Everything But the Oink: The Fire and Folks of Whole Hog Barbecue
By: Andrew Donaldson
Tags: Travel, Food, Culture, History, Foodies

Everything But the Oink: The Fire and Folks of Whole Hog Barbecue

When you absolutely, positively have to feed a whole mess of folks, accept no substitute for the time-honored pig pickin’.

Legendary Pitmaster Ed Mitchell of Raleigh, NC preparing whole hog at 2010 Big Apple Barbecue Block Party. Photo by Wally Gobetz via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The proper terminology is “Everything but the oink.”

Those who like good pork have plenty of options in enjoying “the other white meat.” Some folks seek to partake of such cuts as ribs, loin, chops, pork belly, hams, or butts (which are actually shoulders). Others enjoy the ears, heads, feet (rebranded trotters for… reasons), or the legendary delicacy that is chitlins. The versatility, flavor, and cost-efficiency of the most consumed animal protein on the planet spans the culinary spectrum from street food to Michelin-starred high-end restaurants that most folks couldn’t afford to get to, let alone dine in.

Cooking an entire pig is a long tradition not only of feeding masses of people, but of a master-level culinary achievement by those who get it right from tip to tail. When you absolutely, positively have to feed a whole mess of folks, and especially if you are in the American south, accept no substitute for the time-honored pig pickin’. For the uninitiated, that means putting a whole hog on the fire to feed throngs of family, friends, church gatherings, charity fundraisers, or because it’s a day ending in “-y”.

“I had a big family so our gatherings were that,” explains Tim Ellis, my own preferred pork provider and expert on all things pig. Ellis is the owner of Patch Farmstead where he and his family raise pigs, chickens, and his children, all of whom can be found free roaming his property in Coastal Carolina. “Family, birthdays, reunions, whatever reasons for all the cousins to come together… the choice was ‘cook a pig’.”

Like all things in food, there are many variations on the simple theme of “cook a pig.” There is the idealized version, described in a Southern Living write up, of the all-day cooking, late-into-the-night partying, and the perfect gathering of food and folks in between:

Smoke rising over the marsh near Jim and Weezie Gibson’s home means one thing to their neighbors-Jim’s cooking a whole pig. The Beaufort, South Carolina, couple has been entertaining this way for at least 30 years. “We usually do about one pig roast a year,” Jim says in his lush Lowcountry drawl. “The kids started having them for their friends at Christmas, and we’ve continued.” Jim has friends who regularly assist him, as well as others who drop by. He finds the camaraderie developed during these events sweeter than smoked pork. As soon as you start cooking, someone will show up,” he says. “Everyone likes to visit and tell stories. And everyone always enjoys being around the fire-you know how Southerners are.” They also are notoriously opinionated about how they like their barbecue. “It’s like religion,” Jim says with a laugh… At the end of the day, a larger crowd of friends joins the cooking crew for the serious job of eating. A mountain of chopped smoked pork, hash and rice, coleslaw, and plenty of peppery sauce greet the guests. For Jim, who has been tending the fire since 5:30 a.m., it is time to enjoy his friends and the fruits of his labor. His and Weezie’s hospitality envelops the group like a blanket of pork-scented smoke. The party continues into the night, everyone savoring the last bit of fun and food as they anticipate coming together again to roast another pig.

Then there is the lost in translation — both process and culture — version, such as Ryan Tate wrote up in Wired:

These days, with do-it-yourself cooking projects growing ever more ambitious, any holiday will do for a backyard whole pig roast, at least as far as home chefs are concerned. And that’s why we suspect you, dear reader, are contemplating putting some fire to a dead hog this fine 4th of July weekend, eager to feed a crowd while reconnecting with a primal and strangely elegant way of cooking. Well, let my account of one pig roast gone awry serve as a warning of just how messy and inelegant primal cooking can get, no matter what any distinguished author or hipster blogger might tell you. Beard made it all sound so easy…Remember that no enormous cooking project will be as simple as you imagine. You see a whole pig, and you imagine the roasting, and the eating, and the joy and camaraderie that goes along with it. But don’t forget the transportation, the setup, the fuel management, stray sparks and coal and ash, grease, estimating cooking progress and correcting your schedule, and of course the cleanup. If you’re up for tackling all those challenges this Independence Day and roasting a whole pig — Perhaps on a spit! What could go wrong?! — more power to you. This is a free country, after all. But remember that freedom also means the right to turn to your humble household oven, to buy your pig in pieces from a butcher as God intended, to set your dial to 300F and completely nix the chances of turning what should be a happy holiday into an Iraq War-style misadventure.

