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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our conversation about family, and we're going to add food to the mix. With temperatures reaching 80 degrees for the 4th of July weekend, it is peak time for our cookout. A new cookbook includes family recipes from a father and son duo, Ed and Ryan Mitchell. It is entitled Ed Mitchell's Barbeque. The story begins when Ed Mitchell, known as the Pitmaster in barbecue circles, returned home to Wilson, North Carolina, to help his mother with the small family grocery store after his father passed.

After rolling out his parents' rustic cooker, he smoked a 35-pound pit to lift his mother's spirits and prepare a side of coleslaw of collard greens and all kinds of things and people liked what they tasted, and that launched his interest in starting a barbecue business, Mitchell's Ribs, Chicken, and Barbecue that would eventually become a family legacy he shared with his son. An Indie Week article notes about the book. Yes, there are dozens of outstanding recipes, hello, crackling hush puppies, but this tomb digs deep into the history of the Mitchell family on the real struggle to turn a time on her tradition into a thriving business.

The cookbook, Ed Mitchell's Barbeque, is out today. Ed Mitchell was scheduled to join us alongside his son but was recently hospitalized and is unable to be here. We wish him well and hope for a speedy recovery. Ryan Mitchell joins us, though. Hi, Ryan.

Ryan Mitchell: Hello, hello. How you doing?

Alison Stewart: Hello, hello. Thank you for making time for us. Hey, listeners, if you've got a barbecue tradition you want to share, maybe a family recipe you want to shout out, our phone lines are open to you, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can reach out to us on social media @AllOfItWNYC. What are your first memories of Barbecue, Ryan?

Ryan Mitchell: My first memories of barbecue is honestly just outside at a family get-together. It was at my great uncle's house. To set the tone, my great-grandfather fathered 35 children. He had 16 with his first wife and 20 with the second. The culture and the history and the food and the different perspectives on hospitality and barbecue that were at our dinner table and around our family for me as a kid growing up were just a rollercoaster ride. Barbecue meant a lot of different things to our family. My very first memories are just walking around, playing outside in the backyard while a small family gathering was going on.

Alison Stewart: In the book before we get to recipes, there's a lot of histories, there's a lot of history about your family. There's information that we get about Wilson County. Why is it important to understand the history as we start to hear about the recipes and we think about this food?

Ryan Mitchell: For us, this journey in barbecue started long before we decided to make a business out of it. We wanted to make sure the project gave a voice to, not only our family but just ancestors and barbecue culture from Eastern North Carolina to the rest of the world because the skillset is craft. Was born out of survival and it also has stories of celebration too. We wanted to make sure we gave a voice to everybody that came before us so we could be proud of the craft that we're doing.

Alison Stewart: You have recipes in here for old-fashioned whole hog, fried green tomatoes, rice, grits, mac, and cheese for the vegetarians in the crowd. There's a smoked tofu recipe and some okra [unintelligible 00:03:53].

Ryan Mitchell: There's a smoked tofu.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] You talk about banking the coals, before we even get started, what does banking the coals mean?

Ryan Mitchell: Banking the coals is a age old tradition that my great-grandfather taught to my family. It's a process by which you just position your coals to have the majority of the heat and the smoke to be going up around the heavier parts of the animal. You leave the middle part free of direct heat. It's really just a process to make sure that the middle of the animal can cook slowly and it's not engulfed in flames as the hog cooks overnight. It's basically a square. We call it banking because coals in the wood are actually banked up against the sides of the inside of the grill or the smoker. Again, that allows the animal to cook at an even pace from front to back.

Alison Stewart: As we called your dad the Pitmaster, Ed Mitchell Pitmaster, there is an important history to him taking on that moniker. Would you share that?

Ryan Mitchell: Very much. As we started to get into a lot of the family history and deciding to open up the business and how we were going to just rebrand a little bit, the origin of the craft starts on plantations in the Carolinas and Virginia, up through South Carolina. The elder statesmen that were on those plantations that man the pit were called pit boys. That was just the moniker that was used to describe who was in charge of watching and tending to the hogs over the pits as they cook throughout the day and overnight. Once we got into the business, my father was very adamant about figuring out how to show a little bit more respect to the craft through namesake and we decided to use the word Pitmaster.

It really just came out just on a whim, just a culinary word that we wanted to attach to add some credence to how valuable the skill was. We called ourselves Pitmasters, my dad called himself Pitmaster. From the late '90s all the way up through now, the word has gained some commercial popularity and here we are.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ryan Mitchell. The name of the book is Ed Mitchell's Barbecue. It is out. We've got someone else who sent us a note about his dad. Check this out, Ryan. "My dad explored smoked meats a few years ago. He got a smoker and started, he did a lot of research, but his first brisket tasted more like beef jerky. However, now makes a really great meat and he and my mom are volunteer firefighters. He makes food for the fire company lunches and he got Firefighter Of The Year award at the company maybe because of the brisket. He told me to add the finely ground coffee to the rub and that makes it great." Thoughts?

Ryan Mitchell: Oh, yes. My dad is full of those secrets. I'm impressed that he used the brisket to be able to win the competition. That's a hard piece of meat to master. That coffee is going to add the secret ingredient to the bark. I'm sure that was amazing.

Alison Stewart: One of the ingredients that you folks use is vinegar, vinegar sauce with your racks of rib.

Ryan Mitchell: Apple cider vinegar.

