Stalking the Barbecued Mutton

I have wronged the state of Kentucky, but compared to the Kentucky Fried Chicken people I am an innocent. All I did was to pass on the information that a friend of mine named Marshall J. Dodge III—a man renowned on the East Coast for having somehow forged a successful career as a semi-retired amateur folklorist—claimed to have experienced the supreme fried chicken in a town called Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, while touring the area with a calliope restorer of his acquaintance. Local connoisseurs quickly pointed out that Marshall must have been thinking of a chicken restaurant in Cynthiana, Kentucky—Rabbit Hash being a place so small that the goods and services it offers the traveller probably don't extend to high-test. People I know in the state seemed satisfied with my explanation that Marshall is the sort of person who would never say Cynthiana when he could say Rabbit Hash. Not long ago, I thought of making further amends by journeying to Cynthiana and sampling a platter or two of the chicken in question; that sort of penance is one of my specialties. Then a serious eater I know in Covington informed me, in the sort of voice a heavy investor in Mexican savings banks might use to discuss the reëvaluation of the peso, that the Cynthiana restaurant had closed its doors. I was not surprised. In the last several years, legendary fried-chicken places seem to have closed up at about the rate that indoor shopping malls open—Mrs. Stroud's, in Kansas City, and Mrs. Kremer's, near Jefferson City, just to toss off the names of two darkened shrines in my own home state. Because a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman, I realize that, like a good secondhand bookstore or a bad South American dictatorship, it is not easily passed down intact. Still, in sullen moments I blame these lamentable closings on the agribusiness corporations' vertical integration of the broiler industry. In fact, in sullen moments I blame almost everything on the vertical integration of the broiler industry—the way some people trace practically any sort of mischief or natural disaster back to the Central Intelligence Agency, and some people, presumably slightly more sophisticated, blame everything on the interstate-highway program. If the civilization really is about to crumble, everybody is entitled to his own idea of which is the most significant crack. Which brings us to Kentucky Fried Chicken.

It occurred to me this summer, while I was touring one of the neon-sign displays the Smithsonian mounted in the Bicentennial Year to remind us of the roots of our culture, that Kentucky Fried Chicken is what a schoolboy in Osaka or a housewife in Brussels thinks fried chicken tastes like. The world may be growing smaller, but schoolboys in Osaka have never even heard of Mrs. Stroud. Kentucky Fried Chicken has become the symbol of fast food, even though a chicken fried with care and respect is particularly slow food—pan-frying being a process that requires enough time to make any prospective diner begin worrying about whether he has come close to filling himself up with pickled watermelon rind and assorted relishes. It is also a symbol, I realized, of Kentucky—as if French cuisine were associated in the minds of all foreigners with the sort of frozen French fries dished out to hot-rodders in greasy drive-ins. Are the Swiss thought of as people who sit around all the time eating what high-school dining halls in the Midwest call Swiss steak? The reputation of Kentucky could be reclaimed, I decided, only if the people who spread the word about food were tipped off to a Kentucky specialty that would blot out memories of what Colonel Sanders himself has called "nothing but a fried doughball wrapped around some chicken." I resolved to seek out the barbecued mutton of western Kentucky—a unique regional delicacy I heard about when a restaurant tout wrote me to say that the motto on the menu of her favorite restaurant in Owensboro said, "Mary Had a Little Lamb. Won't You Have Some, Too?"

I made this decision in collaboration with Tom Chaney, a loyal son of the state, who lives in Horse Cave. We were eating country ham at the time. I admit that I would rather say Horse Cave than Owensboro, but, as it happens, Chaney really does live in Horse Cave. In fact, his attachment to home ground is so strong that he has, by his own count, made no fewer than six unsuccessful attempts to leave for good. The place he keeps coming back to is in the south-central part of the state, in a region noted for tobacco and immense limestone caves and, some say, country ham. We were eating the ham in a nearby town called Sulphur Well, in the company of Tom's Aunt Daisie Carter, who spent fifty-one years in the Hart County school system and seems none the worse for wear. The restaurant was a small brick building identified on a Coke sign as Porter's—a place that seems to have inherited the local country-ham trade from the Beula Villa, an old hotel that used to serve as headquarters for people who drank the sulphuric water of the area to clear up whatever seemed to be bothering them. I had sampled the magic spring and, just before we went in to lunch, revealed to Chaney my suspicion that the reputation of Porter's might rest on the fact that anything would taste good after that water. But the ham turned out to be a triumph—sliced thin, and fried, and served with a bowl of redeye gravy. In fact, it occurred to me that country ham rather than barbecued mutton might be the local specialty that could put soggy fried chicken out of the public mind—until Mrs. Carter informed me that the most authentic country hams are illegal.

