r/NorthCarolinaBBQ

For folks not from eastern North Carolina, this plate probably requires some explanation. That’s whole hog barbecue, meaning the whole pig cooked and chopped together, dressed with a thin vinegar and pepper sauce. The yellow stuff is their tangy coleslaw. Brunswick stew is a thick tomato based stew with meat and vegetables, and those little fried-looking sticks are cornsticks, basically skinny cornbread that we use to scoop up the stew because apparently spoons weren’t edible enough.

Then there’s fried chicken brought out on platters and passed around the long tables family style, with sweet tea poured over crushed ice.

You can argue about whether Parker’s is the best barbecue in NC. We do. Arguing about barbecue is nearly a side dish here.

But the lesson is this: when a restaurant has been feeding families the same food, at the same long tables, for 80 years, eventually it becomes more than somewhere to eat.

At some point, supper becomes history.

A little Eastern North Carolina education for the newcomers.

This is what we call barbecue sauce, although admittedly it does not look like what most of the country has agreed barbecue sauce ought to look like. It’s mostly vinegar, pepper and seasoning, thin enough to run straight through the meat instead of sitting on top of it looking important.

That matters because Eastern North Carolina barbecue is whole hog, cooked slowly over wood coals, chopped together with those little pieces of skin and fat mixed throughout. The vinegar cuts the richness, the pepper wakes up the pork, and the whole thing works because none of it is trying to cover up what the pit already did.

We sometimes call it Eastern North Carolina Holy Worter.

Which is admittedly a little dramatic.

But wait until you see somebody bless a freshly chopped hog with it and tell me I’m wrong.

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