Those divergent results show why something so culturally common in the south and widespread as a pig pickin’ is still a really big deal.

Charity fundraisers, political rallies, major events, family and community gatherings: if a whole hog is going on the cooker, pit, or smoke rig it means big doins’ and a big crowd expected. With barbecue being of religious importance in the south, the soul had better be fed as well as the stomach, with a healthy dose of fellowship and tradition. But if barbecue pig is a sacrament in the south, how did the reformation of the smoked swine come about in the first place?

Pigs and Pirates of the Caribbean

“Put them there hogs over yonder” de Soto instructs his men…except in Spanish. “De Soto-Tampa Bay, Florida-1539/Drawn by Capt. S. Eastman; Engraved by James Simillie” [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

To understand just how ingrained whole hog is to barbecue in America, you have to realize “pig over flame” is right there in the name.

They first Suidae arrived in the new world when Columbus hauled eight hogs to what is now Cuba during his second journey on explicit instructions from Queen Isabella — and that is where old world pig met new world fire. Enter the Taino people, an Arawak indigenous people from South America who became adventurous enough to journey to the many islands of the Caribbean. The European explorers noted their cooking method of using fresh green branches over dug pits of fire to cook all manner of seafood and other foraged items.

It took no time at all to figure out the newly arrived pigs should be introduced to this method of preparation. The Taino called it “barabicu,” or “sacred fire pit,” which the Spanish who followed Columbus worked over in their language to form a new word and meaning. This was the genesis of “barbacoa” for the method that we get barbecue from, and “Buccan/Boucan” for the wooden framework holding the cooking over the fire. More folks were exposed by the Spanish taking their exploration to what would become mainland America and their newly acquired, not to mention portable, cooking method with them.

Long before Florida Man was a fixture of internet memes and jokes, there was Florida Pig. Thirteen of them, to be exact, in what is now the Tampa Bay area. Hernando de Soto placed them there when his expedition landed in 1539, and the animals that were taken for their heartiness to endure the seas took to the New World like a pig in slop. Sailors showing up on shores across the New World, digging pits on the beach to match food to fire, and partaking of whatever they could find, quickly caught a nickname from the mix of languages: buccaneers. De Soto’s pigs did their pig thing spectacularly, and they were easy to find all throughout the southeast mainland and Caribbean Islands. By the time Hernando the Conquistaporker died somewhere around the current Arkansas/Louisiana state line, the Spanish had 700 pigs in America. That would be a conservative estimate, not counting those that had run off, gone feral, were introduced elsewhere by other groups, or other miscellaneous swine hither and yon. By the by, a bunch of hogs in the Americas since then can be traced from that baker’s dozen of swine in Florida.

Regardless, pig and what would become the American south were now together forever. Whom God and Hernando De Soto hath joined together, let no one put asunder.

As if they could if they tried.

Once technology like refrigerated rail cars, production line processing, and, most importantly, home fridges and freezers became the norm, the other white meat quickly became a national staple. With Americans consuming an average of 50 pounds of pork per capita each year, the other white meat is more popular than ever. If that sounds like a lot, the United States is actually only eighth in pork consumption per capita, behind the Balkan States, European Union, China, Taiwan, and Belarus. Whole pig roasting over fire is found worldwide from the Philippines to Cuba, but whether it’s Tagalog, Spanish or whatever else the folks cooking and eating speak around the fire, the idea is the same: pig plus fire multiplied by folks equals good eats.

Back in the United States, once the availability of pig was established it was only a matter of time until traditions on how to prepare it became culturally ingrained. Like most things with pigs, great things like a whole hog community gathering developed in complicated ways, and plenty of debate among those that are particular about their pig pickin’ about how things ought to be done.

