The website for Vivian Howard’s Charleston restaurant, Lenoir, states, “Food with a story tastes better,” and her guests at the celebrity chef’s August book club are ready with stories about whole hogs and long nights.
For instance, Ryan Mitchell, who will be featured at the book club with his dad, tells a story about his father, Ed, known for cooking whole hog. Ed Mitchell barbecued the first whole hog of his life when he was just 14 on the back end of his grandfather’s farm in Wilson, N.C.
“My great-grandfather was a sharecropper with 35 children. He and the other guys in the family were cooking a hog and had nodded off after a night of moonshine,” Ryan Mitchell said. “My dad, without waking anybody, jumps in and got the fire back going, stoked the wood and kind of saved the event. He finished cooking that hog all by himself, and when my great-grandfather woke up and saw what he had done, he gave him a shot of moonshine as a reward.”
The stories of the South are what make it so colorful, and celebrity chef Vivian Howard is intent on preserving those stories with her book club, which will feature Ed and Ryan Mitchell on Aug. 27.
The book club has been increasingly popular since its inception about a year ago. This month, the Mitchells will speak at Lenoir, Howard’s Wentworth Street ode to her own Southern roots. The Mitchells are releasing Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque, a book of smoked meat and savory stories. Howard’s staff will provide bites inspired by the book.
Diving into barbecue culture
Ed Mitchell is one of the founders of the Big Apple Barbecue Festival in New York, which grew to host 100,000 people using 16 whole hogs by the time the festival ended in 2017. When the pandemic slowed life down, it seemed a good time to revisit an offer they had to create the book.
Ryan Mitchell said his family prefers the spelling “barbeque” to “barbecue” because it implies cooking the whole hog, whiskers to tail.
“Once we’d done all the research, we discovered from Wilmington, N.C., to Charleston, there were French and Portuguese influences on enslaved ancestors. The language they used to communicate was called Plantation Creole and they spelled it ‘que,’ ” he said.
Mitchell said he and his father make their sauce the North Carolina way with a vinegar base that has “some crushed red pepper, a little bit of hot sauce, paprika, salt and pepper.” They use oak wood and charcoal to cook their hogs. He added that a 135-pound hog takes “a solid eight to 10 hours” to cook.
It’s not an easy task, and Mitchell said he’s intent on passing down the importance of this kind of cooking.
“It’s hard, it’s very difficult,” he said. “I just think evolution is a real thing, and people are feeding themselves in so many different fashions now. Cooking an animal for 10 hours or standing over a pit in any form, well, people have evolved into much easier ways to feed themselves, and they aren’t connecting with the nostalgia of fire and wood and man’s original form of survival.
“If you look at it just like, ‘I am hungry and want to get some food,’ you will figure out the easiest way to eat something, but if you look at it like, ‘I want to have a spiritual or nostalgic experience to feed myself and my family or customers,’ then it becomes a different way to appreciate the experience.”
Preserving the stories
Preserving the stories and the foodways is one of the reasons Howard started her book club.
“I got cooking because I wanted to be a food writer. That’s always been my first love,” she said. “I came to love cooking through cookbooks. I never had a mentor, but I poured myself into cookbooks and got a lot of my technical education that way. Lenoir is a restaurant meant to show you how Southern food is not like a monolithic thing. It’s all different tastes and treasures.
“Being able to bring in cookbook authors who represent different parts of the South and then expanding to different types of authors with a food connection … it’s been fun and a natural way to engage in the restaurant.”
The book club also has been a way for her to engage in Charleston, her adopted town. Known for her PBS show about her North Carolina restaurant, A Chef’s Life, and, later, her exploration of Southern Food, Somewhere South, she was a product of the other Carolina, but Charleston has made room for her.
“Charleston is such a funny place,” Howard said. “At once, it caters to tourists but has a committed and longstanding community that lives there. For a lot of people, it’s not the most welcoming. But I’ve spent a lot of time here and, with having the book club, almost half of the tickets are the same people every month, and they are all locals.”
Given Howard’s fame, the book club could easily grow, but she is intent on keeping it intimate, with chairs crowded into the dining space at Lenoir.
“I think, unfortunately, when things get really big, they’re just not as good,” Howard said. “I think we could sell 200 tickets and have it in an auditorium, but we’d lose the intimacy and that feeling of a conversation between me and the author and the group.”
She said she sees more intimate gatherings as her future and a reprieve from large-scale “turn and burn” events where she said everyone, from the attendees to the chefs, leave wanting more.
“I am trying to do more things like this, more intimate events where everybody leaves knowing each other’s first names. I see it fitting into what I want to do in the next decade. This is where I am as a person.
“We all are craving these intimate kinds of events where we get more out of it than we put in. I feel the book events are like that for me and for the guests. In the last decade, I was meeting thousands of people, and all of them have had this intimate connection to me through TV. I wanted to feel some of that, I wanted to feel what the people watching were feeling, that intimate connection.”
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