The Bible, a Bullet and a Slice of Beef Brisket

Daniel Wood fills his boots in the Lone Star State

Daniel Wood | Image: Kelly Sutherland | Published: June 01, 2005

A mean thunderstorm was hammering Llano (pop. 3,500) and I’d studied its fury from the mesquite and oak covered hills that surround the little central Texas town. I knew I was in tornado country. A big one had made a direct hit on downtown Fort Worth a few months earlier – its high-rise buildings were still covered with plywood. So I pulled into the puddle-filled apron of Cooper’s Old Time Bar-B-Que that evening, ordered a mesquite-smoked pork rib, a slice of beef brisket and a half-pound of chicken from the pitman operating the roofed, outdoor barbecue pit, settled down at one of the restaurant’s indoor picnic tables, and surveyed the scene. The sign on the Men’s Room door read: ‘Don’t squat with your spurs on.’ I made a note to remember that.

Ten deer heads – stuffed animals are a de rigueur decoration in Texan BBQ joints – hung on the walls above a collection of photos of the restaurant’s celebrity customers. One face was familiar. Had the Democrats used the picture of then-Governor George W. Bush, his mouth unflatteringly agape as he tried to chow down a Texas-sized Cooper’s pork rib… well, things – I told myself – might have turned out differently in America.

This thought, however, was interrupted by the realization that four very large women, each carrying a mountain of barbecued meat and coleslaw, had begun sitting down on the far side of my communal picnic table. It took only a nanosecond to calculate that their throw-weight far exceeded my inertia. With the right launch angle, I figured I could soon be performing an airborne face-plant against the president of the United States. I quickly pointed out the danger. They giggled and two joined me on my side of the table. And I was left to reflect on a state where – as a Fourth of July entertainment up in the Panhandle region to the north – people shoot Bibles nailed on fence posts. They then read the bullet-dimpled Biblical verse where the slug has stopped – the pregnant chad, so to speak – to learn their fortune. Yep, Texas, as its residents are proud to tell you, is not like other places.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S BBQ

Texans claim they invented

barbecue. They say its roots lie in 19th-century cattle drives when cowboys would sit around smoking the meat of longhorns over smouldering mesquite. As romantic myth: it’s picturesque. As history: it’s baloney. The origins of BBQ lie to the south of Texas where the Caribbean Arawak tribes and the early Mexicans had words similar to “barbecue” to describe the slow cooking of meat. It is, by tradition, a poor man’s meal because it utilizes the cheapest cuts of meat. As this style has spread into North America in the last 150 years, it has dispersed into a half-dozen regional variations –- as distinct to residents of the U.S. South as recipes for pecan pie. Within Texas, there are, in fact, three BBQ styles. In west Texas, the beef – usually brisket – is slow cooked over mesquite and served unadorned in the ‘cowboy style.’ The Tex-Mex style of southern Texas often features goat smoked for a half day over pecan wood and served up with a spicy chili-flavoured sauce. Those in north Texas cook their beef over hickory and apply a syrupy tomato-based sauce.

North and east of the Lone Star State, BBQ has taken other permutations. The Carolina style of ‘pulled pork’ BBQ requires the smoked meat be removed from the bone and served on a Kaiser bun with a vinegar/pepper sauce. The Memphis style required the cayenne-flavoured pork be served dry in a sandwich. The Kansas City style is honey-glazed pork brisket, sliced like pastrami and served on a bun.

To Texan sensibilities, these abominations have little to do with genuine BBQ. Texan barbecue MUST be smoked many (six to 14) hours at a low (95 to 180 degrees C) temperature. The thought that the meat be served on a bun sets Texans to polishing their guns. Barbecue is finger food. It is served on a sheet of butcher paper. You get your sleeve dirty wiping your mouth. Even worse to Texan minds is the appropriation
of the word “barbecue” by Northerners who think that slapping some bottled sauce onto their T-bones, then firing up their stainless-steel Weber gas grill is barbecuing.

