Southern Mutton

April 8, 2020

“Good luck,” says Wes Berry, a professor at Western Kentucky University and author of The Kentucky Barbecue Book, when I tell him what I’m looking for. “I have talked to the people in the barbecue places in Owensboro and Fancy Farm and any place that serves mutton and have tried to nail down the origins. They all have hunches, but nobody seems to really have true evidence of how it got to West Kentucky.”

One part of Bosley’s hunch that checks out is the prevalence of sheep in western Kentucky, particularly as a result of geography. In the early 1800s, Merino sheep reached the U.S. from Spain, providing the limited number of American shepherds with a source for finer wool. The War of 1812, global trade complications caused by Napoleon’s rise in France, and a protective tariff passed in 1816 (with uncharacteristic Southern support), led to a higher demand and a higher price for domestic wool. Looking for space to expand their flocks, shepherds went west, first to Ohio, then Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. They didn’t go much farther south due to the dominance of cotton and the dearth of textile manufacturing relative to areas upriver along the Ohio. By 1840, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia (the part of the state that’s now West Virginia, in particular) held most of the South’s sheep. With larger flocks and more customers, husbanders soon developed sheep breeds that could produce plentiful, quality wool for most of their lives, then be turned into decent enough meat at the end. 

The wool caught on. The meat didn’t. Mutton never captured the share of Americans’ diet that beef or pork did, and it never earned the cachet of tender lamb, despite farmers and bureaucrats trying to get sheep onto the American table. In hard times, eating mutton even took on the noble mantle of a patriotic chore. President William Howard Taft’s secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, declared in 1912 that beef wasn’t getting any cheaper and “there is a supply of meat that people should become accustomed to eating — mutton.” The Owensboro Messenger compared Wilson’s suggestion to Marie Antoinette telling breadless peasants to eat cake.

“Beef is for the other folk,” the paper declared, “the folk who can afford to pay thirty or thirty-five cents a pound for a tenderloin steak or a porterhouse, or even higher prices.” Sans revolution, the government continued its efforts. In 1913, the Evansville Press, just over the river from Owensboro in Indiana, ran a piece bylined “Uncle Sam.” 

“Really, I wish you people would eat more mutton,” the symbol of our country wrote, stressing that the growing nation couldn’t live on beef alone. “No — I don’t mean ‘lamb,’ but m-u-t-t-o-n, MUTTON! Sheep meat a year or more old.” Papers of this time also ran the church picnic notices, often promising barbecue. 

Let’s suppose this glut of sheep — to say nothing of the government’s pleas — did lead to shorn old ewes landing in the barbecue pit. Was that exclusively the work of Welsh settlers, or, as Dan wondered, could there be more to the origin story? He sent me a Center for the Study of Southern Culture newsletter from 2003 that tells of Jewish residents of Savannah, Georgia, enjoying barbecue mutton. It doesn’t claim they inspired or invented it; it just wasn’t pork and the pitmaster didn’t cook beef. Dan also remembered seeing a reference to Jewish shepherds in Missouri in the early 19th century. He couldn’t find the source, and neither could I, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Jewish immigrants moved from Europe to the U.S. during this time. Maybe some were shepherds who sold their older sheep for meats. Maybe there were Jewish Kentuckians looking for an alternative to pork who would buy such a dish. Bosley and Berry hadn’t turned Dan’s 99 percent into 100 just yet. So I kept searching. 

“If you find the smoking gun, I'd love to see the archival evidence of that,” says Janice W. Fernheimer, director of Jewish Studies and associate professor at the University of Kentucky. 