Alison Stewart: Apple cider vinegar. All right, tell us what apple cider vinegar is, why do we introduce this into our ribs?

Ryan Mitchell: Apple cider vinegar has a very special place in all of barbecue for North Carolinians. It was used as a preservative, a condiment. It was used also as an insect repellent as the hot pieces of meat sat on smokers and off to the side as other food was being cooked. Apple cider vinegar has a very special place amongst North Carolina culture. It has so many facets to it. We use it on our ribs, we use it on our chicken, we use it obviously, on our pork and beef. Almost everything. It has a splash of apple cider vinegar touched to it.

Alison Stewart: Does it do something to the proteins?

Ryan Mitchell: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What does it do?

Ryan Mitchell: We use it on the larger cuts of meat. For example, for like the whole hog. It is also used as almost like a tenderizer. It breaks the meat down just a little bit faster and a little easier. When we start the chopping process and the hot vinegar, apple cider vinegar, it's based on those larger chunks like the shoulders and the hams. It does make it a lot easier to chop and process as it absorbs the vinegar. Again, a very multifaceted ingredient that we love here in Carolina.

Alison Stewart: Another recipe that caught my eye, washtub fish stew. [laughter] What's the origin story? Do I use a washtub?

Ryan Mitchell: Yes. The origin of it, you use a washtub. You may have better methods now, but that was an amazing recipe that we were allowed to use through our amazing co-writer here, Zella Palmer. That's a family recipe of hers. Washtub fish stew, it pays homage to the coastline. Wilson is approximately an hour and a half to two hours from Wilmington, which is the beach area. The Atlantic coastline from Wilmington on up through the East Coast, man, really played a huge part in barbecue culture. Seafood is a major player amongst indigenous people and plantation life as we move up inward into the Carolina. That fish stew was just a go-to recipe amongst the eastern corridor or the coastal corridor of the Carolinas.

Alison Stewart: There's a recipe in here that's not just any collard greens, they say Wilson County collard greens. You wrote, "When I was a child, Black women in Wilson looked forward to getting up on Saturday morning to go and pick their collards and wash them in preparation for Sunday dinner." What's special about Wilson County collards?

Ryan Mitchell: Wilson County collards, we called it that because in our family, a lot of the collard farms and a lot of the agriculture that surrounds Wilson was notoriously famous for growing collards. A lot of surrounding counties would come up and it was almost used as a gathering and a social experiment amongst the Black women, amongst our church, and our family to traditionally go out and gather collards together, paying homage to ancestors before them, and get fresh greens, and spend the day together just appreciating the land. They would get back on Saturdays and wash them up and there would be Sunday dinner at home and also for the church as well on Sunday.

After we finished, we would feed the clergy and different functions that would happen at the church afterwards. It just had a huge social impact amongst the elders to be able to hand down.

Alison Stewart: Did the elders make you drink pot liquor?

Ryan Mitchell: [chuckles] They did make me drink pot liquor. Pot liquor was like the original elderberry juice. You drink it if you're sick or not.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Whether you like it or not, you're drinking that.

Ryan Mitchell: Whether you like or not. You're going to get some pot liquor before flu season, during the flu season, and then after, go get a shot of pot liquor. It worked and it was a major player in our household for sure.

Alison Stewart: I want to say that you have drinks as well. Pineapple whiskey lemonade. What's happening there?

Ryan Mitchell: [chuckles] The whiskey lemonade is just, once we moved up to Raleigh and added a bar to our barbecue menu, those recipes were very popular to bring in all different age groups and people that wanted to sit at the bar and enjoy mixed beverages with their barbecue. Notoriously throughout our city, a lot of the barbecue places, they didn't have bars in them. They didn't have liquor licenses, so we didn't even get a chance to really explore that. All the guys would be out back drinking moonshine in a separate scenario, but to have a mixed beverage added to the menu was huge once we started to really get everyone involved with enjoying our food.

Alison Stewart: What is a common mistake people make? A lot of people are going to be barbecuing this weekend.

Ryan Mitchell: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: What would you just say, "People, let's not do this"?

Ryan Mitchell: Listen, I'm a huge promoter of indirect cooking, so listen, we got time, you have half of the day in front of you, you load the grill with your charcoal and your wood and you set it on, you get your coals going, leave some space for emergency. If you're cooking on a rectangular grill, leave one side open, so to say. Leave one side without any coals or fuel up under it so that if you do have a flare out, you can just simply flip it over to the other side. Grease and fire, that's the accelerant.

Simple, instead of panicking and burning up everything that you have on the smoker, just take your tongs or take whatever you're using, and if you see a flare up, move the meat simply to the other side. Then when the flames go down, readjust your nerves a little bit and then start trying again.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Some good advice for the weekend. My guest has been Ryan Mitchell. The name of the book is Ed Mitchell's Barbeque. It's out today. Send in the best to your dad.

Ryan Mitchell: I will do that. He's doing well.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for this week. Coming up on Monday, all music all the time, we'll air some exclusive in-studio performances from singer Noah Kahan, the New Orleans rock band The Revivalists, and singer-songwriter Brandy Clark. Then on Tuesday's show for the 4th of July, we'll learn about the life of famed orator and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. All Of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Our intern is Aki Camargo. I'll get that right one day. Meg Ryan is the head of live radio.

Our engineers are Juliana Fonda and Jason Isaac. We love Aki. Luscious Jackson does our music. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you and I will meet you back here next time. Sorry, Aki.

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