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The regional table / Tennessee

Memphis Barbecue Spaghetti

Published September 23, 2026 · Tennessee

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Memphis makes a spaghetti out of chopped pit pork, and the pork is the only part of it that ever sees smoke.

This one belongs to Memphis and to nowhere else, and the record for it is an oral record. The Southern Foodways Alliance sent Rien Fertel through the Memphis barbecue houses in July 2008 and posted the transcripts in full; of the fourteen Tennessee barbecue interviews I pulled from that collection, only three say the word spaghetti at all, and only two say anything about the dish. Both point at the same house. Frank Vernon, who came into the business in 1983 by buying the old Brady & Lil's and later renamed it the Bar-B-Q Shop, is asked outright whether Brady & Lil's originated it and answers, "That's exactly right; it's the original way." Jim Neely of Interstate, who grew up next door to Brady's mother, gives the same credit unprompted and from the other side of the street: "Lily and Brady came up with this barbecue spaghetti idea", and before Brady closed the place and died "he gave me the recipe. There's only two people in Memphis that has Brady's recipe; that's me and Frank Vernon." Two men who competed for the same customers agreeing on who was first is about as good as a twentieth-century dish gets, and it is still their claim rather than a document — the SFA's own note on the Bar-B-Q Shop calls Brady & Lil's the "supposed originator". Neither transcript prints a surname for Brady; Neely places him as the son of a neighbour who could barbecue, a Mr. Owens, and even the restaurant's name comes out of the two men's mouths in two orders, Brady & Lil's and Lily and Brady's. So he is Brady here, as he is there.

How old it is, nobody reachable can say. Vernon puts the recipe at "over 50 years old" in 2008 and says Brady & Lil's "had been around anywhere from 40 to 50 years before we even took over"; the SFA's own headnote dates that restaurant only to the 1950s, and nothing I could open settles the difference. Eric Vernon adds that "you really didn't start seeing barbecue spaghetti in the other barbecue restaurants until like the late '80s", which fits Charlie Robertson at Three Little Pigs, whose single mention of it is that the shop does spaghetti for catering and never put it on the menu. The newspapers are no help and their silence is worth stating: Nebraska's archive holds 7,493 pages carrying the word spaghetti and not one carrying barbecue spaghetti, and Georgia's returns eight pages for the phrase of which seven are accidents of typesetting — a lawn-party menu of "barbecue, spaghetti, cold slaw and punch" in 1934, a grocer's list of Castleberry's canned goods in 1958, a column of church suppers in 1972. The eighth is a Memphis travel column from 2014. The nearest real near-miss is a syndicated picnic page in The Jackson Progress-Argus of 20 July 1950 headed "Barbecued Spaghetti": ground beef, tomato juice and Worcestershire, the spaghetti boiled five minutes and then laid on top of the sauce to simmer ten more. Same name, different dish, and Neely rules it out in one line — "instead of using ground beef, we take the barbecue pork meat". Tennessee's own lane is a dead end too: the Tennessee Virtual Archive answers a script perfectly well and holds one item with the word spaghetti in it and nothing on this at all. There is no printed ancestor to copy, so the quantities below were worked out for this page.

Why this version works

Onion, basil and parsley. These are the only seasonings named anywhere in the archive for this dish — Neely blends the pork "with basil, onions, and parsley" — and they are a better set than they look. Memphis sauce runs sweet from molasses, and sweetness with no green edge goes flat by the third forkful. The onion goes in at the start and melts into the base; the herbs go in off the heat, because basil simmered for twenty minutes tastes of hay.

The meat is the barbecue. Neely settles what the name means better than anyone has since: "Of course there ain't no way in the world you can put the spaghetti on the pit and barbecue the spaghetti itself. It's the meat that makes the barbecue spaghetti." Everything smoky in the bowl arrives already smoked. If the pork is oven-roasted or, worse, boiled and sauced, no amount of seasoning later will put the smoke back, and you have spaghetti in barbecue sauce, which is a different and much duller thing.

