As for pork steaks, Ms. Bartlett learned to cook those from Alex Erwin Tooley, whose father opened the first barbecue restaurant in Tompkinsville, Tooley’s BBQ. Ms. Bartlett went to work there part time in the 1990s, “to help Mr. Tooley out,” she recalled. She found that she preferred cooking and serving to the line work she did at a local textile factory. She ultimately bought the business in 2004.

The pork-shoulder steak is the most perplexing piece of the puzzle. Pork steaks are common in St. Louis, where they’re grilled and served with Maull’s barbecue sauce . But elsewhere in Kentucky (not to mention the rest of the country) people prefer to barbecue whole pork shoulder, a.k.a. Boston butt — named for the barrels, or butts, in which corned pork shoulders were once packed for shipping.

Whole shoulder has obvious advantages — generous marbling, intrinsic tenderness — that make it nearly impossible to overcook and dry out. It takes more time to cook, but the process is considerably less labor intensive than cutting and grilling shoulder steaks.

Wes Berry, an English professor at Western Kentucky University and the author of “The Kentucky Barbecue Book,” believes the pork-shoulder steak’s origins here have to do with Monroe County’s location in the heart of Kentucky farm country, where tobacco was a major crop. Dr. Berry hypothesizes that because the steaks cook quickly and provide a calorie-dense meal in a hurry, they became popular fare to serve to farmhands during harvest season.