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"FacebookPinterest\n\nOddly enough, in most sections of the country more than one kind of sandwich is necessary. This is because restaurant owners have never learned to make any one sandwich so perfectly that no others are required.\n\nHere in New York City, for example, we have more kinds of sandwiches than we have people carrying lunch pails. I was lamenting this situation not long ago while dining on a beluga caviar-and-smoked salmon croque monsieur at Le Bernardin. As I nibbled absentmindedly at the edges of the egg-battered sandwich, I found myself thinking not of the citified seafood combination in my hand but of an incomparable sandwich experience in my past. I vividly recalled the rhythmic crack of cleaver on cutting board, the glorious vision of wood smoke belching darkly into the sky, the heady scent of vinegar infused with Texas Pete Hot Sauce.\n\nI realized that my memories of the sandwiches made with hand-chopped pork that I'd eaten in eastern North Carolina had become clearer to me than reality. Almost fifteen years had passed since I'd last walked into a barbecue spot down there and said, \"A sandwich, please.\" No further expression of my needs was required, since no other sandwiches were offered, although on a few awkward occasions a waitress\u2014never a man, not in those parts of the state\u2014 would ask if I wanted coleslaw on it. I would courteously forgive her blunder, for she was likely to be too young and inexperienced to know it should never be served any other way.\n\nI thought sadly of the lengths to which we New Yorkers have gone to transform sandwiches into culinary adventures. Even our bread has become complicated, whereas the eastern North Carolina sandwich requires only a packaged hamburger bun. Knowing that other good things come on hamburger buns, like hamburgers, for example, I had tried to repress my desire for the chopped-pork sandwich by eating burgers as often as possible, but that didn't work. So thoroughly had I mythologized the eastern North Carolina sandwich that even the hamburgers I once loved had become a cruel joke.\n\nI'd started proselytizing, informing those few friends who would listen that the eastern North Carolina sandwich was America's greatest regional dish, surpassing even the jumbo lump-crab cake of Maryland's eastern shore. I welcomed debates on the importance of the sandwich in the panorama of indigenous American food. Others championed fried chicken, lemon-meringue pie, the bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, any of which I conceded second place. A friend suggested a freshly picked ear of sweet corn, and I mocked her for advocating a foodstuff that could be stored in a silo.\n\nMy fixation became so overwhelming that I realized only a visit to eastern North Carolina would end it. I prepared to go, even though it was the dead of summer and I recalled the establishments that made the sandwiches I so loved having little in the way of ventilation other than hot breezes stirred by a few haphazardly placed fans. It would be me, a sweating pitcher of sweetened iced tea, a fat sandwich wrapped in wad paper and a few flies torpid from the heat. I so looked forward to the trip. I could consume unfathomable numbers of sandwiches in the course of determining who made the best, not that I expected any to be less than magnificent.\n\nBarbecue, of course, is America's greatest gift to the culinary world. The French, the Spanish and various other people seek praise for inventing it, but we perfected it. I speak now of meat slow-cooked over wood or charcoal, not supermarket cuts of beef incinerated in backyards by suburbanites cooking over briquettes soaked in lighter fluid. By selecting the eastern North Carolina sandwich as the beau ideal of barbecue, I was placing it above pork ribs and beef brisket, the industry favorites. I had no qualms about my commitment, for this sandwich is barbecue at its most sublime. I believe the reason it has never received proper acclaim is that it is little known outside the coastal regions of North Carolina, which are seldom visited, except by devastating hurricanes.\n\nBefore setting off to North Carolina, I tried to make certain I wouldn't make the calamitous mistake of eating barbecue prepared with gas or electricity. Barbecue without wood is like French cuisine without butter, inappropriate and insulting. I wanted to detour around all such cookery, even if it incorporated the perfunctory tossing of a few hickory or oak chips onto the fire. Subjectively, but reasonably, I decided I would only seek out places east of U.S. 1, the north-south highway that passes through Raleigh, the state capital.