The actual ham we were wolfing down, she assured me, was quite within the law, but the sort of country ham that local people traditionally bought from a farmer—a farmer who might kill three or four hogs a year, cure the hams to sell, and use the rest of the meat for his own table—could no longer be sold legally because such farmers were obviously not set up to pass modern government inspections.

"You mean you have to buy the country hams you cook at home from a supermarket?" I asked.

"Well, it's sort of like bootleg whiskey," Mrs. Carter told me, making it clear from her tone that she had not been the kind of schoolteacher who spent her spare time roaming the neighborhood kicking over stills and lecturing on the evils of Demon Rum.

I suddenly had a vision of Tom and his Aunt Daisie racing from their supplier with three or four bootleg hams in the back seat, the Agriculture Department's version of revenuers in hot pursuit—Tom and Aunt Daisie tearing around curves, losing the law at last on the back roads they know so well, and arriving home with the contraband they would cook secretly at night, hoping that the succulent aroma would not draw the authorities to their door. Knowing that people in some parts of Kentucky are still sensitive about their reputation for free-lance distilling, I could hardly draw attention to a product whose most authentic version was illegal. We each had two or three more pieces of ham while we talked it over. Then Tom asked me how the sulphur water had affected my health.

"I feel like a million," I said. "A little full, but like a million."

Tom was reminded of a legendary eater in Horse Cave named Miss Fannie Hiser, a large woman who used to live with his Aunt Minnie. After everybody had finished one of the huge Sunday dinners Miss Fannie prepared, Tom recalled, she used to lean back in her chair, fold her hands contentedly under her ample midsection, and say, "Thank God for capacity."

"Are you sure this place we're going serves decent fried chicken?" I asked Tom late that afternoon. Tom had gathered some barbecued-mutton intelligence from his operatives in western Kentucky, and we decided to go over it while eating a fried-chicken supper with Tom's father, Boots Chaney, a more or less retired insurance man who remains fully active as a chicken eater. What had aroused my suspicion was Tom's choice of the concession restaurant in Mammoth Cave National Park—the sort of restaurant I have been suspicious of since my wife and a friend of ours waited forty-five minutes in a Bryce Canyon version for some broiled brook trout, only to discover when it finally arrived that it had been broiling the entire time.

I was reassured when I noticed that the menu specified native chicken and a thirty-minute wait. "It's heartening to see that a restaurant in a national park is going to take the time to pan-fry some chicken," I told Tom. "It's the sort of thing that could help restore Americans' faith in their government." A necessary assumption in serving the slow-food variety of fried chicken is that the people waiting for it in the dining room are waiting with people they don't mind waiting with. Waiting for pan-fried chicken with the Chaneys is a treat. They share an office in Horse Cave—a two-room affair they sometimes refer to as Bogus Enterprises, Inc. (Tom Chaney's enterprises include helping run a tobacco-and-corn farm, which he owns in partnership with his Aunt Daisie Carter, and trying to form a professional repertory theatre in Horse Cave; Boots Chaney's enterprises were summed up by some tony-looking stationery his son had made up for him with the legend "Widows Tended—Lies Told—Whiskey Hauled.") The Chaneys also share a fondness for anecdotes about the area—particularly about the Cave Wars that took place in the twenties and thirties, when independent cave operators competed for the tourist trade with merchandising devices like blowing up each other's entrances, and stealing the body of Floyd Collins from where it was being displayed in a cave near the one that fatally trapped him in 1925, or outfitting their shills in uniforms that looked official enough to make an unwary tourist think he was being directed to a national park rather than to a free-lance hole in the limestone. No wonder people look so sour as they emerge from fast-food emporiums: they probably haven't heard a good story in years.

I approached Owensboro warily. Barbecue is a touchy subject all over the country. Except for the universal agreement that the best barbecue of all is served in Kansas City, there is a lot of regional quibbling on the subject—not just about whose barbecue is best but even about what barbecue is. In the Southwest, for instance, people ordinarily barbecue ribs, but in North Carolina the word is used as a noun referring only to chopped pork that has been flavored, in a manner of speaking, with a vinegar-based sauce. It is normal for regional loyalists to be both chauvinistic and arcane when talking about the local version. A traveller who returns to, say, New York from a trip to North Carolina and reports to North Carolina expatriates there that the barbecue didn't seem to amount to much subjects himself to stern geographical probing:

"Were you east of Rocky Mount?"