The university hosts the Jewish Kentucky Oral History Project. A search through the interviews reveals only a few mentions of sheep, and just one mention of a Jewish family raising them — the Weils. In 1910, the Jewish Agricultural Society counted two members in all of Kentucky. It doesn’t give their names, but it’s possible they were Jonas and Sim Weil, brothers from Alsace-Lorraine who moved to Lexington in the 1880s and eventually started farming (Jonas and Sim were also among the founders of Temple Adath Israel in Lexington in 1904 — where Dan was Bar Mitzvahed several decades later). Jonas in particular is noted in the local press for raising and selling lamb, a tradition his son Herschel continued. But the Weils didn’t deal in sheep specifically for any dietary or religious reasons — Herschel’s son Walter says the family didn’t keep kosher — and they weren’t selling much mutton, let alone selling it to western Kentucky barbecues. Most of the lambs went to an abattoir in New Jersey, run by a man who Walter says he may have been named after. Mutton was a byproduct, not a profit-maker. “Once the ewes who bore the lambs were too old to propagate, I wouldn't be surprised if they were sold to a slaughterhouse for mutton,” Walter says.

It’s likely there were other Jewish farmers who weren’t in the Jewish Agricultural Society — the 1910 document is a membership list, not a census. The 2013 novel A Far Piece to Canaan is inspired by the author Sam Halpern’s upbringing in a family of Jewish sharecroppers in Kentucky. Halpern (perhaps more widely known as the titular dad in the Shit My Dad Says Twitter account) was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant who had family in the state. In an interview for Tablet with his son Justin, Samuel said the family established their own farm in 1950. More stories like Halpern’s — earlier stories, going back another century — undoubtedly exist, waiting to be written or found. One or more may intersect with mutton. 

Going through the oral histories from the University of Kentucky, barbecue doesn’t get much attention. After reading or watching a few, a different picture of Kentucky’s history emerges — one that’s been overlooked outside of projects like the oral history and the occasional book: Jewish settlers helped build Paducah, Owensboro, and many other cities and towns along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. “In one small town after another during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was common to encounter men of German-Jewish stock who had emerged as prominent citizens deeply engaged in local affairs,” writes the historian Lee Shai Weissbach in his book The Jewish History of Small-Town America: The South and Beyond. Paducah and Henderson, specifically, had triple-digit Jewish populations in the early 20th century. They weren’t necessarily feasting on mutton, though.

“If there were kosher foods, they were brought in from Chicago and St. Louis and Nashville,” and other cities with large Jewish populations, says Laurie Ballew, the president of Temple Israel Congregation in Paducah. Ballew had never heard of any connection between kashrut and mutton. Depending on whether the proper authorities were available to certify the meat, mutton wouldn’t even be kosher, since it’s not just the type of animal that determines kashrut. And it’s not clear how many people were keeping kosher. Walter Weil says many others in his temple didn’t. That was in the middle of the 20th century.  

But when the history and legacy of Paducah’s Jewish population came up, Ballew had a long list of topics that went beyond barbecue. Barney Dreyfuss, an immigrant from what is now Germany, took up baseball in Paducah and was later pivotal in starting the World Series. His uncle — and his employer when he moved to Paducah — was Isaac Bernheim, who founded I.W. Harper bourbon. He moved to Louisville and was a major figure in the whiskey business — among many other Jewish entrepreneurs — as well as a philanthropist. There’s a giant forest and nature reserve south of the city that bears Bernheim’s name. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, whose accomplishments include championing the right to privacy, was from Louisville. There’s a banner of him downtown and the University of Louisville’s law school is named for him. In Lexington, the poet I.J Schwartz produced a book of epic Yiddish-language poems called Kentoki about his adopted home. 

Paducah’s Jewish population was also the target of one of the more direct acts of antisemitism by the U.S. Government. Ulysses Grant, in 1862, issued his General Order No. 11 in response to fears that Jewish merchants were running a black market in cotton during the Civil War. The order said that Jews, as a class, must be removed from his territory. A Paducah businessman named Cesar Kaskel pushed President Abraham Lincoln (who was born about 200 miles east of Paducah) to reverse Grant’s order. Lincoln did, weeks after it was issued. Grant reportedly regretted his actions, and he tried to make up for them at times; he later became the first sitting president to attend service at a synagogue. But the mark was made, and it was a reminder of a darker side to history. While Jewish businessmen and residents were often seen as the respected members of the community they were, antisemitism still sometimes percolated, resulting in actions like Grant’s, which were “steeped in these nasty stereotypes about Jews and shady business dealings,” Fernheimer says. 