\n\nI have at times enjoyed eating in central and western North Carolina, where the hush puppies (undersized deep-fried cornmeal cakes) are superior to those in the east, but the barbecue there is fatally tainted by ketchup. Long ago, the settlers in eastern North Carolina feared the tomato, believing it to be poisonous, and they were right, at least where barbecue was concerned. When a piquant vinegar-based sauce is mid into chopped pork, the sweet, wood-cooked flavor of the meat is intensified. When the heavy, tomato-based sauce obligatory in central and western North Carolina is added, the flavor is masked. Either, of course, is preferable to the mustard-based sauce of South Carolina, which makes a chopped-pork sandwich taste like a ballpark hot dog. I telephoned every barbecue spot east of U.S. 1 that I could find and asked this question: Do you cook with wood, gas or electricity? I reached fifty-nine of them, and fifty-six gave me a straight answer without insisting I telephone a public relations account ecutive, one of the many ways in which North Carolina is unlike New York. At Bunn's the fellow who answered the phone pugnaciously replied, \"We don't give out our secrets, but we'll put our barbecue up against anybody.\" Now, I understand the South has lots of secrets it doesn't want us Yankees to know, but there are no secrets to the way barbecue is cooked. If there isn't a pile of wood behind the place, the owner isn't cooking with wood, and if the pile of wood is so neat it looks as though it hasn't been touched, it's probably there just to fool people like me into thinking the cooking is done with wood.\n\nThe woman who answered the phone at Betty's Smoke House Restaurant said, \"We use smoke,\" which could mean anything, including a cook with a three-pack-a-day habit. The woman at Big Nell's Pit Stop allowed that hers was \"open-pit,\" a coy barbecue come-on. Open-pit is a non-fuel-specific term used to crowd-pleasing effect in the South, in much the same way that northern chefs praise their own cooking as gourmet. Thirteen people assured me they used wood, although in this region wood cooking is usually indirect. Oak or hickory is burned down to charcoal, and the charcoal is moved to the open pits where the whole hogs are cooked. Smoldering charcoal adds less smoke flavor than a flaming log, but the fires are easier to control, and charcoal cooking seems to give a creamy, soft texture to pork. Regardless, wood in any form is better than gas. With wood I imagine delicate tendrils of smoke and heat encircling the pig, massaging it, caressing it, permeating it. With gas I imagine Audie Murphy with a flamethrower, charging a Kraut bunker.\n\nA number of owners who were cooking with wood warned me their way of life was dying out, which they blamed on nefarious state regulators. The man who answered the phone at Murray's blamed \"the bureaucrats\" for driving out people like him. Exaggerating somewhat, he added, \"I'm the last that's left, and I'm going to be gone.\" Laziness could be another cause of the proliferation of gas cooking, because turning a valve is easier than chopping down a tree. Whatever the reason, less and less barbecue is being prepared with wood, and I realized I could count on only thirteen of the fifty-nine places I had telephoned. That meant only thirteen sandwiches I was certain to like, which didn't seem nearly enough.\n\nTo ensure I wouldn't go hungry, I made up my mind to look into the impertinent boast issued by the unrenowned Bunn's, in Windsor, that it had the best barbecue around. I also decided to include Big Nell's and Betty's, the only establishments in the southeastern part of the state that claimed to use wood, or at least hinted at the possibility. I also wanted to eat at B's, in Greenville, which I'd heard about. B's is so famous it apparently has no use for a telephone. I understood from past adventures with barbecue that it was unlikely I'd actually eat at B's, even if I found it. Going out of your way to visit a barbecue spot you aren't absolutely sure is open for business is never a good idea, because the proprietors of barbecue places wouldn't be proprietors of barbecue places if they liked to work regular hours. Odds are they aren't going to be at work if there is any excuse for them not to be.