It ain’t. That’s charbroiling. It’s cheating. It’s like going to a suntan parlour rather than earning a tan chasing steers under a hot sun. To barbecue correctly, say Texans, the unmarinated meat –- usually the toughest cuts – is placed within a tightly-covered smoker where the flames are long gone, but the heat from the coals remains. Hours pass. The hot wood smoke gradually imparts its flavour to the meat and makes it tender. Meanwhile, copious amounts of beer are drunk. Patience is the main ingredient of a true Texas barbecue.

The portions of BBQ meat normally served at a meal –- as one might expect in Texas – are humungous. These portions are accompanied by a wallop of coleslaw, a glob of baked beans and a couple of thick slabs of white bread. The meal is typically washed down with beer or a vile-tasting, bubble-gum flavoured soda called Big Red. Dessert, tradition dictates, is an ice-cold Snickers bar fresh from the fridge. The only lean in Texan cuisine is couchward.

The legend of the white-hatted sharpshooter lies at the heart of the Lone Star State. That the open range has long been fenced, that cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail are ancient history, that real cowboys are rarer than one-eyed vegetarians in Texas, doesn’t diminish the survival of the myth. Willie Nelson was being ironic when he sang: “Mothers, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.” A young man without a big brass buckle, pointy-toed boots, and a Stetson is practically naked at Billy Bob’s Texas, the world’s largest (capacity 6,000) nightclub, located in what was once a cow barn in Fort Worth’s stockyards. And thousands of wannabe Texas cowpokes gather each week to watch performances by people like John Wayne Holland, 52, a rodeo cowboy who has broken a few bones ropin’ and ridin’ cattle and who tells me that he’ll be doin’ just that until the day he stops breathin’.

The cow may be a dumb and ugly creature. The horse has been replaced by a four-wheel-drive Bronco. But for Texans, these two animals are iconic: the subject of reverence among the God-fearin’, freedom-lovin’, meat-eatin’ folk.

“The way to provoke a good argument in Texas is to talk barbecue.” The speaker is gregarious, 45-year-old Bud Kennedy, well-known food columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and – at 250-plus pounds – a walking billboard, of sorts, for the state’s cuisine. There’s a tradition in Texas, he explains: “Eat NOTHING that’s not brown orwhite.” It is a culinary dictum he admits to following: fried chicken, barbecued meat, steak, potatoes, gravy, beans, bread, chili, burgers, Coke, beer… As he lists the choices and sees my amused expression, Kennedy adds: “I’m not opposed to fruit or vegetables. A good iceberg lettuce salad…” I resist saying a good iceberg lettuce salad is, in my opinion, an oxymoron. He is, after all, the culinary expert. His fame has required that he serve as a judge at some of the thousands of barbecue cook-offs that occur across the state – in every town, for every charity, at every small-time rodeo.

Only in Texas is cooking a spectator sport. In his capacity as judge, Kennedy has sampled barbecued armadillo and barbecued rattlesnake, scores of versions of fiery chili, hundreds of variations of barbecued beef, and – on one occasion – 88 competing bowls of pinto beans. The next day, I find myself at an International Barbecue Cookers’ Association competition held on the outskirts of Fort Worth. The aromas of smoky mesquite and simmering beef surround the 200 or so motor homes and vans, parked together covered-wagon style beneath a tenting sun. Awnings shade the contestants, mostly men with Homer Simpson paunches and drawls as slow as the Pecos River. They sit in plastic lawn chairs, their boots up, chatting with neighbours and drinking the morning’s third or fourth icy Bud. Dense clouds of smoke issue from the contestants’ oversized barbecues, which the men pay religious attention to – like acolytes at a holy shrine.

These trailer-mounted devices are homemade: reconfigured from 24-inch oil pipeline casings or big propane tanks. Some are plain steel and some carry the Confederate flag or an advertising logo. It’s clear from the camaraderie and the investment involved that these men travel – as they admit doing – the Barbecue Circuit, roaming the South, trying to acquire some cash and minor celebrity for their particular version of smoked meat and dipping sauce. It is a group, I suspect, where the appellation ‘Red Neck’ would be heard as praise.

