhere they were nodding their affirmation, or at least an acknowledgment that I hadn’t yet screwed up the family barbecue legacy. The steps I took to cook the hogs that day in March weren’t any different from the ones they would have taken a century ago. It’s further gratification knowing that the hogs in my restaurant today are being cooked with the same fundamental barbecue principles. My granddaddy Pete Jones always said, “If it’s not cooked with WOOD it’s not BBQ.”
What is barbecue? That depends on the cook you’re asking, I reckon. Ribs might be on the lips of a Memphian, Californians might say tri-tip, and in Kansas City they’ll be arguing about sauce. A Texan will surely tell you that it’s not a barbecue joint without brisket on the menu, but in my mind, barbecue is whole hog cooked over wood. I say that because I was raised in eastern North Carolina, and that’s all we’ve ever done. East of Interstate 95, that’s the expectation. That’s how my family, the Joneses, have been doing it at Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, since 1947.
Over time, that definition of North Carolina barbecue has been diluted so that any tender pork that’s chopped with vinegar is considered barbecue, even when it’s done without a stick of wood. I think of that as cooked pork, and some of it’s dang tasty, but it’s not what I consider to be traditional North Carolina barbecue. In my opinion, cooking over wood is the essence of traditional barbecue, but only a handful of old-school places do it like I think it ought to be done. One of the newest in that mix is my restaurant, Sam Jones BBQ, in Winterville, North Carolina.
In eastern North Carolina, more so than anywhere else in the country, the definition of barbecue has historically been pretty simple: a whole animal cooked over wood, or coals. Long before the days of butcher shops and barbecue joints, this is how barbecue was cooked, be it whole lambs, goats, small steers, or hogs. It was done that way out of expediency when the slaughter was part of the barbecue event, and meat didn’t arrive in a refrigerated truck. It just so happens that we still think it’s the best way. I personally don’t believe you can re-create what happens when you cook a whole animal if you start with an individual cut. All the muscles, and fat, and skin combine to create a mixture of dark and light meat, of lean and fatty meat, which can’t be matched by a pork butt or a ham. Then, if you make the mistake of cooking without wood, there’s nothing you can do to make up the ground you lost in flavor, no matter how much sauce you add.
I’m a product of that barbecue, having eaten it all my life. I’m also a product of my community and my state. There’s always a Yeti cooler full of Cheerwine, the beloved cherry-flavored soda and North Carolina’s finest elixir, in the back of my Super Duty pickup. My truck is equipped with the lights and sirens required for it to double as an emergency vehicle because I happen to be the fire chief in Ayden as well. The irony of my two callings being building fires and putting them out isn’t lost on me. We average about three hundred calls per year out of two fire stations, which are made up of volunteers. We get a stipend of nine dollars per call. We obviously don’t do it for the money.
That also means that my wife, Sarah, needs to worry about two different kinds of fire taking me away from home. She’s the person who holds our family together when I’m gone for a week at a barbecue festival in New York, working long hours at the restaurant, or leaving in the middle of the night for a fire call. Funny enough, our first date was over barbecue, but it wasn’t from the Jones family.
You see, my family is known for barbecue. I’m the third generation of Joneses to own a barbecue joint. I’m also the first who hasn’t had to farm tobacco. I still support my forefathers’ efforts with a Marlboro Light habit I need to let go of, but the tobacco barns are fewer and farther between in North Carolina these days. In rural, eastern North Carolina, the current cash crop is pigs. There are more pigs than people in the eastern part of the state. We go through seventy of them every week between Skylight Inn, owned by my dad, Bruce Jones, and Uncle Jeff Jones (who’s really my dad’s cousin and not my uncle, but that’s what I grew up calling him), and Sam Jones BBQ, which Michael Letchworth and I opened up the road in 2015. The two restaurants are seven miles door-to-door from one another, and worlds apart in how they’re operated. They’re still joined by one important commonality, and that’s whole hog barbecue cooked over wood.
That’s why that first date with Sarah back in 2006 was a little awkward. We went with a group to Parker’s Barbecue in Greenville, about twenty minutes north of home. She knew I was in a funk, which I’ll explain later, when she called me and said, “Hey, I’ve got some family coming in town and they want to go out to eat.” I won’t ever forget. I was at home sitting in my barn when she texted me and said, “Everybody’s going to Parker’s. Would you like to go?” I was like, “Yeah, I might.”
I drove separate. I told her when I pulled up in the parking lot, “I believe I’d rather get caught selling drugs as to be in Parker’s. Somebody’s going to see me in there and decide to be a comedian.” The door hadn’t closed behind us as we walked in there when I heard, “Oh, you come to get some good barbecue, did you?” That’s the way it is in a small town, especially when your family owns another barbecue joint. The little bit of embarrassment from that night was worth it, though. Twelve years later, Sarah and I have two daughters, Elaina and Eliza. They’re not quite old enough to pick up a shovel, but one of them could be the family’s fourth-generation pitmaster.
My family taught me everything they know about cooking whole hog barbecue, but they weren’t very good at the teaching part. How many times has a barbecue cook been asked a question he didn’t know the answer to? In my family, it’s plenty of times. The answer is usually “Because we’ve always done it this way.” To me that is not an answer. Just because you’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean you were doing it right.