\n\n\n\nI took a plane into Raleigh-Durham International Airport, which straddles the ketchup-vinegar line of demarcation, hired a rental car and set off. What I didn't know at the time but was soon to discover is that anybody interested in tasting the best vinegar-based-chopped-pork- and-coleslaw-on-a-hamburger-bun sandwiches\u2014I'll just refer to them as sandwiches from here on\u2014should center his travels around Route 70, the barbecue beltway of eastern North Carolina. My explorations took me as far north as Albemarle Sound and as far south as the South Carolina border, and all the sandwiches I particularly liked were either right on Route 70 or no more than thirty minutes away.\n\nI'd set aside six days for the trip and ended up driving an effortless 936 miles in four days. The eastern North Carolina I recalled from my last trip to the region, back in the late '80s, had quite a few back roads, but the transportation grid has been upgraded from asphalt to autobahn. North Carolina has always loved wide highways (one of its nicknames is the Good Roads State) and just about every road I traveled was a four-lane divided highway, even when it didn't seem to make much economic sense\u2014Interstate 40 has one exit leading to Jones Sausage Road. The bridges of eastern North Carolina are even more astounding. They are soaring, arching, futuristic structures much like the kind I used to see in the Flash Gordon comic strips of my youth. Maybe I'm an envious Yankee, but we New Yorkers pay $3.50 to go from the Bronx to Queens, and not once in all my North Carolina travels was there a bridge or highway toll. The lavish distribution of federal-highway funds to this modest region astounded me, but there were other sights to behold. In the course of my journey, I rode a ferry (payment required) from Southport to Fort Fisher, and while awaiting the boat I decided to remain in my car after spotting a DANGER QUICKSAND sign hammered into the ground. I can't think of a more effective deterrent to nature walks.\n\nWhile driving south on Route 172, I was stopped by a marine sentry, who informed me that I was entering Camp Lejeune. He glanced into my car, probably to check for contraband, and seemed taken aback to see so many Moon Pies scattered across the backseat. Moon Pies are packaged cakes made in Chattanooga, Tennessee, from marshmallow, saturated fats and the worst sort of chocolate imaginable; I became addicted to them years back in the course of research into why people would eat something so awful. The elderly lady working in the tiny grocery where I bought mine started reminiscing about Hinky- Dinks, which she said were just like Moon Pies but better. I told her that no matter what Hinky- Dinks were like, they had to be.\n\nAfter agreeing to abide by the marine's stern instructions not to park or get out of my car, I proceeded to drive through Camp Lejeune, a disappointingly uneventful trip. The land was unspoiled, other than the shrapnel in the trees. Every once in a while, I'd pass a diamond-shaped yellow traffic sign that read TANK XING, which gave me a thrill of anticipation until I realized I had no more chance of encountering a tank than I did of coming across a moose at one of those MOOSE XING signs all over Maine. In fact, my entire four-day trip was tranquil, except for the dread that rose within me as I passed through the Confederate flag\u2013bedecked beach communities just north of the South Carolina border. They looked just like the Jersey shore, if the South had won.\n\n\n\nAfter heading out from the airport on day one, the Buick Century set on cruise control, I quickly came upon the first assurance that I was in barbecue country: a pork-packing- plant billboard beautified with a cartoon of a pig wearing a crown. Most of what I saw after that was cornfields, churches, double-wide trailers and facilities for filling propane tanks. The prefabricated building thrives in this part of the state, in part because of the ever depressed economy and in part because of last year's Hurricane Floyd, which brought waters twenty to thirty feet high. I occasionally passed long-abandoned farm buildings, grayish brown and mummified. The miracle is that they still stand despite the eighty-mile- per-hour winds that have shaken them so many times over so many years.\n\nMy first stop was Goldsboro, an hour's drive east of Raleigh, where I showed up at Guy Parker's yellow-brick place a half hour after the opening time of 10 A.M. It was closed. Instead of giving up and leaving, I walked around back and started poking my head into windows and doors until Parker heard me trespassing and invited me inside. \"Come in, we're open,\" he said, explaining that he'd been on the premises since 3 A.M., cooking pork.\n\nGuy Parker's had once been a service station, pretty common in the barbecue business. He'd remodeled it himself, adding overhead fans, wood-grain booths, brown vinyl benches, pig paraphernalia and some baskets of artificial flowers. His sandwich was filled with plenty of chopped pork, and it was correctly served at room temperature, which I believe is a holdover from the days when refrigeration was a luxury. On top of the pork was a dollop of decent coleslaw.