An ancient Virginia recipe will be used to cook whole-hog barbecue this weekend — and you can taste it

When Alex Bazemore was growing up in Ahoskie — just south of the Virginia border — whole-hog barbecue was nothing but a way of life.

“I grew up in the country, and that’s how my grandparents used to do it. They raised hogs, and then they would slaughter a few, and I remember my granddad and uncles and them out cooking hogs that way,” he said.

During the cold winter months they dug the pit, burning the same white oak they used for firewood down to charcoal. They smoked the spatchcocked pig for hours and hours. And then they invited over the neighbors, and had a pickin’.

It is an old tradition — not to mention a recipe for good neighbors — about as old as Virginia and North Carolina themselves.

Bazemore has continued his whole-hog cooks as a competition and catering chef under the name Maine Dish LLC. But on Saturday at Big House Farm in Chesapeake, Bazemore will be going back to the very roots of that tradition.

Alongside fellow pitmaster Sam Clayton, and Southern Grit magazine’s Joshua Fitzwater, Bazemore will be cooking a pair of whole hogs sauced according to a 400-year-old Virginia recipe that had been documented by food history author Joseph Haynes: butter, vinegar, salt and chili pepper.

The event will be called, quite simply, Tasting History.

Southern Grit will livestream the whole-hog barbecue starting at sunup Saturday at facebook.com/southerngritmag, with talks by food writers and historians and the pitmasters themselves.

When the cook is finished in the midafternoon, they’ll sell the results by the pound at Chesapeake culinary education spot Now You’re Cooking, with orders reserved in advance.

Fitzwater and food writer Debra Freeman planned the event as a showcase for old Virginia barbecue, in what’s become nearly an annual tradition. They’d organized similar historical Virginia cooks in Woodstock in 2019, and then in Norfolk in 2020, basting the meat with the same long “mops” used by mostly African American cooks hundreds of years ago.

This year’s cook was inspired by a conversation with esteemed American food historian Adrian Miller, author of the new book “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue.” Miller had wanted to witness Virginia’s African American barbecue traditions from modern-day pitmasters.

But unlike the nationally famous barbecue of Texas or Kansas City, which became known through their restaurants, Virginia’s oldest barbecue traditions are preserved mostly in countless backyards and farmsteads.

So Tasting History is a means of getting Virginia’s traditions out to the public, with help from Bazemore and Clayton.

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“Other (states) are kind of rooted in restaurants to some degree,” Fitzwater said. “They’re known as these (barbecue) areas because of these restaurants. Virginia, it’s more that the barbecues were used as a political thing or a community gathering type of thing. … And it’ll start arguments with people from other states, but you can make a direct tie showing that a lot of the barbecue that found its way to North Carolina and other places came from Virginia.”

That long history is what the event is ultimately about — and Joseph Haynes has made strong arguments that the birth of American barbecue happened at the hands of African American pitmasters in Virginia.

That said, much of the fun will also be in the tasting, for those who manage to reserve a pound or two of pork. Fitzwater said they’re not expecting to make any money — just recoup their own costs.

“The food’s going to be delicious,” Fitzwater said. “I mean, it’s the best I’ve ever had. But ultimately, it’s that we want to continue to expose a broader audience to the central significance of Virginia barbecue, the processes that started in Virginia, and some of the original African American pitmasters. The process is bringing together European, African or African American and indigenous techniques together — into this thing that essentially created American barbecue as we know it.”

Taste Virginia will broadcast its whole-hog barbecue from Chesapeake’s Big House Farm at facebook.com/southerngritmag from sunup to midafternoon on Saturday. To reserve a pound of whole-hog barbecue cooked according to a 400-year-old recipe, go to the event page at bit.ly/taste_history. Barbecue is $12 a pound with no fixins, and can be picked up at Now You’re Cooking, 1128 N. Battlefield Blvd. #105, Chesapeake, 757-401-4400.

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Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com