North Carolina barbecue is something of a sacred subject — and not just in North Carolina. A predictable shit storm came down when, the other night, Stephen Colbert called out the stuff as "sauceless, vinegar-based meat product." He went so far as to compare it to toilet cleaner and chaw spit.

This seems a bit much. On the one hand, I applaud Colbert for taking on a sacred cow, or rather a sacred pig. They can't say the guy doesn't have balls. And he's right in a way. It's true that a lot of Carolina barbecue, not just in North Carolina but also in Colbert's home state of South Carolina, is mediocre at best, and sometimes almost as bad as he makes it out to be. But the best of it is transporting, unique, and irreplaceable. No barbecue tradition in America varies so much from good to bad. I just came back from Raleigh and Durham and experienced both. At Cooper's, I had a finely chopped barbecue sandwich that was simultaneously soft and somehow also firm, tightly packed but giving up every bite without resistance. It was porky, and a little smoky, and its vinegar just set off its fat. It was basically perfect. Later in the day I went to The Pit, one of the state's best barbecue restaurants, and it was even better. The barbecue was fresher, and even when coarsely chopped, was still tender. Moreover, the vinegar was judiciously spiked with hot pepper, so you got three things on your palate at once: fat, acid, and heat — a kind of holy trinity of American meat.

But man, is there a lot of bad barbecue elsewhere in the state. For one thing, "barbecue" in the Carolinas is pretty much limited to pulled pork. While some restaurants have a perfunctory rib or chicken on the menu, their heart isn't really in it. Then there is this: even at its best, Carolina pork isn't as smoky as what we typically think of as barbecue. A pork shoulder is a big item, and even the most sustained smoke bath can't penetrate very far. But Carolina barbecue generally doesn't get a smoke bath; it experiences something close to aroma therapy, sitting adjacent to smouldering coals, with fresh air coming in at an alarming rate. So it has to be very, very fresh to be good. I've done all-day Carolina barbecue tours, and the difference between the product you get at noon and the product at 4pm is so marked that you can barely believe it. To make matters worse, many Carolina barbecues pull the shoulders all at once, so stuff dries out in steam trays, and the less said about that the better. The very greatest Carolina barbecue, as at Scott's and The Skylight Inn, take their stuff to the next level by cooking the skin to a shattering crispness, chopping it really fine, and mixing it in. But for some reason that technique is rare. Don't ask me why.

So, I guess I would have to say that Colbert is half right. Good Carolina barbecue is a wonder, one of America's greatest inventions, a marvel of restraint and patience. But when it's bad, it sucks.

Josh Ozersky Josh Ozersky was Esquire's Food Correspondent and a regular contributor to Esquire.com.

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