\n\nUp to that point, Parker's sandwich was pretty standard, but there were two modifications I'd never seen. The bun looked as though it had been placed on the grill with an anvil set on top of it, because it was a little warm and a lot squished. Then there was Parker's tour de force, a slice of crisp skin. I've eaten plenty of chopped pork filled with bits of skin, and I've always admired the resulting crackle and crunch, but this was the first time I'd seen a whole slice added to the sandwich the way a slice of American cheese goes on a burger just before it's served. \"How do you like that?\" asked Parker when he saw me take the skin from the sandwich for a closer examination. I just nodded, not wanting to tell him that the skin was distracting. I ended up eating it separately, munching it like a wafer. The real problem I had with his sandwich was vinegar related. Parker bottles and sells his own brand of vinegar sauce, and he was too generous with it, sprinkling in so much that the sandwich tasted more like vinegar than pork. Still, I was so thankful to be sitting there, I smiled happily through my meal. When I paid the bill, I noticed that the sandwich came to $2.12, and his explanation as to how he settled on that sum was too complicated for me. Mostly, the eastern North Carolina sandwich sells for $2\u2013$2.50, and there is no reason to stop anywhere that charges more.\n\nAbout twenty minutes away, right on Route 70, was Wilber's, a near barbecue legend in North Carolina, and just past Wilber's, off on the other side, was McCall's Bar-B-Que &amp;amp; Seafood. McCall's worried me, not because of the way it spells barbecue\u2014pork tastes just as good whether it's written barbecue, BBQ or bar-b-que\u2014but because it doubles as a fish restaurant. Barbecue owners who sell fish tend to forget they're in the pork business. I'm particularly wary of the ones who fry croakers, whatever they are, because there's nothing worse than eating in a barbecue place that smells like a fried-croaker place. Wilber's wasn't a whole lot more promising. There was a sign outside offering two specials of the day, one of them spaghetti with tossed salad and garlic bread and the other a fish plate with two vegetables. I don't care for greens on barbecue menus, except for the cabbage in coleslaw.\n\nTo my surprise, each made a first-class sandwich. I'd rate Wilber's slightly better, because the pork was chunkier and more peppery. At Wilber's I had my second and last sweetened iced tea of the trip. I'd promised myself I would drink only sweetened iced tea, because that's what the locals like, but after a big glass at Parker's and another at Wilber's, I was trembling from sugar shock. Sweetened iced tea in North Carolina isn't a beverage; it's an intravenous glucose drip. From then on, I drank unsweetened tea, identified as \"untea\" on my check at McCall's. I was way ahead of schedule at this point, because eating in New York had made me forget how quick and efficient service can be everywhere else. Waitresses who work the barbecue circuit have a routine. Once you're seated, they take your order within thirty seconds. A minute later, they're back with tea, utensils wrapped in a paper napkin and an apology for keeping you waiting for your meal. Two more minutes pass and your sandwich arrives. I had eaten three lunches in Goldsboro, and it wasn't yet 1 P.M.\n\nI had one more stop, a catering firm known as Alton's open to the public only three days a week. I figured any place that exclusive had to be worth finding, even if it was on the road leading to the Goldsboro-Wayne Municipal Airport, and nobody I asked had ever heard of the Goldsboro-Wayne Municipal Airport. They kept sending me to Seymour-Johnson Air Force Base. It took me almost an hour of high-speed driving before I found what I believe is the world's only unmarked municipal airport, and the more lost I got the more certain I was that I was in for the barbecue experience of my life. That's the sort of optimism required when searching for a remote restaurant you're unlikely to find. When I finally arrived, I saw that the barbecue was being prepared in some sort of pig cooker on wheels. I liked the idea that people in this part of the country don't go anywhere without taking their barbecue with them.