Going Whole Hog

With the type of crowd that shows up at a pig pickin’ comes an audience with high — and informed — expectations as to what they are going to get. Like going to a religious service, everyone knows the rough plan and the songs; the real mystery is whether the preacher is going to get it right. All eyes are on the tender of the pig to make sure things are done right so they come out just so. Or else.

That starts with the cook and the cooking. “Whole hog, wood coals, vinegar with spices. That is what BBQ is; other things are pale imitations,” thus saith the pig farmer from Patch Farmstead, “and the absolute best way to do it is get your pork right out of the pig with metal tongs while it’s still on the grill.” He isn’t alone in his statement of faith on the proper way to commune over a whole hog, though there are other confessions. Tennessee does it differently than the Carolinas, but whole hog cooking has stayed much more regional than other forms of BBQ across the fruited plain.

Much of that has to do with the effort and expertise involved, not to mention the cost and the physicality of cooking hundreds of pounds of animal for 12–14 hours. Unlike, say, brisket, or even a good sized pork shoulder that can be cooked with a normal home grill, smoker, or oven, whole hog is an all-in affair in every sense. At competitions such as the Whole Hog Barbecue Series that runs events in the Carolinas and Virginia, the judging standards reveal the challenges in cooking. After heads and feet are removed and the back sliced-but not separated- the teams of no more than three are charged with “100 and 125 pounds; all pigs be as close as possible to the same weight.” Cooking a whole hog at home or at a restaurant isn’t any easier even if the time constraints are less, but the judges may be even harsher and more personal. If it was easy, the old saying goes, everyone would do it.

B’s Barbecue — Greenville, NC

Photo by Alan Pike for the Southern Foodways Alliance via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

There has been something of a generational shift going on in the whole hog world, where the old family-run pit joints in small towns are closing down, leaving the availability of the whole hog experience more to the friends and family set. But like all good things in the food world, modern trends come calling. Some have upscaled and updated the whole hog as a concept for high-end dining. Recognition is good for preventing extinction, but also raises a debate. Labor intensive and time consuming are the enemies of profit margins in the restaurant business. Whole hog is both, meaning the newer endeavors trend more toward the hipster food crowd rather than the come-as-you-are of community gathering places of old. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the folks who see whole hog as more than just a trend recoil at the idea that high prices, gourmet sides, and craft beer accouterments are “preserving” of their cultural and culinary traditions.

The truth is there has always been a cultural divide to BBQ. The buccaneers might have started fire and smoke pig cooking in the American south, but it was the dark times of slavery where the term “everything but the oink” took new meaning out of necessity. Slave owners ate the best and left the rest, lest you think soul food traditions like jowls, fatback, trotters, and chitlins were products of some deep culinary discovery instead of the making do with what they had. On the occasion there was a celebration such as harvest time, whole animal cooking was both the most practical and tastiest option to feed a mess of folks in a hurry and with limited culinary logistical help. Most pig farmers regardless of race through the years never wasted a thing on an animal from tip to tail because they couldn’t afford too. Folks of the working class and below who followed for generations after have a rightful claim on things like BBQ, as much right as the derisively called “Yuppiecue” set has to reinvent and elevate it for food’s biggest stages.

It might be “just BBQ,” but there is a lot of weight to it beyond the measured-out meat portions. Vittles such as whole hog were forged in fires beyond just the cooking methods, largely a product of people trying to overcome both circumstances and hunger as families and communities. Fires that purify and strengthen folks’ opinions on where they came from and how they got where they are now. Fires within those same folks that burns underneath the smiles and the “bless your hearts” for those who don’t respect it.

Like all families, however, those who love barbecue in general and whole hog in particular are perfectly fine debating what constitutes “proper pig” amongst themselves. Not to mention reflexive defensiveness toward others who question their chosen ways to serve up swine. And don’t get such swine fundamentalists started on modern trending cooking methods such as *whispers* gas: “I once committed to donating a pig for a BBQ fundraiser,” Tim Ellis explains. “When I found out they intended to use a propane cooker I told them I hadn’t put the effort I had into my pigs to have one profaned over gas. They rethought and found a wood cooker. I’m sure all who had the BBQ from that were grateful.”

