CAROLINA BARBECUE

In the foggy half-light of dawn, a cloud of smoke billows into the early morning Carolina air as a sleepy, soot-covered cook shovels crackling embers of oak beneath hefty iron grates. As the coals turn to dust, he’ll scoop and shovel again, again, and again, just as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather did before him. In these parts of the country, this sort of daybreak ritual can mean only one thing: barbecue.

Barbecue is a technique that was born centuries ago from two civilizations—the Native Americans and the Spanish. Native American tribes that inhabited the south Atlantic shore of the United States were masters of wood-roasting meats. They developed a technique using a combination of fire and smoke that kept meat juicy and tender through hours of cooking while infusing each bite with succulent smokiness. In the 1500s, the Spanish introduced pigs to the western hemisphere, and they flourished, especially in the Southeast. Unlike cattle, pigs have a high birth rate (a female pig often produces 20