\n\nAs I walked inside, I heard the sweetest of sounds, the thunk of a cleaver chopping away at pork. Alton's resembled a Grange hall hired for a family reunion. There were long tables set with plastic tablecloths, and the chairs looked as if they should fold up for storing in a back shed, although I tested mine and it refused to fold. Every table had four unmarked bottles of sauce on it, and I tasted a few drops of each for research purposes. (I never add sauce to sandwiches, figuring it will be interpreted as an insult, the way shaking salt on plats du jour angers fancy French chefs.) There was a plain vinegar sauce; a spicy vinegar sauce; a dark, molasses-like sauce that reminded me of the stuff Texans pour over brisket; and a bland, tomato-based sauce. I asked the waitress about the dark sauce, and she said, \"That's for the beef we serve on Saturdays.\" Proud of my perceptiveness, I picked up the bottle of bland stuff and said to her, \"I don't think much of your red sauce.\" She looked at me contemptuously and replied, \"We don't have red sauce around here. That's ketchup.\"\n\nThe sandwich at Alton's was tasty enough, although it came on one of those squished rolls and contained so little meat it was about as filling as an hors d'oeuvre. The iced tea was weak, like most iced tea in this part of the country, but I suppose I can understand the reluctance of proprietors to spend a lot of money on tea when what their customers want is plenty of sugar. On the way out, I picked up some oversize, homemade, brown-sugary chocolate-chip cookies, three for a dollar. I was planning to keep them in the car and eat them throughout the trip, but the chocolate kept dissolving in the heat, which can't be said of Moon Pies. They're coated with a chocolate product that refuses to melt.\n\nThe luncheon portion of my first day concluded, I headed northeast to Farmville, looking for Jack Cobb's, which is open only three days a week. This was supposed to be one of them, but the lights were out. I was sorry to see that, because I liked the ambience: a rusty old JACK COBB &amp;amp; SON sign, a pig painted on the front window and railroad tracks running alongside. I drove on in search of the well-regarded B's, in Greenville, and found it at the edge of the town, on B's Barbecue Road. That's about as good a tribute as a barbecue spot can get, having the road it's on named after it. B's was closed, even though it wasn't supposed to be, according to the hours posted outside. Somebody had scribbled a note on a white paper bag and left it between the front door and the screen door. It read \"Sold out of food. Reopen July 18. Thank you. Management.\" Inasmuch as this was July 7, I wondered if the management knew something about a pork famine that I didn't. Thankfully, nowhere else was shut down for lack of groceries.\n\nMy next stop was Bunn's, in Windsor, a once lovely town that probably had parades and ice cream socials until the four-lane bypass sucked the life right out of it. Bunn's was pleasant, in a hoary, country-store sort of way, although a refurbished seating area in a side room seemed to be modeled after cafeterias in community hospitals: white plastic chairs, white vinyl tables, white-painted wood and cinder-block walls. The sandwich cost $1.50, 50 cents less than anybody else's, and came on a hamburger bun so awful I couldn't believe even a hamburger bun could taste that bad. The pork was respectable, but I couldn't figure out how it was made. I didn't see wood or smoke or charcoal or any pork-cooking device whatsoever, although I noticed a tiny grill out back, too small to hold a hog. It was the kind we northerners leave in our backyards to rust.\n\nI spent my first night in a guesthouse in Edenton, a historic town on Albemarle Sound dotted with graceful residences. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the first permanent English settlers in North Carolina came down from Virginia and colonized this area, most likely bringing their pigs with them. Edenton manages to attract quite a few tourists, even though its only barbecue spot uses gas. In the morning, I drove over a glorious toll-free three-and-a- half-mile bridge that crosses the sound, heading for Simpson's B-B-Q. When I got there, the front door was locked. A pink ribbon was tied to the doorknob, which I took to signify the birth of yet another barbecuing Simpson, reason enough to close up and celebrate. I reached Ayden a little after noon. I drove up and down Route 11 for a couple of miles each way and couldn't find the Skylight Inn, which had me frantic with worry, because I'd remembered the sandwich there as one of the most memorable eating experiences of my life. It turned out I was driving on the all-new, four-lane Route 11, built since I was last in the neighborhood. The Skylight Inn was where it always had been, but the road was no longer Route 11.