Is the Lowcountry the true cradle of pit-smoked pork?

Santa Elena’s smoky legacy

Story by Michele Roldán-Shaw + Photography by Katie Bradham

The year is 1566. Conquistadores and caciques stand around a cook fire at Santa Elena, the Spanish fort on present-day Parris Island. Tendrils of smoke curl about various kinds of meat — rabbit, wild turkey, alligator and perhaps pork supplied by the foreign invaders. When the moment arrives, Spaniards and Indigenous people set aside their differences to enjoy tender morsels of slow-cooked, smoked-to-perfection barbecue. 

Hey, it could have happened. And if it did, that would make Beaufort County the hallowed birthplace of barbecue. But as with every other debate in this fanatical sub-culture — dry rub versus sauce; red versus mustard; chopped versus pulled; noun versus verb; letter c versus letter q — the topic is hotly contended. 

“So many people have different ideas about Southwest-style barbecue, Caribbean-style, Mexican or Tex-Mex barbacoa,” says local pitmaster Ted Huffman, owner of Bluffton BBQ in the Promenade. “They talk about Kansas City and Memphis, and all that’s well and good. But from the standpoint of introducing smoky-fire pig-cooking to the U.S. before it was the U.S., Santa Elena has to be it. This is the Cradle of Q, if you will.”

High on the hog

In order to entertain this bold claim, we would have to agree that true barbecue refers only to pork (already a controversial assumption). “As far as barbecue goes,” says Huffman, who opened his first restaurant in a little red caboose before moving to the current location, “pork to me is the holy of holies.” He’s not alone in this feeling — unless of course you go to Texas, where beef brisket reigns supreme. In other regions chicken, sausage or even lamb and goat are valid contenders. But for the sake of advancing our theory about South Carolina’s barbecue primacy, let’s just stick with pork for a minute. 

When the Spaniards began exploring the Americas, their first stop was the Caribbean, where they encountered native peoples cooking meat over an open fire. The meat was placed on raised platforms of green saplings, which the explorers called barbacoa. Historians generally agree that this Spanish corruption of the Arawak word barabicu, meaning “sacred pit,” ultimately gave rise to the term barbecue. 

But the Caribbean Arawak and Taíno peoples weren’t the only ones cooking meat this way; it was a common method throughout the Americas. Nor was it the only technique for slow cooking, as humans have been roasting food in pits or earth ovens for millennia. If your definition of barbecue doesn’t rely on smoke-infused pork, the first pitmasters were early man. But if you figure it has to be a pig, and it has to have that smoky slow-roasted taste, then barbecue was born the minute European hogs met Indigenous American cooks. And that might very well have occurred first in South Carolina. 

As the Spanish staked out their claim in what is now the United States, they founded Santa Elena as the capital of La Florida, which extended (in their minds at least) from the Keys to modern-day Newfoundland. It was the first successful European settlement in the United States, but it lasted only 21 years. Long enough, as Huffman points out, for pigs to go feral in a new land. A whole hog can feed 100 people, he says, and for coastal tribes used to subsisting on oysters and quail, that might have been a big deal. 

“Even though the Spanish invasion was something I’m sure the Indians didn’t appreciate, I think they shared sustenance,” Huffman posits. “Maybe during peace-time negotiations they cooked a fat hog, which the Indians had never tasted. That would have been a communal eating experience because there was no food storage. To me, breaking bread is a form of communication.”

A history of hostility, heritage and harmony

Like many such stories in our checkered American past, it ended in hostility and slaughter. But the tale of barbecue went on. Pigs were here to stay, and in spite of the brutal genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, many aspects of their culture remained — including barbacoa. Somewhere along the way, the raised platform was ditched, and meat was simply laid on green branches over a pit of coals, possibly to accommodate larger, heavier animals than the wild game Indians had been eating. Enslaved Africans, who would have been responsible for much of the cooking in the Old South, brought their tips and tricks to the table, and today some of our most revered pitmasters are Black. 

Whether or not you’re willing to concede that barbecue was born in South Carolina, you have to appreciate its pluralistic origins and ongoing power to bring folks together (even if they are still arguing about mustard sauce). “You could have the governor and the trash man, and the trash man’s on strike, but they’ll sit down together over barbecue,” concludes Huffman. “It’s not a regular food. It bridges cultural gaps.”