Drained, then finished in the pan. The two accounts pull apart here and it is worth knowing which is which. Neely, the only first-hand description of the method in the whole collection, dresses it: "we simply drain the spaghetti after we get it done and we take and chop this meat and mix—mix it in with the barbecue sauce in the spaghetti." The SFA's own summary of the Bar-B-Q Shop instead calls it "noodles simmered in sauce and pork trimmings". Boiling the pasta two minutes short and then giving it three or four minutes in the sauce is the honest middle: it drinks enough to be stained through and to stop sliding off the fork, without going soft or turning the sauce cloudy with starch. Cooking it from raw in the sauce, the 1950 skillet way, leaves you with a gluey pan and pasta that tastes of tomato and nothing else.

A cooked base, not a bottle emptied over it. The one point Vernon will make about his method is exactly this: "everybody else probably takes barbecue spaghetti and puts barbecue sauce in it, chop meat up; we got a base that we actually cook on the pit and this base right here is the secret." No home kitchen has a pit to stand a pot on, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What is transferable is the principle — the sauce and the chopped pork cook together for twenty minutes before any pasta comes near them, long enough for the fat to melt out of the meat and carry the smoke into the tomato. Sauce poured over hot pork at the last second never does that.

Ingredient notes

Pork: A pound and a half of smoked pork shoulder, chopped rather than pulled — Neely says "we take and chop this meat", and chopped pieces hold their shape in a sauced pan while long pulled strands tangle into the spaghetti and disappear. Leftovers from a butt are ideal. If you are buying it from a barbecue counter, ask for it unsauced and by weight; a pound and a half is generous and a pound will do.

Herbs: Fresh basil and fresh parsley, chopped just before they go in. Dried basil is not a substitute here; it has none of the top notes that the sweetness needs answered, and it will simply sink. A handful of thinly sliced scallion greens does the same job if basil is out of season.

The base: Plain canned tomato sauce, cider vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire and yellow mustard, in the Memphis proportions: tomato forward, sweet but not candied, with enough vinegar to keep it from cloying. Use unsulphured molasses and measure it — a quarter cup reads right and a third of a cup makes dessert. If your smoked pork came heavily sauced anyway, cut the molasses by half.

Spaghetti: Plain dried spaghetti, not thin spaghetti and not fresh pasta. It needs to survive four minutes in a hot pan after the pot, which thin strands do not, and fresh egg pasta goes to mush on contact. Salt the boiling water properly and keep a cup of it back — it is the only thing that will loosen the pan at the end without watering the sauce down.

Step by step

  1. Chop the pork. Cut the smoked shoulder into rough quarter-inch pieces, keeping any bark. Set aside about a quarter of it to go in at the end, so some of the meat keeps its texture rather than dissolving into the sauce.
  2. Start the onion. Warm the oil or reserved pork drippings in a wide, deep skillet or a Dutch oven over medium heat. Cook the onion with a pinch of salt for 8 minutes, until soft and just beginning to colour, then add the garlic and cook 1 minute more.
  3. Build the base. Add the tomato sauce, stock, vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire, mustard, paprika, black pepper and cayenne. Bring to a bare simmer and cook uncovered 20 minutes, stirring now and then, until it has thickened enough to coat a spoon.
  4. Simmer the pork into it. Stir in the larger share of the chopped pork and simmer another 20 minutes on low. This is the step that stands in for the pit: the fat renders out of the meat and the smoke goes into the sauce. Taste and correct the salt now, while there is still nothing else in the pan.
  5. Boil the spaghetti short. Cook the spaghetti in well-salted water two minutes less than the box says — it should still be stiff in the middle. Reserve a cup of the water and drain, but do not rinse.
  6. Finish in the pan. Tip the drained spaghetti into the sauce and toss over low heat 3 to 4 minutes, until the strands are stained through and the sauce clings instead of pooling. Loosen with the reserved water a splash at a time.
  7. Herbs and the rest of the meat. Off the heat, fold in the reserved pork, the basil and the parsley. Let it sit 2 minutes before serving; it thickens as it stands, so keep the last of the pasta water within reach.
A pan that has gone thick, dull and slightly gluey means the spaghetti sat too long in the sauce and gave up its starch. Add the reserved pasta water two tablespoons at a time over low heat, stirring until the sauce moves again, and finish with a teaspoon of vinegar to wake the flavour back up. The opposite failure — sauce sliding off the strands into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl — is undercooked base, not too little sauce: lift the pasta out with tongs, boil the sauce down for three or four minutes, and put them back together.

