Page 18 - October 2021 Issue

Ardie Davis
aka Remus Powers BBQ Hall of Famer ardiedavis@kc.rr.com
Beware of Goblins Bearing Coffee Salt and Hog Sugar!
The late Lucretia Peabody Hale’s story about Mrs. Peterkin, “The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee” became a bestselling children’s picture book in 1868. Hale kept her salty coffee theme going in two more “Peterkin Papers” editions. Although the stories caught on, salty coffee didn’t.
In a similar vein, have you read stories about “The Pitmaster Who Put Sugar in Her Barbecued Hog?” No such stories exist in a Her or His version. Unlike salty coffee, however, sugar in hogs, ribs and shoulders has caught on in the competition barbecue network and elsewhere since the early 1990s. Sugar’s porky popularity has rapidly grown nationwide ever since.
Salt has a long history in North America. Coffee, processed sugar and pork came along thousands of years after indigenous humans were already thriving on the continent’s vast swath of coasts, rivers, lakes, forests, mountains and plains.
Today, salt and sugar are major players in the intercontinental culinary drama. Salt is a flavor carrier mineral essential to our physical health. Processed sugar’s physical health role is less im- portant than salt, but it plays a star role in feeding our emotional health. The pleasure sugar delivers to our palates fuels a multi- billion dollar food industry as well as weight reduction and phar- maceutical industries.
We know the downside of too much salt and sugar in our bodies. During this traditional Halloween season of ghosts and goblins, if you happen to meet up with “Pythagoras” preaching “All things in moderation,” be sure to tell him, “Good luck with that!” The
thought of “Pythagoras” Trick or Treating with a bag full of candy is hilarious!
Health and food science matters aside, discovering how the bar- becue we know and love today evolved from its distant past to now is a tangled red, white and black path full of ghosts, myths, and conflict. Far be it from me to untangle that path, but I’ll dab- ble a bit in the conversation.
Take, for example, the notion that the only real barbecue is pork barbecue—no beef, bison, chicken, turkey, duck, quail, pheasant, opossum, raccoon, woodchuck, squirrel, rabbit, carp, catfish, alli- gator, rattlesnake and so forth. I call it hogmatism. The earliest stewards of this land were no strangers to meat fires; they knew no such thing as pork barbecue—or processed sugar for that mat- ter.
With her first sip of salted coffee, Mrs. Peterkin knew she had made a mistake. Sugared hogs are another matter. In the late 1980s when I first met Joe Phelps and Doc Gillis at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, the whole hogs I judged then and several years forward were sauced with seasoned apple cider vinegar that complemented the natu- rally sweet meat of the pork. A decade or so later the prevailing sauce complement on hogs, shoulders and ribs was sweet, usually a tomato base with a touch of vinegar and a heap of sugar. It has been that way for the most part ever since. Will whole hog barbe- cue restaurants be next?
We live in the Sugar Age. Given the rapid pace of food science it is possible that there are healthy sweeteners on the horizon that will satisfy our sweet tooth without the collateral diabetes and/or obesity penalties we pay for consuming excess processed sugar.
Meanwhile the Salt & Sugar Show will go on. Shall we buy a bucket of salted/buttered popcorn, a handful of candy bars and a tall sweet fizzy cold soda—no hot salted coffee, please—and enjoy the show?
To paraphrase a popular Pogo quip, “We have met the Salt and Sugar Goblins and they are us!” Pythagoras can wait. Happy Hal- loween!
Some say each philosopher has an angle on the Truth. Others say Pythagoras had the only right angle.
www.PigCuttingBoard.com
Beaufort, NC • (252) 646-6101
BarbecueNews.com - 16
OCTOBER 2021