Blackwood Station, N.C. — THE moon was high over the loblolly pines when Keith Allen arrived for work at 2 a.m. He built a fire of hickory logs, and a plume of rich blue smoke creased the black night sky.
When the fire had produced glowing red coals, Allen shoveled them into a pit below two dozen hog shoulders on a metal rack. For the next nine hours, he shoveled more coals, stoked the fire, and turned the shoulders as they cooked a ruddy, smoky brown.
Long after first light, he was still at it. With a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, he chopped the pork with a rhythmic \o7whump, whump, whump.\f7 Then he plunged two gloved hands into the steaming meat to mix in a homemade sauce of vinegar, salt and red pepper.
And that, for purists, is the long, hard, wearying way of making genuine pit-cooked Eastern North Carolina chopped barbecue.
Not many people do it this way anymore. Most of the state's barbecue restaurants have switched to gas or electric cooking, which is cheaper, faster and cleaner. Most now chop North Carolina's signature meal with electric grinders and season it with bottled sauce.
Allen, a tall, silver-haired, second-generation barbecue cook, insists that barbecue that isn't cooked in a pit over hickory coals and chopped and flavored by hand isn't really Carolina barbecue. He devotes most of his waking hours to that ideal.
Five days a week, Allen works from 2 a.m. to well past dark, preparing every bite of barbecue served at Allen & Son, a small roadside joint on a winding highway north of Chapel Hill. When Allen takes a day off or goes on vacation, the restaurant closes. He won't let anyone else make his barbecue. He never sits down for a meal of barbecue -- not even his own, preferring to keep his palate pure for taste-testing.
"What you're chasing is that flavor," he said, pronouncing it "flay-vuh" in his silky Tar Heel accent. "If you don't do it right, you won't get it."
ONLY 20 to 30 barbecue restaurants among hundreds in the state still cook with wood, says Bob Garner, author of two books on Carolina barbecue. "But nobody does it to the degree Keith does -- he's one of a kind," Garner said.
Allen's painstaking methods -- cutting his own hickory, manning the fire for hours, chopping his own meat and making his own sauce -- have their roots in a time-honored process. Pigs have been roasted over wood coals in North Carolina since the 17th century.
