a dishpork skins

The pig's hide, cooked until it blisters and cracks. On an eastern whole hog the skin faces up through the night and is turned to the coals at the end to crisp; at Skylight Inn it is chopped into the meat, where the crunch and the salt are part of what 'barbecue' means. Sold on their own, skins are a side or a snack: fresh fried squares with pimento cheese at Sam Jones BBQ, a pork skin sandwich with slaw at Lexington Barbecue. In the Pee Dee the hog is sometimes skinned before cooking and the skin fried on its own. A crackling keeps a little fat and meat under the skin; a rind is skin alone.

The skin is the pit's own by-product. At a hog killing the fat is rendered for lard and the cracklings are what is left in the pot, and tradition holds — crackling bread, cornbread with cracklings baked in, was the winter bread of the farm. On the eastern pit the same crust comes off the barbecue: the small hogs of the Carolinas are cooked hot enough for the skin to crisp, and the skin takes up more of the smoke than the meat does, so the chopped skin carries the flavor of the fire into every bite. At a pig pickin some cooks wipe the ash from the skin with paper towels or a whisk broom before the hog is turned, to keep the cracklings clean. Tennessee cooks larger hogs at lower heat and the skin never crisps — one of the marks that separate the Carolina hog from the Memphis one. At Skylight Inn the chop takes in tenderloin, inner meat and crisped skin together, which NCpedia records as the eastern habit: in some areas bits of skin are integral to the finished product. South of the line the Pee Dee sometimes strips the hide before the pig goes on and fries it apart, and NCpedia notes North Carolinians who follow that lead, sorting skin from outside meat from inside meat.

On the pit: the hog cooks skin-up, is turned skin-down at the end, and the blistered skin is chopped with cleavers into the meat, or lifted, salted and broken into pieces. Fried: the skin is cut into squares, rendered slowly, then fried hot so it puffs. Commercial rinds are dried pellets rehydrated and fried in pork fat at 200–210 °C, which swells them to five times their size; the pink or purple spot on a bagged rind is a USDA inspection stamp. Eaten with the fingers, salted, with hot sauce, or with pimento cheese.

Sam Jones BBQ lists fresh fried pork skins with housemade pimento cheese (September 2026). Lexington Barbecue sells a pork skin sandwich with slaw at $4.50 cash, $4.65 card (September 2026). Bagged rinds from the gas station are the same thing at a distance.