Learn about a dish popular at certain American barbecues
Now Playing: Lesson Audio
Get a breakdown of the dialogue and translations instantly with the Premium line-by-line Audio. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
| Pig Picking |
| It seems that almost every major event in Eastern North Carolina is accompanied by a pig pickin'. Depending on the size of the event, this can mean that one or more groups of people, the majority men, gather around a repurposed oil drum that has been cut in half, fitted with a grill of expanded metal, and painted black in order to cook a pig. And when I say pig, I mean an entire pig. They set folding chairs around the pig cooker and drink all night, carefully checking on it and adding their own special spices as the night goes on. |
| When the pig is finished, usually some of the pork is pulled and mixed with more spices in order to create barbecue. Now, where I grew up, barbecue was anything you cooked on a grill. Not so in the South. Barbecue is only pulled pork, and, depending upon your region, flavorings. Eastern North Carolina barbecue is made with vinegar, red pepper, and other spices. The rest of the pig is left in the cooker, and people "pick" the meat they want off the carcass. |
| Admittedly, the first time I went to a pig pickin', I was a bit taken aback. You simply don't see an entire dead pig in Los Angeles. But now I am used to seeing the cookers smoking away at football games, fund-raisers, birthday parties, and even weddings. Hog farming has a long tradition here, and pig pickin' is a part of that tradition. |
Comments
Hide