What might sound picky is a point of pride: That effort ties this modern version of pigs and the folks who depend on them for both livelihoods and meals to the history and culture of both the food and the animal.

Passed Down by Blood

“My daddy was the one who taught me what cooking a pig meant. Not incidentally he’s the one who taught me the whole procedure for killing, scalding, scraping, and butchering for the grill. I’ve already shown my kids this part, but it’s a job that’ll get outsourced to the pros every time.”

Tim Ellis does it about as far away from those fancy new cooking methods in the high-end restaurants as you can get: “Control the heat in the cooker using the touch of your hand…put your hand on the lid; if it can stay without pain it’s too cold, if it burns you right away too hot. The right temp, you can hold your hand on the lid maybe about 3 seconds or so.”

Well, with one exception: “I have a digital wireless thermometer that goes to a phone app, but I still touch the lid. I’ll teach my kids the same.”

Ellis’ Twitter feed constantly shows the two things he spends most of his time raising at Patch Farmstead: his children and his pigs. Patch’s pigs graze and live naturally with minimum supplementing, and other than fencing for their own protection, the animals “just frolic about, the makings of happy bacon.” He raises the pigs from birth to death, takes them to processing himself, and sells the pork along with other things. “Farm to table” and “locally sourced” are hot concepts in food these days. Buying from someone like Tim Ellis isn’t just trendy, though. To procure food from someone who knows everything about the animal from birth to your plate isn’t just good for your quality of food, but a connection to the source of your food and a tradition worth upholding and supporting.

“Big Black” at Patch Farmstead. She has had over 100 piglets and was one of the farm’s original hogs. Photo by Tim Ellis

He even fits the historic profile of sailors-turned-pig proprietors that goes all the way back to those original 13 pigs in Florida. “Starting a farm is a long way from how I started my adult life, being a Navy nuke submariner…But growing things was always a part of my life no matter where I went.”

“My dad was the first generation that didn’t farm; he drove a truck,” Ellis explains. “But of course the land is something that gets passed down by blood. In our last home my friends would remark at how my backyard looked like an ag research field so when (wife) Dare said, ‘Maybe we should go to the country,’ I was gone before she could get all the words out.”

Pigs and people, and the land they both inhabit, have been a great match for centuries now for feeding folks and sustaining their livelihoods. From the exploration of the first Europeans ripping an idea from the indigenous cookers, through the wicked desolation of slavery, to the high-end hipster remixes in NYC and elsewhere, there is plenty to celebrate and appreciate when a whole hog finds its way from the pasture to the fire to the plates of hungry people. The “other white meat” when done the traditional way is a culinary sight to behold. Which is why it will continue to be the high-water mark for friends and family gathering in the places that know how to cook a pig proper. Regardless of trends in restaurants and food circles, the pig pickin’ will be there when a large group of folks get together for whatever reason they need to. There will be drinks and side dishes of course, but the star will always be that entire pig on the pit, ready to serve with only 12–24 hours worth of work and wait.

There is nothing neat, clean, quick, or easy about whole hog barbecue. The prep and cooking is as involved as the history of how it became a tradition in the first place. But that’s what makes it special, and fitting for moments of gathering for a celebration or a cause. Everyone has hardships in life; coming together to appreciate the hard work of someone to prep a whole hog lets folks share that commonality, even if it’s only for a few bites before the arguments of how it was done start up anew.

Nobody ever said pigs were easy.

Even at Patch Farmstead the not easy part is the point, right down to how they got to raising pigs in the first place: “Once we found our spot it didn’t take a minute to figure that pigs were going to be the way you go here. If we’d have bought nice clean pasture maybe I’d have had cattle or goats,” Tim Ellis explains about his own land of pigs, and kids, and traditions. “But overgrown hardwood forest begs for one critter only.”

“Lucky,” saith the sailor-turned-pig expert, “it makes the best of all the meats.”

Makes for good eating too, especially as part of a fellowship of friends and family. Enjoying each other, and everything but the oink.