the pitblock pit

An open pit built above ground of cinder blocks — concrete blocks — wide and shallow, a little longer than a split hog, with a rack across the top on which the pig lies and a bed of charcoal below; brick or steel are the alternatives, and the charcoal is made in a fireplace or a burn barrel beside it. It is the whole-hog pit of the Carolinas, the one a farm, a fire department or a family can lay in an afternoon. *Tradition holds —* the blocks go up dry, without mortar, two or three courses high, a gap is left for the shovel, and a sheet of tin or plywood closes the top.

The trench came first. Tradition holds — the farm barbecue of the Carolinas was cooked over a pit dug in the ground, and Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church in Charlotte cooked its 1929 barbecue that way, hickory coals shoved under whole hogs in ditches; by the 1980s metal cookers had replaced the church's dirt pits, with some meat still cooked on open pits inside a screened building. NCpedia records that few commercial pits today are dug in the ground. The cinder block — cheap, fireproof, stackable — is what the open pit became when it climbed out of the ditch. It is the pit of the pig pickin' and the cook-off, and the pit the whole-hog restaurants of the east grew from: the Skylight Inn's hogs cook over charcoal made in fireplaces beside the pits, and Rodney Scott's over hardwood charcoal shoveled from a burn barrel. The Cuban roasting box, by contrast, is a closed box of concrete blocks and steel mesh with the coals on top.

Blocks are laid in a rectangle a little longer and wider than the split hog; a rack spans the top, the hog goes on skin-side up, and a lid holds the heat. Coals from the burn barrel are shoveled in and spread beneath the carcass on a regular round through the night — Tradition holds — heavier under the hams and shoulders, thinner under the loin. The fat that drips hisses on the coals, and a flare-up is the danger the cook watches for; an uncontrolled pit fire can take the pit and the building. After eight to twenty-four hours the hog is flipped once, skin down, to crisp.

The block pit is the pit of the yard, the church lot, the fire station and the competition; restaurants that cook whole hog mostly cook in masonry or steel pits under a roof, and the form — a bed of coals, a rack, a hog, a lid — is the same.