NEWSLETTER

Photos by Dennis McGrath

Vice: Tell us about your new book.

Bobby Seale: Barbeque’n With Bobby Seale is about learning and understanding how to barbecue with baste marinades, which is different from barbecue sauces. Sauces, yes, we love ’em, they’re tasty, they’re delectable, but practically every sauce has some kind of sugar content. And when you take raw meats and get them into a sugary sauce, you’re setting yourself up for the sugar in the sauce to burn over the hot coals. You don’t put the sauce on until the meat is durn near done.

My uncle Tom Turner in Liberty, Texas, taught me to barbecue with his baste when I was 12 years old. People from 100 miles around came to his barbecue-pit restaurant. He became well known for having some of the best barbecue there was. I loved being around that restaurant. I mean, barbecue became my favorite food at a young age. We’d help him out, and he’d pay us $2 a day, you know, for stacking bottles, cleaning up, sweeping up the sawdust.

I remember the last time we were there, he had built an extra place for the white folks on the other side, because there was discrimination back in those days. Black folks and white folks could not eat in the same location. So the white people who would come by, you know, he would just sell the ribs to them to go. And they asked him, “Tom, why don’t you build a place for us to be able to sit down and eat, instead of just coming here and getting takeout.” So my uncle built a sort of extension to the restaurant, but it was separate from the larger part where the black folks were. I used to serve black folks on one side, white folks on the other side, all his great barbecue dishes.

What was his secret?

What he would do is, he’d take a big vat, and he would chop up onions, lemons, scallions, celery, bell peppers, and he’d boil it all down for 30 minutes. He’d take this marinade, pour it over the meats, and then in the evening, when the iceman came by—you know, you had an icebox then, you didn’t have a refrigerator in 1949—he would get three 50-pound blocks of ice. He’d take an icepick and chip ice over the top of the meats sitting in the marinade. Then he’d leave the meats marinating all night in washtubs.

The pit was a big, commercial barbecue pit with two steel doors on the front. He would load it with cords and cords of hickory wood at night. Before we closed up, around 12 at night, we would light that fire in that brick pit and let it burn. When we’d come back in the morning, we’d have mostly coals of hickory wood. We took those coals and spread them out in the back of the pit, and then we would lay rib after rib after rib up on the racks inside the pit.

Then we’d take a big kind of a mop that he’d made, an extension mop, you know, three to four feet long. You’d dip the rag wound around the tip of that, and you’d just mop and baste the meat with that same baste that was in the tub where the meat was marinated. And then you’d flip and turn these ribs for four or five hours. The chickens would be up on a higher rack so they wouldn’t burn. This is the method by which my uncle Tom Turner would barbecue.

So this is where I get my philosophy of barbecuing from baste marinade. This is the technique, this is my philosophy. It’s a tried and proven philosophy of barbecuing methodology.

What was your uncle Tom like, as a man?

Well, he was a rough man. You know, he took no crap. Every once in a while, you might have a racist. He packed a pistol around his restaurant and back and forth from home, because if someone was going to rob him, or some racist was going to act the fool, he might shoot him. Normally, he was just a man interested in business and getting along with people. He didn’t have a lot of time for people dilly-dallying around.

He created. He was creative in cooking. This man could cook. This man liked to cook, he knew what to do—outside of the barbecue.

But anyway, he was just a man who took no crap from nobody. Don’t jump up in his face, talking about what you going do to him, because he might shoot you. That’s what other people would say: “You can’t mess with old Tom there. You mess with Tom Turner, that man might shoot you.”


TO BE CONTINUED:
LABOR DAY BOBBY-QUE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |

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