a wordchopped

The way most Carolina barbecue reaches the tray: cooked meat cut across on a block with cleavers — in the east fine enough to hold the thin vinegar sauce, in the Piedmont in larger pieces. At a Lexington counter it is an ordering word with a scale, chopped, coarse chopped, sliced, and each is a different plate from the same shoulder. 'Sliced' is the far end, the shoulder cut into slabs and not chopped at all. A whole hog is chopped all together, skin included, so that every tray gets every part.

Chop is a Middle English verb of uncertain parentage, and by the 1630s a chop was a slice of pork. The barbecue sense grows out of the whole hog: once the meat comes off the bones it goes to the block, and the food writers Jane and Michael Stern called the sound of cleavers on it among the most alluring things about Carolina whole hog. NCpedia gives the eastern meat as 'boned, chopped, or shredded' and the western as 'chopped or sliced pork shoulders or butts'; the Wikipedia article has the east chopping after the meat is pulled from the bone, for a finer texture that holds the thin sauce, and Lexington serving 'pulled' or very lightly chopped, leaving strands. Melton's in Rocky Mount chopped whole hog so fine that a 1988 magazine compared it to chopped peanut butter. At Lexington Barbecue the menu on 15 September 2026 reads Chopped BBQ, Coarse Chopped BBQ and Sliced BBQ, on plate, tray or sandwich, a chopped plate at $13.40 cash. Tradition holds — some eastern pits call their finest chop minced. Inference — the scale exists at Lexington because a shoulder can be sliced to order and a whole hog cannot.