The regional table / North Carolina
Lexington Pork Shoulder with Red Slaw
The Piedmont kept the vinegar and the pepper and added two spoons of ketchup, and North Carolina has been arguing about it ever since.
Both sides of that argument are in print and the dates are what settle who changed what. The eastern books do not have a tomato in them: the Raleigh Cook Book of 1907 barbecues pork by adding half a teacup of vinegar to the gravy and basting while it bakes, and the Henderson Cook Book of 1914 builds its barbecue sauce out of stock, vinegar, browned flour, mustard, salt, cayenne and black pepper. As late as 1928 the Ladies Aid Society of the First Baptist Church in Wadesboro printed a barbecued chicken of vinegar, butter, water and a broken pod of red pepper in the Anson County Cook Book, and no tomato either. Then, in October 1940, the Women of the North Carolina State Grange published their Grange Cook Book and Household Guide, and there it is twice: Mrs. Harry B. Caldwell of Summerfield Grange bastes with butter, catsup, water, vinegar and pepper, kept hot so the butter stays melted, and Mrs. B. M. Casper of Yost Grange cooks an onion and a small red pepper soft, adds a cup of tomato catsup and black pepper, and bastes the meat every thirty minutes in the oven. The ketchup arrives in the North Carolina record between the wars, and it arrives alongside the vinegar rather than instead of it.
Lexington itself is thinner in the documents than its reputation suggests. When the Federal Writers' Project walked visitors through the town in its 1939 guide to the state, it gave them the courthouse square reserved for public buildings in 1824, the Classical Revival courthouse with six stone Corinthian columns and the slave auction blocks flanking its entrance steps, the Century Oaks in the Lowe yard and the flour and cotton mills — and not one word about barbecue, in the town that would become its capital. The state's standard reference caught up later: the Encyclopedia of North Carolina calls Lexington the inspirational centre of the Piedmont style, chopped or sliced shoulder with a thin tomato-based sauce that most vendors do not baste with, because it burns, and therefore serve at the table, which is how it came to be called dip. The red slaw beside it is cabbage coloured with ketchup or with the dip itself. I could not open North Carolina's digitised newspapers while writing this — the DigitalNC servers refused every connection — so the dated Lexington press record is not in this article, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What is here is the cookbook record, which is enough to show when the tomato came and what it came with.
Why this version works
The dip does two jobs. It dresses the meat and it dresses the cabbage. A slaw made with the same vinegar, ketchup, sugar and pepper that went on the pork binds the plate together, and because it carries no mayonnaise it stays sharp through a fatty sandwich instead of doubling the richness.
No basting, on purpose. Sugar and tomato char, drip and flare, and the Encyclopedia of North Carolina names that combustibility as the reason Piedmont pits stopped mopping with their sauce. Cook the meat with salt and pepper only, and the outside builds a dry crust that takes sauce afterwards instead of burning it on.
Outside brown belongs in the chop. The dark, chewy exterior is the most concentrated thing on the shoulder. Chop it through the pale interior meat rather than trimming it off, in roughly one part crust to four parts inside, and every forkful gets both. Trimmed away, the meat is bland; left whole, it is all you taste.
Shoulder alone, and that is the point. Eastern barbecue chops a whole hog together. The Piedmont cooks the shoulder, a single muscle group with a heavy fat cap and a seam of collagen that turns to gelatin between 195 and 205°F. Cooked alone it tastes more of itself and less of the animal, which is exactly what its partisans want and exactly what its critics complain about.