\n\nAlmost nothing had changed. In back was an alpine pile of split wood, so huge it reminded me of those mountains of used tires scattered throughout the Northeast. The woodpile behind the Skylight Inn was at least twenty feet high and fifty feet long. A sign read UPHOLDING A FAMILY TRADITION OF WOOD COOKED BAR-B-Q SINCE 1830. The funny little dome atop the one-story brick building was still in place, denoting the Skylight Inn's claim to being the barbecue capital of the world, which it might well be. Inside I noticed a self-service soda dispenser that wasn't there in the '80s and more gumball machines than ever, four in all. Barbecue places have a lot of gumball machines because local booster clubs are always asking if they can put one in to raise money to send kids to summer camp, and barbecue owners don't have the heart to refuse. Behind the counter, a man with a cleaver was chopping pork, although he wasn't the same fellow from fifteen years back. I gradually made my way to the front of the line, where Pete Jones, the owner, was assembling sandwiches and trays. The $2.50 tray gets you coleslaw, corn bread instead of a hamburger bun and more pork than can fit into a sandwich. I was tempted but ordered the usual. Working quickly, Jones scooped up a mound of chopped pork from a huge pile on the counter behind him, added a smaller serving of coleslaw and put both on a Sunbeam bun. He wrapped the sandwich in wad paper and handed it over. My first impression was of heft. As I started into one of the side rooms to find an empty table, I noticed a fellow with an NRA belt buckle and a Pepsi-Cola cap tidying up. I asked him how much meat went into each sandwich, and he replied, \"All we can cram in.\"\n\nThe dining area I selected didn't have a lot going for it, as far as customer comfort was concerned. Until then everywhere I'd been had invested seriously in air conditioning, upgraded the comfort level from sweatbox to meat locker. The air-conditioning in the Skylight Inn's side room was barely perceptible. Wisps of a pork-scented breeze drifted about, providing modest comfort. The tables had brown Formica tops; the chairs, brown vinyl seats; and the floor, brown-speckled tile. A couple of Rubbermaid Brute garbage cans stood open in one corner. All this was immaterial the moment I bit into the sandwich. I ate it so fast I had to go back and get another right away. The pork was creamy and soft. The crunchy bits of skin were done just right, which meant they encompassed the yin and yang of barbecue, the crackle of caramelization and the ooze of fat. The vinegar was barely noticeable, and the presence of hot sauce was undetectable until it touched the back of my throat, leaving a tiny burn like the finish of a Napoleon Cognac. The coleslaw was fresh, elegant and fine, containing a hint of mustard, so little that it seemed to influence the color more than the taste. I tried to eat my second sandwich slowly, but I gulped it too, and I was too full to have a third.\n\nI walked over to the counter to pay my respects to Jones and was told he had gone home for lunch, a shocking admission. If a man can eat this food every day, why would he choose to eat anywhere else? The fellow taking over for him said I should go to the house across the street and knock on the kitchen door. I walked across South Lee, which had hardly any traffic as a result of its no longer being Route 11, and through a yard, passing some pens containing turkeys and others with dogs. I knocked hard so Jones could hear me over all the gobbling and barking that started at my approach.\n\nHe was in the kitchen, having fish for lunch. His doctor had told him he had to stop eating barbecue six days a week, which he'd been doing for fifty years. Jones said he'd been diagnosed with a cholesterol count of about 800, which is a pretty good warning sign for a 72-year-old man. \"Actually, I'm just guessing the number,\" he said, \"but I went to the doctor, and he took all these tests, and when he got the results he called me and said, &#145;Come into my office as quick as you can; you're supposed to be dead.' He wouldn't tell me what it was, but a little while later he said I'd gotten it down to 375, which was about half.