the pitpork shoulder

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 half, which cured on the bone is a 'picnic ham'. The butt's name is a barrel, not an anatomy. In the North Carolina Piedmont, shoulder is the only cut that counts as barbecue: Lexington pits salt it, lay it over oak and hickory coals for nine to twelve hours, and serve it chopped, coarse chopped or sliced under a red dip. It is darker meat than the loin and stays moist through a long cook, and it is what packers ship when they will not ship a carcass.

New England butchers of the colonial and Revolutionary era stored and shipped pork in barrels called butts, and the shoulder cut they packed that way took the name of the port; a 1912 University of Illinois bulletin notes the barrels still going to Germany and Denmark, and 'Boston butt' first appears in print in 1915. In the Carolinas the cut's rise is the whole hog's decline. The Piedmont settled on shoulders early — Tradition holds — because a shoulder fit a small brick pit and a lunch counter's day in a way a carcass did not. By the 1980s the corporate farms replacing independent hog farms shipped butchered shoulders and hams rather than whole pigs, which pushed restaurants elsewhere the same way. Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, which began in 1929 by cooking three or four pigs and a goat, told Our State in 2016: 'Now we just use the butt.' South Carolina hash, once made from heads and liver, is now mostly made from leftover shoulder.

Lexington pits cook shoulders only, salted but not basted or marinated, on racks over oak and hickory coals for nine to twelve hours at about 200 to 225 degrees; the Barbecue Center puts three hundred a week through its pit. Elsewhere a butt is rubbed, smoked until it reaches 195 to 205 degrees inside, and shredded. Off the pit the Piedmont serves it three ways — chopped fine, coarse chopped in small chunks, or sliced; never pulled, at Lexington Barbecue — and dresses it with dip. Tradition holds — the crusted outer meat is sold apart as outside brown.

Shoulder is the cut of the Piedmont's pits — Lexington Barbecue, the Barbecue Center, Stamey's, Red Bridges, Short Sugar's — and of most new restaurants in both states, because it arrives boxed from the packer; a pulled-pork menu anywhere in the country means this cut. At Lexington Barbecue a chopped tray was $8.00 cash and $8.25 by card in September 2026.