The easy way to make barbecue is with a gas-assisted cooker and a thermostat. The hard way, the old way, is to dig or build a pit, burn hardwood down to coals, and tend a whole hog through the night, adjusting by instinct and experience. In Mississippi, only a handful of pitmasters still do it the hard way.

Whole-hog barbecue is a test of endurance as much as skill. The cook begins in the evening and does not really stop, feeding the fire, managing the heat, and resisting the temptation to rush. By morning, if all has gone right, the meat pulls apart at a touch and tastes of smoke all the way through.

The practitioners are aging, and the economics are brutal. A whole hog cooked overnight is expensive in labor and fuel, and it is hard to compete with faster, cheaper methods. Several of the old pits have gone cold in recent years as their keepers retired or passed on.

Those who remain speak of the craft with a mix of pride and worry. They are training apprentices where they can, but the knowledge is stubbornly hard to transmit. It lives in the hands and the nose, in a thousand small judgments made in the dark, and it cannot be written down.