\" His daughter had fried the fish in olive oil, and he was washing it down with cranberry juice, a meal he didn't seem to be enjoying all that much. He just ate steadily and slowly, and then he smoked a cigarette. He said nothing had changed at the Skylight Inn since last I'd come around, other than himself, and that was due to age. He was still cooking barbecue the same way, on charcoal made from 85 percent oak and 15 percent hickory, more oak than hickory because he likes a less smoky taste. I asked him a lot of questions about the coleslaw, which was even better than I recalled. He said he'd been offered $10,000 for the recipe but that there was no recipe because every batch had to be made differently. \"No two bags of cabbage are the same, and I go by odor and smell,\" he said. He agreed to reveal this: The mayonnaise he uses is Kraft. I asked him if there was barbecue he liked as much as his own, because I hadn't found any, and he said that a second cousin by the name of Bum Dennis had a restaurant in the center of town I should try. \"His granddaddy and my granddaddy were brothers, and his great-granddaddy and my great-granddaddy were the same person,\" Jones said. I drove over to Bum's Restaurant, which I found across from the police station and one store over from a shop called Guns Unlimited.\n\nI admired Bum's superb air conditioning, a relief after the Skylight Inn's, but his sandwich was so poorly put together almost all the meat fell out when I picked it up. That made me all the more appreciative of the assemblage at the Skylight Inn. Jones is like one of those artisans who can build a stone wall without mortar that lasts for centuries. I stayed that night in New Bern, about a half hour southeast of Ayden. New Bern, once the Colonial capital, has a downtown riverfront area reached by means of a futuristic roadway that seems to float in the air, held aloft by the sheer magnificence of its space-age design. My dinner that night was a sandwich at Moore's BBQ , situated on the side of yet another four-lane. The dining room smelled like a fish fry, but the slightly too vinegary sandwich lived up to the motto of Moore's: \"We still do it the olde tyme way.\"\n\nThe next morning, I headed for the southeast corner of the state, passing Lane's Barbecue House, featuring CHARCOAL COOKED BBQ. It was closed, but with good reason, since it had burned down, one of the drawbacks to cooking with wood. Just south of Camp Lejeune, I came to Betty's Smoke House Restaurant. I walked around the building and didn't see anything that resembled smoke, or even wood. Inside was an autographed photograph of the British actor Patrick Stewart, which was unexpected. I never thought of him as a man who eats a lot of pork. It was a little early for lunch, so I decided to poke around the gift shop, which made the hostess anxious. She yelled across the room, \"Can I help you, sir?\" which embarrassed me into immediately taking my assigned seat.\n\nI ordered quickly, then asked permission to keep the menu at my table, just to look it over. In less than two minutes, the hostess returned and snatched it away. Dillydallying isn't encouraged at Betty's, which moves at such high speed even the wooden dining-room chairs are on rollers, like office furniture. The sandwich cost $3.50, which was too much, and it came with French fries, which it shouldn't have, not as far as I'm concerned. The pork tasted fine, but the fries were the kind served at twenty-four-hour coffee shops.\n\nJust before the South Carolina border, I came to Big Nell's Pit Stop, which backs up to a trailer park. I opened the door and walked into a fawning tribute to NASCAR. The walls were covered with stock car-racing posters, and all available shelf space was filled with race-related bric-a-brac, like a Kellogg's Corn Flakes box with a picture of Richard Petty. Adding to the atmosphere was a handwritten sign taped to the men's-room door that read IF YOU MAKE A MESS, CLEAN IT UP! I guess that was Big Nell's way of saying bon app\u00E9tit. The sandwich was remarkable in one respect: It was inedible. The pork was so watery and tasteless it could well have been made from reconstituted meat, the stuff of marine reconnaissance missions. It was the only sandwich I didn't finish, the only eastern North Carolina chopped-pork sandwich I've ever disliked. The proprietor might have mistaken me for Dale Earnhardt, so quickly did I accelerate out of Big Nell's parking lot. I started back north on Route 17, performing another feat of daredevil driving when I noticed a Cheerwine soda dispenser on the far side of the four-lane, gleaming like a Cape Hatteras lighthouse, just outside a tire store. Cheerwine is pretty much the sweetest soft drink ever made, and in my opinion the greatest accompaniment to barbecue ever produced, although nowhere I ate on this trip offered it. I ripped the car into a U-turn, tore into the parking area and had an ice-cold, twelve-ounce can that tasted just right, a little like Dr Pepper with cherry syrup stirred in. Except for a Moon Pie, I can't think of another food that provides so much pleasure for 40 cents.