Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh Unknown (books to read for 13 year olds .txt) 📖

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.

I walked over to the counter to pay my respects to Jones and was 2 2 0

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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 bark-ing that started up when I went by.

He 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 effective warning sign for a seventy-two-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, ‘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 ten thousand dollars 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 smell,” he said. He agreed to reveal one secret. The mayonnaise he uses is Kraft.

I asked him if there was any barbecue he liked as much as his own, because I hadn’t found any, and he said that a second cousin of his by the name of Bum Dennis had a restaurant in the center of town I should try. “His granddaddy and my granddaddy were brothers,” he said. I drove F O R K I T O V E R

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over to Bum’s Restaurant, which is across from the police station and one store over from a shop called Guns Unlimited.

Bum had admirable air-conditioning, a relief after the Skylight Inn’s.

I can’t praise much more than that. The 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.

The next morning, I headed for the southeast corner of the state, passing Lane’s Barbecue House. It was closed, but with good reason. It had burned down, which is one of the potential 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 resembling smoke. Nor did I see wood. I felt it was a little too 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?” I got the message: Get out of there and get to your assigned seat. I did so, immediately.

I 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 the 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. The pork tasted fine, but the fries were the mundane kind served at coffee shops.

Just 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 racing-related bric-a-brac, like a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box with a picture of Richard Petty. Augmenting the decor 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 appetit. 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 2 2 2

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of Camp Lejeune training 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 Jeff Gordon, so quickly did I accelerate out of Big