Less than 100 years later, the Jewish population in western Kentucky was in decline. Not because of unwelcoming neighbors, but because of general population trends, with many Americans moving to larger cities or their suburbs. As Weissbach writes, “the outward migration of Jews who grew up in small towns accelerated greatly in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and in most cases it was not counterbalanced by the arrival of new settlers.” 

“Now most of the Jewish people who used to go to our synagogue are in the cemetery. And the younger people, as younger people do, they go to college and don’t come back,” Ballew says.

My life in western Kentucky was agnostic. Encounters with religious custom were limited to the occasional Friday fish dinner at my Catholic grandparents’ house in Missouri. Religious diversity in our town generally meant various denominations of Christian and families like mine who didn’t go to church and who a friend once described as “lapsed.” Christianity, active or lapsed, seemed to be the default.  

This inaccuracy was persistent, even as I learned more about where I came from. I read about race relations. I heard stories of immigrants. But in all my education, just as in my hometown, Judaism was largely absent, except for an occasional mention of Brandeis or Bernheim. Was this due to lack of trying to find a richer past on my part, or lack of being taught? 

“The older people are aware, but the younger people aren’t,” Ballew says. “If they’re not told about it, they don't know about it.”

What better way to tell this history than through food?

“Southern Jewish history reminds us of our nation’s racial and religious diversity. And nowhere is this diversity better understood than the dinner table,” writes Marcie Cohen Ferris in her book Matzoh Ball Gumbo. “Eating is a complicated activity that reveals who we are and where we come from, an activity that defines our race, gender, class, religion.” 

And what better food to tell a slice of southern history than barbecue? It’s an iconic dish that has a fetishistic hold on carnivorous gourmands. “The idea that something as quintessentially Southern as barbecue, with this Kentucky variant, would have Jewish roots is obviously going to be appealing,” says Josh Parshall, the director of history at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Jewish Life. Explaining this dish as the result of a 19th century melting pot, neighbor dining with neighbor, would be the type of flashy history that might get someone to think a little bit more about a place they’d not thought about before, about their meals, their country, their fellow man. This is why we learn about the things we love and the places we come from.

“We're in a pretty scary time in the United States right now,” Fernheimer says. “When people don't know just how much the things they love are connected to the people they don't know, they have all the more reason to be scared of them or to fear them or to fuel those kinds of virulent hatred.”

We learn so we can avoid a future where orders banning people as a class can be avoided. We learn so we can celebrate people who change the world. We learn so we see that the differences we imagine aren’t anything to fight over. We learn so we can toast with a glass of bourbon or sit down to a plate of barbecue.

Despite my hopefulness, I had nothing to confirm Dan’s theory. I called Ferris, and she hadn’t heard of anything that would connect mutton to the Jewish populations of western Kentucky. Neither had Steve Raichlen, author of the aptly named The Barbecue Bible. After exhausting my resources, I couldn’t budge Dan’s 99 percent figure any lower. I had a few dots — Jewish communities in western Kentucky, Jewish shepherds in the bluegrass — but I couldn’t draw a line to mutton barbecue. I told Dan I wasn’t sure I could ever find what I needed to say his theory was definitely true. 

“Even if there’s no evidence for it,” he said, “it's something that should be true.” 

I asked Dan what it would mean if I had found the evidence. 

“It’s of no consequence whatever,” he said. “I would get a big chuckle. That’s about it.” 

A new history of barbecued mutton probably wouldn’t change the world. It might change some minds. It might get a few more people to travel to western Kentucky. But absent a smoking gun, we’re left with that 1 percent. Maybe less, maybe more. Without something unlikely (a letter, a recipe) or impossible (a time machine), the only smoke comes from barbecue pits. Maybe there isn’t a connection to barbecue mutton. But there is a connection to so much else. The cultural communion is part of the South. It’s part of the country. And if a little speculation about regional food helps remind people of all that, then maybe it’s good to speculate sometimes. 

“It’s a good story,” Dan says. “It’s still a good story even if it isn’t true.”

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