\n\nI stayed overnight at a motel just outside Goldsboro and made the mistake of eating dinner at a restaurant that didn't serve barbecue. Anybody who orders a \"Montreal-style\" steak as far from Montreal as I was deserves what he gets\u2014a thin, tough, gnarly piece of meat acrid from black pepper.\n\nI had three stops scheduled for my final day. The first let me down, considering how perfect it looked. Smoke was pouring from an open pit when I arrived at Murray's, a white-painted cinder-block building in a rapidly gentrifying suburb of Raleigh. Yet the pork was oddly bland, tasting of little except vinegar.\n\nStephenson's, which lists its address as Willow Spring but wasn't even in the same county as Willow Spring, wasn't promising at all. It was way too fancified. The tables were varnished pine, and mine was situated right next to a glass wall overlooking a little garden of flowering trees and bushes. I couldn't figure out why I felt so uneasy, until I realized I had never been in a barbecue place with landscaping before. The shrubbery was excellent, and much to my surprise, so was the sandwich. The coleslaw was magnificently ingenious, a challenge to the slaw made by Pete Jones. Some wild-eyed innovator in the kitchen had added a few bits of finely chopped pickle, just enough to give the coleslaw extra piquancy and a pleasing crunch.\n\nGrady's was even harder to find than Stephenson's. Allegedly in Dudley, it was five miles from the town's center at the intersection of two roads not found on any map I had in my car, and I had three of them. There was nothing near it but open fields and a tractor. Grady's had seating for about twenty-five, a screened-in window where orders were taken, a cooler filled with soft drinks, some frilly curtains and a gum machine. The pork was so delicious I found myself contemplating the possibility that it was even better than the Skylight Inn's, although the coleslaw wasn't in the same league. I wanted to ask the woman stirring a pot how she made such a wonderful sandwich, but she let me know she was too busy to talk and I should find her husband, who had all the time I needed. Stephen Grady told me he had opened in 1986, back when he was employed at a sawmill and could get all the wood he needed for free. At the time, his wife, Gerri, had been laid off and needed work. \"I bought it to make her a job,\" he said, smiling, \"and does she ever have a job.\" He's 65 now, and he and Gerri expect to work for five more years. That will be the end, he said, because nobody will want to undertake the costly upgrades the state demands of a new proprietor. A long-term owner is allowed to ignore many newfangled regulations, and so can a relative who takes over a family business, but none of Grady's eight children from a first marriage had shown interest in barbecue, and his wife's children weren't lining up, either. \"You got to work hard at this,\" he said. \"This is not one of those easy livings.\"\n\n\n\nWorried that the end was near for wood-cooked North Carolina barbecue, I reached a supervisor in environmental-health services. Bart Campbell, one of those much feared state regulators I'd heard about, insisted the state wasn't trying to put anybody out of business. It just didn't want walls covered with soot, cinder blocks soaked with grease and flies coming through unscreened windows. He didn't sound unreasonable. \"We don't want people cooking on bedsprings they put across the top of their pits,\" he said. \"We're trying to keep people away from things they can't clean.\"\n\nHe assured me that the state of North Carolina still stood behind wood-cooked barbecue, which was the right thing to say. Without barbecue there would be no reason for citizens to attend church suppers or gather at political rallies, both fundamental to the well-being of any southern state. \"Life without good barbecue would be bad,\" Campbell said. I returned home to the land of toll roads, satisfied. I had eaten too much of the best barbecue I'd ever tasted, and I felt reasonably confident that wood cooking would endure, providing future generations of barbecue owners don't resent having to run hot-water pipes out to their pits. I calculated that in the four days I was on the road, I had eaten fourteen sandwiches. While some people might think that was too many, all I know is that the morning after my return, I woke up realizing I had a long day ahead of me and not a single sandwich to help me get through it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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