Storage and make-ahead

Refrigerated, it keeps 4 days, and it changes overnight: the pasta goes on drinking sauce until there is none loose left. Reheat in a covered pan over low heat with a few tablespoons of water or stock, not in the microwave, which cooks the edges to paste before the middle is warm.

The base alone freezes well for 3 months and is the part worth making double of. Freeze it before the pasta goes anywhere near it, thaw it overnight, and you are twelve minutes from dinner.

What to serve with it

In Memphis this is a side dish that got out of hand, ordered next to a chopped pork sandwich rather than instead of one. At home, treated as dinner, it wants something sharp beside it and nothing else rich: a vinegar slaw, dill pickle chips, white bread to wipe the bowl. To drink, keep it cold and unsweet — sweet tea against a molasses sauce is too much of the same idea twice.

From the recipe box / Tennessee

Memphis Barbecue Spaghetti

Chopped smoked pork shoulder simmered into a tomato-and-molasses base, with spaghetti boiled, drained and finished in the pan until it has drunk some of it.

Prep
20 min
Cook
55 min
Total
1 hr 15 min
Serves
6
Calories
660 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Chop the smoked pork into quarter-inch pieces and set a quarter of it aside for the finish.
  2. Cook the onion in the drippings over medium heat 8 minutes with a pinch of salt, then add the garlic for 1 minute.
  3. Add the tomato sauce, stock, vinegar, molasses, Worcestershire, mustard, paprika, black pepper, cayenne and salt, and simmer uncovered 20 minutes.
  4. Stir in the larger share of the pork and simmer 20 minutes more on low, then taste for salt.
  5. Boil the spaghetti in well-salted water 2 minutes short of the package time, reserve 1 cup of the water and drain without rinsing.
  6. Toss the spaghetti in the sauce over low heat 3–4 minutes, loosening with the reserved water until the sauce clings.
  7. Off the heat, fold in the reserved pork, the basil and the parsley, and rest 2 minutes before serving.

Nutrition

Fat27 g (9 g saturated)
Sodium980 mg
Protein34 g
Servinga generous cup
Calories660
Cholesterol85 mg
Carbohydrates70 g (14 g sugar, 4 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

What if I have no smoked pork?

Then make something else, or buy a pound from a barbecue counter on the way home. The smoke in this bowl is entirely borrowed from the meat, and there is no way to add it at the stove that does not taste like it was added at the stove. Oven-roasted shoulder makes a decent sauced pasta; it does not make this.

Can I use bottled barbecue sauce?

You can, and it will be eatable, but it is the exact shortcut Vernon defines his own dish against — "everybody else probably takes barbecue spaghetti and puts barbecue sauce in it, chop meat up". If you do use a bottle, thin about two cups of it with a cup of stock and a splash of vinegar and still simmer the chopped pork in it for twenty minutes. The simmering is the part that matters, not which tomato you started from.

Is it a side dish or a main course?

In Memphis it is a side, sold alongside a chopped pork sandwich or a plate of ribs, and some houses treat it as a catering item rather than menu food — Charlie Robertson at Three Little Pigs says they do ribs, chicken and spaghetti for catering while the menu stays chopped and pulled pork. At six servings this recipe is dinner for four and a side for six; it scales either way without changing.

Is the spaghetti cooked in the sauce or dressed with it?

Dressed, on the only first-hand evidence there is. Neely boils it, drains it and mixes the chopped meat and sauce through it; the SFA's own description of the Bar-B-Q Shop version says the noodles are simmered in the sauce, and no transcript backs that up with a method. Pulling the pasta two minutes early and finishing it in the pan gets the absorption the second description implies without the starch and the mush that cooking it from raw in sauce produces.