Case in point: At Skylight we would cut cabbage for slaw on a prep table and rake the trash leaves into old bags. A couple of local guys would pick up the bags and feed the cabbage to their livestock. When we prepped the cabbage, one person would always walk down to the end of the table where that bag was tied to the corner and hold the bag open for the other one to rake the leaves in. It had been that way as long as I can remember. Mike “Chopper” Parrot had been at Skylight for two weeks. I was cutting cabbage, and I said, “Mike, will you hold that bag open for me?” And as I was raking them in there, Mike said, “This is stupid.” He goes in the stock room, pulls down a cardboard box, rolls it up, slides it into the cabbage bag, then rolls it back out so the bag stands up on its own. I felt like the stupidest man in the world. So every day that we make slaw, you will see a cabbage bag with a piece of cardboard inserted in it. It stands on its own, and one man can do the job. That’s the kind of simple innovation that can happen when you start asking if the way we’ve always done it is the right way to keep doing it.
Clockwise, from below: Jeff Jones, Bruce Jones, me, and Pete Jones in 2003 at the counter of Skylight Inn; Buddy Mills, Pete Jones, Kenneth Ross, and Bruce Jones with me in his arms in 1981; John Bill Dennis, Emmitt Dennis’s brother, cooking a whole hog.
Neither Pete Jones nor his brother and business partner, Robert, could read or write. They literally could not have put pen to paper to describe the details of making our slaw, cornbread, or the whole hog barbecue. Those are the three legs supporting the Jones family barbecue table. It would have never occurred to either of them to explain why any of the particular steps were necessary anyway. Because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” was always explanation enough for them.
Take my granddaddy’s morning routine. He would get up at 6:30 a.m. My grandmother would make coffee in a bubble-top pot. This makes no sense to me, but he poured coffee into a cup and set it on a saucer. He’d take the cup and saucer to the table, pick up the cup, and pour the coffee into a bowl. He’d blow on the coffee, let it cool, then drink it right out of the bowl. I have no idea why he had to mess up three dishes. He did it every day. In this book, I want to tell my story. I want to tell my family’s story. I also intend to tell you when you can skip the cup and saucer and just go straight to the bowl. Whole hog barbecue takes a long time, but it’s not complicated. There’s no point in trying to make it more complex just so I come out looking like some kind of genius.
Whole hog barbecue might be simple, but it is never not a spectacle. As long as America has had hogs, we’ve had whole hog barbecue. And as long as hogs have cooked over coals, onlookers have stared longingly in amazement. When a whole hog is on the pit, people are drawn to the fire. They’re drawn to the smoke. Droplets of fat explode into scented puffs of smoke that rise to flavor the pig and perfume the air. Down in the cooker, red hot coals peek out from under a blanket of ashes and send up ribbons of shimmering heat. It’s hard even for me not to stare, even after all these years of cooking.
Once we flip the hog, the skin becomes the focus of the cooking. If whole hog is the old testament of barbecue, it’s that shatteringly crisp skin that is the gospel according to the Jones family. Crowds gather to look on as the hog is lifted from the pit and onto the cutting block. “Can I get some skin?” ask the uninitiated, who don’t realize how important it is to our finished product. We chop it right into the meat.
In eastern North Carolina, for a handful of barbecue joints, this spectacle is a way of life. Skylight has been giving pit tours probably since it opened more than seventy years ago, and our pit-house doors are always wide open to visitors at Sam Jones BBQ. We have nothing to hide, and frankly we’re proud to show the place off.
Creating that same spectacle in your own backyard isn’t out of your grasp either. You might have seen the high price tags of sleek offset smokers used to cook brisket in Texas or the stainless steel rotisseries for ribs in Kansas City, but to do whole hog right, all you need are some concrete blocks, some sheet metal, and an old fifty-five-gallon drum. I’m going to show you, every step of the way, how to build the pit, harvest the coals, and slowly cook a whole hog at home. Think of this book as the quickest way to make yours the most popular backyard in the neighborhood.
We’ll begin with my family’s barbecue history, which eventually led to my grandfather Pete Jones opening Skylight Inn, and my father, Bruce Jones, along with cousin Jeff Jones and me, continuing the legacy today. I’ll share recipes for some of our most famous items and the methodology behind our whole hog barbecue. The second section focuses on how to re-create that whole hog magic just about anywhere that can accommodate a pallet full of concrete blocks. A more expansive barbecue menu can be found at Sam Jones BBQ, and you’ll be able to make most of it from recipes in the third section. The final portion of the book reveals family recipes that have previously been held so close to the vest that I didn’t even know how to make them. Now, you’ll also be able to celebrate like a Jones.
Barbecue has always been about community for the Jones family. Every community is woven together like a blanket. I think every business and family that is a part of a community, especially a small community, is automatically a part of that woven blanket. You have to choose if you’re going to be a strong thread or the weak one. If we hear of a death—not only in our community, but maybe you were a patron of ours, and your father passed away—we’re going to send a spread of barbecue and sides to your house from both restaurants. I’ll try to carry it myself if I’m home, because it’s something that’s important. Also, because I know what it means to be that person on the other end. We’ve learned a thing or two about building bonds by building barbecue pits. Build a block pit in your backyard, and you’ll be surprised how quickly and easily you can bring a community together. That’s the power of whole hog.