LAMB BARBECUE: Cultural Codicil, Baa-aad to the Bone

  Earlier this summer, on a culinary tour of Savannah, Georgia, a friend turned me on to her favorite menu item at Johnny Harris, the barbecue landmark and former dance hall (not to mention rumored speakeasy) dating back to the 1920s. “You’ve got to try the lamb barbecue sandwich,” she said with the urgency of a paramedic treating a potentially fatal nutritional disorder. For the unschooled, Johnny Harris’s place is one of the great historic monuments to ’cue. Photos of its 1940s heyday show patrons in tuxes and ball gowns in its circular dining hall, with big bands like Harry James’s on the revolving bandstand in the center of the room. “Starlight” twinkles from tiny bulbs in the vaulted ceiling.

The circular dining room is still intact, but the patrons now are largely Savannah folks in khakis and loafers, often with kids in tow. Harris’s barbecue sauce won the 2002 Diddy-Wa-Diddy Award (first place) at the American Royal International Barbecue Sauce Contest in Kansas City, and business is so good the place may expand into a Shoney’s next door to accommodate groups. The sliced lamb sandwich is tender, great with Harris’s mustard sauce, on soft wheat bread with a pickle slice.

It was a delicious treat, the kind that lingers in your memory. It was still haunting me later that summer when, on a trip to Memphis, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Charlie Vergos’s Rendezvous and rediscovered that iconic institution’s barbecued lamb riblets. That in turn took me back to my college days in Owensboro, Kentucky, where the local specialties are barbecued mutton and burgoo, a thick stew of mutton and vegetables (much like Georgia’s pork-laced Brunswick stew), served up at the famous Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn. And as every journalist knows, three examples make a story. I set out to uncover the role lamb plays in the ’cue cultural catechism–to shear it, if you will, of its wooly origins.

The three restaurants—Johnny Harris, the Rendezvous, and Moonlite—share similar lifelines: All began as taverns, some on dirt roads, with the sale of a few sandwiches. The Rendezvous is the youngest establishment, dating only to 1948, although the current owners of the Moonlite, the Bosleys, bought the then 30-seat joint in 1963. All are still family-run, with Johnny Harris’s place in the hands of the descendants of Harris’s partner,
K. L. “Red” Donaldson, who’d worked his way into management from dishwasher and pitmaster. At the Rendezvous, employees are often third- or fourth-generation descendants of original staffers.
But the styles and origins of their menus’ sheepish traditions are as far-flung as the restaurants’ locations. At Johnny Harris, the six-to-eight pound, boned, rolled and tied lamb roasts twirl in specially designed Roto-Flex carousel-style gas ovens. (The original hickory pit “never drew again” after a renovation, says Norman Heidt, Red’s son-in-law.) The comparatively small roasts are cooked only four to six hours, unsauced and unmarinated, with the flavor coming from the cut of meat, slow cooking, and hickory smoke. Sauce is served on the side of tender, lean slices of meat.

The Rendezvous is, of course, famous for Memphis-style dry seasoning, a term that Charlie’s son John Vergos prefers to “dry rub.” (“It’s not a rub, and it’s not dry,” he points out.) At the Rendezvous, two to two-and-a-half pound raw, unmarinated half-slabs of lamb ribs are cooked less than an hour over hardwood charcoal. When the ribs emerge from the ovens, crisp-edged and still deliciously fatty, they’re basted with hot vinegar and water, and sprinkled with Vergos’s spice mix (chili powder, garlic powder, oregano, paprika). They’re terrific with the vinegary, mustardy house coleslaw.

Owensboro in Daviess County, Kentucky, is the barbecued mutton and burgoo capital of the world. “Mutton” is essentially older lamb, with most calling it that after the animal is more than a year old. Although mutton is noted for its gamier taste, Moonlite’s Patrick Bosley notes that the inn’s slow-cook, low-temperature barbecue methods (12 hours over hickory coals for each quarter-mutton, often cut in-house) tenderize the meat and tame its wilder flavors, while retaining its unmistakably gutsy taste. Traditional tomato-based sauce is served on the side of a sliced or chopped sandwich or plate. The Moonlite sells an average 10,000 pounds of barbecued mutton per week—not including burgoo.

So, why? Why lamb, why these areas, why the specific methods? Surprisingly, despite all the vagueness of barbecue history, there were some very definitive answers. Moonlite’s Bosley notes that Daviess County, Kentucky, was home to a huge population of Welsh settlers. (In Wales today, he says, there are still four sheep to every resident.) In addition, the tariff of 1816 made wool production a profitable concern in what was then the West. Older sheep, no longer producing wool or offspring, were more dispensable than the younger lambs. Later, says Bosley, mutton went the way of all barbecue, becoming a cheap meat staple of church picnics and political gatherings. Today it’s still the ’cue of choice at Daviess County Catholic gatherings.

At the Rendezvous, the lamb riblets were part of the process that also birthed Vergos’s spice mix. John Vergos’s Greek grandfather, Charlie’s father, first ran a hot dog stand on Beale Street. He sprinkled his dogs with the spices that Greeks put on almost every meat–garlic, oregano, a little lemon juice. “It was the Southern Delta tradition, even the New Orleans tradition, that added the chili powder and cayenne,” he says. And lamb, of course, had long been a staple in the Vergos household, at every Easter and Christmas.

Johnny Harris’s lamb barbecue was a favorite of Savannah’s Jewish residents, says Heidt. Though the cooking method certainly isn’t certified kosher, apparently many wanted to enjoy barbecue without eating pork. (Johnny Harris has never served beef barbecue.) And so its stylish denizens danced to big bands, drinking their potable of choice, with the barbecue that suited them most.

“For most of us, barbecue is a result of a situation—poverty, for one thing, because the ribs were the cut most folks were throwing away. It’s truly American and unique,” says John Vergos. “It’s kind of like the pictures on the wall here—no one planned this look. It just happened and grew because it works somehow.” And so to the established and hallowed blend of cultures that created barbecue, most notably the meeting of African and Southern souls, add these cultural codicils that gave us the lamb addendum: Welsh, Jewish, and Greek traditions.

Krista Reese