Bobby Lee Tucker had judged barbecue in Branson for twenty two years, and he had never once been seen to hurry. He broke the red wax seal with his thumbnail, unfolded the heavy cream paper, put on his glasses, and began to read in that slow Ozark voice that everyone in the county knows. “This is to certify,” he read, “that on the fourteenth of March, 1996, the recipe known as the Big Earl Rub was registered with this laboratory, in full, with every ingredient and measure sealed, in the sole name of Mrs. Loretta Hollis.” He lowered the paper. “Loretta, is that you?” “It is, Bobby Lee,” I said.
The crowd of two thousand made a sound like wind in a cornfield. Tiffany, on the stage, still holding the trophy over her head, slowly let her arms down. “Mama,” she said, “that is not what it means. You told me the rub was in the family. You always said it would be mine one day.” “One day,” I said, as gently as I could, “is not the same as today. And the rub, honey, was never in the family. It was in your father and in me.” I put my hand on the jar. “Batch One. July of 1988. He wrote the label himself, with a ballpoint pen, in the back of the smokehouse.”
Darla, who had been standing beside me all afternoon with her pocketbook clutched to her chest, stepped forward then. She is seventy three and has never raised her voice in a church or a store, and she raised it now. “Bobby Lee,” she said, “there is one more thing. The grocery company has a letter. Somebody called them in May and said she owned the recipe. Somebody who wanted to sell it for cash.” She turned to Tiffany. “I have known you since you were in diapers, sweetheart. Please tell me it was not you.”
A daughter who claimed the secret recipe of her mother at a barbecue cook off learned what the jar on the judges table really said.
Tiffany began to cry. She did it quietly at first, and then not quietly at all. The microphone was still clipped to her collar, and her sobs went out across the festival grounds, over the hot dog stands and the folding chairs and the little children on the shoulders of their fathers. “The restaurant was failing,” she said. “You were in the hospital, Mama, and the rent was due, and I had no money. Everyone kept saying I was the daughter of Big Earl, and I thought, if I could just be somebody. If I could just win one thing.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “I called the grocery company because I was afraid.”
I climbed the three steps of the stage with my walker, one at a time, and the crowd went so quiet that I could hear the fryers hissing in the food court. I took the microphone from the clip on her collar. “Folks,” I said, “every cook in this county knows what a burnt brisket feels like. You put your whole heart in it, and you walk away for ten minutes, and it is black. My daughter walked away. She made a mistake. It is a big one, and she is going to answer for it, but she is not the first person who ever loved something so much she tried to hold it too tight.” Somebody in the audience said, “Amen.”
Then I set out my terms, in front of everybody, because I have found that a promise made in public is the only kind that holds. The trophy would go to second place. The sign on the building would say Big Earl, as it had for thirty six years, by the end of the week. Tiffany would write an apology for the Tri Lakes News, in her own words, signed. And she would work in the kitchen for one full year, at the smoker, from four in the morning, as my apprentice. “You will learn it a piece at a time,” I told her. “No shortcuts. Your father would have said the same.”
She nodded. She could not speak. I turned to Bobby Lee, who was holding the envelope with trembling hands, and told him that the grocery company would be paying me nine hundred thousand dollars for a license to the rub, not the recipe itself, which would never leave this family. I would be setting aside ten percent for Tiffany, to be released a little at a time, when she had earned it with honest work. Bobby Lee wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “Loretta,” he said, “Earl would have been so proud of you he would have burned the ribs.”
She showed up the next morning at four, in rubber boots, with her hair tied back and no makeup. I handed her a shovel. For the first week she did nothing but clean the pit and haul wood. In the second, I let her trim brisket. She burned her first rack, black as coal, and cried, and I said, “Good. Now you know the smell of failure. Do not forget it.” By the end of the month, she had learned to read the smoke, to feel the bark with her fingertip, to tell the difference between done and almost. She made her first honest rack of ribs in June.
At the cook off the following summer, we entered together, under the name Big Earl, in a booth I could barely stand in. I sat on a stool with my cane and a glass of sweet tea and watched my daughter work the pit, sweating, laughing, barking orders at two college kids. We took second place in ribs. Tiffany held the red ribbon over her head and did not weep at all. Bobby Lee came by the booth afterward, shook her hand, and said, “Young lady, I have eaten a lot of barbecue in my life. That was the first rack I ever had that tasted like love.”
On the morning of her fortieth birthday, I handed her a small glass jar. It was an empty one, washed and dried. Taped inside the lid, in the faded blue ballpoint of her father, was a list. Six ingredients, with measures. The two I had never told anyone, brown sugar and smoked paprika, and the four that no one knew. She read it silently, with tears standing in her eyes. “Mama,” she whispered. “You trust me?” “I do,” I said. “You earned it, baby. It took a year and a trophy, and it was worth every minute.”
