Best Food Writing 2010 by Holly Hughes

he disappears into the kitchen and returns with four enormous beef briskets that have been sitting in the refrigerator overnight while a seasoning rub from a closely guarded recipe seeps into every fiber and pore. After heaving the meat onto the racks, Polk settles into a rusty metal folding chair a few feet away. The sun has come up, and the day is getting warmer; the pit radiates a slumber-inducing heat. “I’ll keep an eye on it, but I might nod off a little,” he says. He’s entitled. By 11, when the customers start showing up, things will be too busy for so much as a coffee break.
    New Zion—more generally referred to as “that church that sells barbecue”—is one of the most renowned yet improbable members of the Texas barbecue hall of fame. I’ve been making regular pilgrimages here from my home in Austin, a good three hours away, for nearly 15 years, and each time I do I wonder why I’ve waited so long to come back. Everything about the trip is gratifying: driving out through the remote region known as the Piney Woods, spotting the smoke rising above the trees, comparing notes with other customers (“How’d y’all hear about this place?”), and finally sitting down in a rickety little church building to devour some of the most tender, flavorful barbecue in the state.
    The transaction is about as straightforward as it can be: the church cooks mouthwatering meats, sides, and pies, and the public queues up for the privilege of consuming them. That’s all there is to it. Basically, the church runs a barbecue joint like thousands of others in Texas, but something about the whole experience far surpasses the sum of its exceedingly modest parts. Walking across the remnants of purple carpet that have been placed on the ground around the pit to keep the dust down, I feel as if I’d been hired as an extra for a Texas-based episode of The Andy Griffith Show or perhaps been asked to pose for a Norman Rockwell painting. A feeling of déjà vu—of having stepped back into that elusive, simpler time, a time when community and fellowship fueled the state’s great barbecue tradition—envelops me, but with one key difference: this is for real.
    If you want to find out more about the place that wags inevitably refer to as the Church of the Holy Smoke, it’s a good idea to get acquainted with the Reverend Clinton Edison, the fatherly, 56-year-old pastor who presides over New Zion’s congregation of 40 or so mostly elderly members. I ask him how the barbecues got started, and he treats me to an hour-long yarn.
    As best he can figure, it was 1976—although some say 1979—when a painting contractor named D. C. Ward volunteered to paint the church, to which he and his family belonged. At noon on the first day of work, his wife, Annie Mae, set up a smoker on the church lawn to barbecue some meat for Ward’s lunch. Savory aromas wafted through the air. “Once she fired that pit up,” Edison says, “people started stopping by and asking if they could buy some barbecue.” Annie Mae sold a little meat, then a little more, and pretty soon it was all gone. “My poor husband never got anything to eat,” she is quoted as saying in one of the yellowed news clippings tacked to the dining room’s walls. The following Sunday, Annie Mae asked the pastor at the time whether she could sell barbecue and give the proceeds to the church. He handed her $50, and with that sum she started what could be described as the longest-running church fund-raiser in the state’s history.
    The Wards handled the whole shebang at first, but before long most of the congregation was pitching in. Lunches and dinners were served on paper plates on the church lawn for a couple of years, until the health department cracked down and said they had to move the operation indoors. Fortunately, the church had raised enough money by then to build a wood-frame parish hall with room for a handful of tables and a kitchen. Things took off in a serious way: on