I’m drawn to a banner that reads WOOD COOKIN’ TEAM. It hangs on the side of a big Excalibur RV, just above the ugliest of all the competitors’ barbecues: a two-metre-high, soot-blackened steel bull with smoke escaping from its horns and mouth. As I study the chimera, contestant Goober Lloyd informs me, “It’s anatomically correct.”

I bend slightly and say, “I think anatomically enhanced.” For this astute observation, I’m invited to join Lloyd and his Cookin’ Team, a group of Decatur, Texas car salesmen, and learn a thing or two about barbecuing – while I swig a late morning Bud. Sear the meat first, these experts say. Then, slow cook over mesquite coals for eight hours. Keep the heat even. Concoct a flavourful dipping sauce. Eat. As we chat, Lloyd performs a strange medical procedure on the chickens he has removed momentarily from the barbecue. Using a frightening, 15-centimetre-long veterinarian’s syringe, he injects marinade into the half-barbecued birds. For the record, the blackish syrup in his syringe contains: apricot sauce, BBQ sauce, mesquite flavouring, sugar, honey, Miller Lite and Low-Cal Pepsi. (I later learn, to my surprise, the chicken took fourth prize.)

COME 'N GIT IT

Fort Worth (pop. 500,000), the blue-collar little brother to nearby Dallas, bills itself as ‘Cowtown.’ A sign in the once-derelict, now trendy Stockyard District reads: ‘Where the West Begins.’ For decades in the 19th century, Fort Worth was a way station on the famed Chisholm Trail. It had the reputation as a rough place where cowboys and their cows stopped en route to railheads to the north. Today, the streets in the restored Stockyards look like something out of a set for High Noon –- swinging doors to the saloons, covered boardwalks along the shop fronts, and shop clerks dressed up like can-can girls. You can buy a two-pound steak here. Or see the still-operating stockyards Hotel where Bonnie stayed (without her sidekick Clyde) in 1934. It’s also the location of Billy Bob’s Texas, a gargantuan nightclub that features indoor rodeo competitions, 42 different bars and a rhinestone-covered, saddle-shaped mirror ball above one of the dance floors.

In a state where superlatives are as common as double-barrelled first names like Billy Bob and Cindy Lou, assessing the best barbecue restaurants in Texas is no mean feat. There are 3,800 barbecues to choose from. The following three, however, end up on everyone’s list: Angelo’s Great Texas BBQ, Louie Mueller’s Barbecue and Cooper’s Old Time Pit BBQ in Llano. Angelo’s features tender, hickory-smoked pork ribs served in a sprawling cafeteria with –- by my count – 88 different stuffed animals or animal heads on the walls. Mueller’s features oak-smoked briskets of beef served in a 1940s-style atmosphere of ceiling fans, communal tables and walls blackened from 62 years of barbecue smoke. Cooper’s serves 20 kinds of meat – my three choices were all delicious – selected outdoors at the mesquite-fuelled barbecue pits, then eaten at the crowded indoor picnic tables with a spicy dipping sauce that one of the managers described as 90-grain vinegar, ketchup, Tabasco sauce and Llano River water – “with the minnows included.”

As I sit there, the talk goes from college football to the fickleness of women to country music to the abiding appeal of the cowboy as the symbol of Texas. It is a litany of upsets and redemptions. The cold Bud goes down fast. From my vantage point, a dozen flags of the Lone Star State flap from poles nearby. Every Texan can recite the old story: of the Alamo overrun, the short-lived 19th-century Republic of Texas subverted by political intrigues, the defeat of the Confederacy, the appearance of the Yankee Carpetbaggers, the generations of poverty, the Dust Bowl years… These are the crucible from which modern, moneyed Texas – oil, aerospace industries, maquiladora, presidential influence – emerged. I finally bid my hosts goodbye – “Havagoodun” they say in true Texan fashion – and head into a hot High Noon. The modern cowboys sit amid their Winnebago covered-wagons, barbecuing beef, drinking beer, talking about women and listening to Jimmy Buffet’s old lament: “Wastin’ away again in Margaritaville/ Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt…” I hear the song everywhere. It is the anthem of Texas. Despite the regret, the song says, life is good. The creed of the self-sufficient cowboy dictates that if anything is wrong, well… it’s probably my own damn fault.

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