the pitpig 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, the tailgate or the fire station and home again. Carolina Cooker of Micro, North Carolina, builds one of 12-gauge steel with four propane burners on a leaf-spring trailer, listed at $2,599.99 in September 2026; BQ Grills of Elm City builds towable charcoal-and-wood cookers of eighth-inch steel in five- and six-foot lengths at $7,200 to $9,800. The article on the pig pickin' calls the grills 'as varied as the methods of producing them', some homemade, some custom-made.

The pig pickin' moved the whole hog off the farm pit and onto wheels. Tradition holds — welded cookers appeared in eastern North Carolina after the Second World War, when propane and a cutting torch put a pit within reach of anyone with a trailer hitch, and the rental cooker followed. What the article on the pig pickin' records is the argument the cooker started: propane 'is said to maintain a consistent temperature, whereas charcoal or charwood are often touted as producing better-tasting meat', and the cooks who run charcoal add chunks of blackjack oak or hickory for the smoke, or keep a separate stove of hardwood to make coals and shovel them under the grate. The cooking is communal and 'usually directed by an authority figure' — the host, helped by friends and family — and the pig goes on meat-side down for four to eight hours and is flipped once when it stops dripping fat. Ed Mitchell learned on a family cooker in Wilson: at fourteen or fifteen he tended the fire after the men, having passed the moonshine, fell asleep, and his grandfather woke to a cooked pig and poured him his first glass.

The split hog goes on the grate meat-side down; on gas the burners run low, on charcoal the coals are lit in the bed or shoveled in from a hardwood stove; the lid comes down for four to eight hours until the dripping slows, and the hog is flipped once, skin down, to crisp. Some cooks wipe the ash from the skin with paper towels or a whisk broom before the flip so the cracklings come out clean. Off the cooker the meat is chopped, pulled, or picked straight off the bones by the guests.

Cookers are built and sold across the Coastal Plain — Micro and Elm City among the makers — and every pig pickin', tailgate and fire-department plate sale runs on one. Gas is the ordinary choice and charcoal the argued-for one.