Carolina BarbecueThe pit (11)

gas pit, gas cooker, electric cooker

The cookers most Carolina barbecue is cooked in: steel ovens fired by propane, natural gas or an electric element, with a thermostat and racks, and often a box for wood chips or a log to put smoke on the meat.

pig roaster, hog cooker, trailer cooker

A steel box on a trailer chassis, long enough for a split hog, with a hinged lid, a grate, and either a row of propane burners underneath or a bed for charcoal: the cooker of the pig pickin', towed to the church lot…

shoulder, Boston butt, butt

The front leg and shoulder of the pig, sold as one primal — a primal being one of the large first divisions of a carcass — or split in two: the butt, the upper half with the blade bone, and the picnic, the lower arm…

whole-hog barbecue, whole hog, a pig

The entire dressed pig — dressed meaning gutted and scraped of hair, the head sometimes left on — split open along the backbone, laid flat over coals and cooked as one piece, then pulled from the bones and chopped…

hickory, oak, hardwood

The hardwoods of the Carolina pit. Hickory and oak are the woods a Carolina cook burns, usually together and usually burned down to coals before they go under the meat: Lexington pits cook over oak and hickory coals…

coals under the meat, open-pit, pit-cooked

The Carolina way of putting fire to meat: a bed of hardwood coals directly beneath the hog or the shoulders, with no flame and no separate firebox.

cinder-block pit, concrete-block pit, open 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…

Lexington pit, closed pit, pit house

The masonry pit of the Piedmont: a closed brick chamber with a rack for the shoulders and a chimney through the roof to carry off the smoke.

hog killin', hog-killing day, killing hogs

The winter slaughter of the farm's hogs, done on the first cold day of autumn or winter, when the meat would keep.

burn-barrel, coal barrel, fire barrel

A repurposed steel drum — or, at Scott's in Hemingway, two 55-gallon drums welded together — in which logs are burned down to coals: the wood goes in at the top, the coals are pulled out from below and carried by shovel…

the block, cleavers, chop

A thick wooden block and a pair of cleavers, on which cooked pork is turned into barbecue.