"Is Goldsboro east of Rocky Mount?"

"West. There's no decent barbecue west of Rocky Mount."

"I don't know where Rocky Mount is, but it must be east of all the towns I ate barbecue in."

"I expect so."

Although I assumed that people in Owensboro would be proud of their local version—not just a different sort of pork or a different sauce formula or a different way of slicing beef but an entirely different animal—it also occurred to me that Owensboro might not want to be proclaimed the Barbecued-Mutton Capital of the World. It's a fairly sophisticated city, after all, with four distilleries, and a General Electric plant that was turning out more than half a million tubes a day before it was struck low by the Japanese transistor, and two colleges, and a river port on the Ohio, and a thirteen-story motel just as perfectly round as a good silo. Baffling as it may seem, there are residents of Cincinnati who are not pleased when I refer to their city as the Center of Greek Chili in Ohio. There was also the possibility that Owensboro already had a slogan that it would be reluctant to part with.

"No, I think slogans for cities are trite," the executive vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce told me. "We don't have one anymore."

"What did the slogan use to be?"

"Opportunity Center of the U.S.A."

"I see what you mean. But you do think that Owensboro is—in fact, if not in slogan—the barbecued-mutton capital of the world?"

"Undoubtedly," he said.

Two hours later, Tom Chaney, who had been doing some further consultation with a specialist from Union County, informed me by telephone that Waverly, Kentucky, forty-five miles west of Owensboro, might be the barbecued-mutton capital of the world. Not an hour after that, the proprietor of Posh & Pat's, a barbecue place in Henderson, on the way to Waverly, said of Owensboro, "They've got the reputation, we've got the barbecue." Meanwhile, I had been told that the premier barbecued mutton was served by a man named Woolfolk in Cairo, Kentucky, just south of Henderson, but only in the summer. I knew I had come to the right territory.

"How come this is the only area where mutton is barbecued?" I asked an Owensboro merchant who had been kind enough to give me change for a nickel parking meter.

"I expect because there are so many Catholics here," he said.

I didn't want to appear ignorant. "Yeah," I said. "I suppose that'd do it."

As I was searching my mind for some connection between the Roman rite and mutton consumption, the merchant told me that the large Catholic churches in town have always staged huge picnics that feature barbecue and burgoo—burgoo, another staple of Owensboro barbecue restaurants, being a soupy stew that I, for some reason, had always associated with southern Illinois. In the early days, the church picnics apparently served barbecued goat. In fact, Owensboro might have arrived at barbecued mutton by a process of elimination, since people in the area seem willing to barbecue just about any extant mammal. In western Kentucky, barbecue restaurants normally do "custom cooking" for patrons who have the meat but not the pit, and among the animals that Posh & Pat's offers to barbecue is raccoon. The Shady Rest, one of the most distinguished barbecue joints in Owensboro, has a sign that says "If It Will Fit on the Pit, We Will Barbecue It. It is probably fortunate that the people of the area settled on barbecued mutton as the local delicacy before they had a go at beaver or polecat.

After only six or eight meals of barbecued mutton, I had prepared the report I would give to the first internationally influential eater I ran across. "They serve it just about every way," I would say. "Sliced, chopped, ribs, hidden in burgoo."

"Is it good?"

"It's not bad at all."

"Just not bad?"

"I believe I prefer it to Greek Chili," I would say. "Also, as far as I know, it is not illegal in its most authentic form." Barbecued mutton is, as the saying goes, not Kansas City, but there were reasons not to apply such standards. In Posh & Pat's, after all, the restaurant gossip going on when I walked in was not about someone’s secret sauce formula but about the Burger Farm franchise just down the interstate being replaced by a Wiener King. A local restaurant man who happened to be at Posh & Pat's counter downing a sliced-mutton sandwich said he was thinking of opening a new steak restaurant with an "old depot" décor. "It's all Western or Barn here now," he told me. With the franchisers and décor-mongers closing in, any authentic local specialty obviously needs celebrating. Did I want a nice river city like Owensboro—a city that, according to my calculations, has a barbecued-mutton restaurant for every fifty-one hundred and eighty-eight residents—to be known as the Ex-Tube Capital of the World? Was it fair to serious eaters like the Chaneys that foreigners should believe their state to be nothing but a jungle of fast-food franchises? "Kentucky is the Barbecued-Mutton Capital of the World," I would tell the first eater of influence I could find. "Spread the word." ♦