Barbecue Is the Spice of Life and Something to Fight About in Court : Lawsuits: One juicy example is the fight between Texas Pig Stands and Hard Rock Cafe. These people take the Southern delicacy seriously.

You won’t find Barbecue Law offered in the catalogues of the nation’s prestige law schools--at least not yet. But if the paper chasers need instruction in that arcane science, they can turn to a recent case from the annals of the Lone Star State: Texas Pig Stands Inc. vs. Hard Rock Cafe International Inc.

Though the suit was filed in February of 1988 by Texas Pig Stands owner Richard Hailey--who likes his barbecue with a reddish, slightly sweet-flavored sauce and sour dill relish--the roots of the controversy go back to 1921, when the first Pig Stand was opened in Dallas.

The small stand, which Hailey claims was the first drive-in restaurant in the country, featured a “pig sandwich” on its menu. The tasty sandwich and the curbside concept were so successful that other Pig Stands were opened throughout the United States; at its zenith, the chain was more than 100 restaurants strong. The company logo, then and now, was the profile of a hog with the words Pig Sandwich stretching from ear to tail. In the latter half of the century, however, the business began to shrink, and today there are only seven Pig Stands left. All are in Texas.

Still, Texas Pig Stands has a proud tradition. So when the Hard Rock Cafe opened in Dallas in 1986, Hailey was chagrined to find that it too served a “pig sandwich.” He took the matter to court, seeking restitution for all of the profits that the Dallas Hard Rock had made on its version of the entree.

The Hard Rock lawyers argued that the company’s founder, Isaac Tigrett--who likes his sauce hot and vinegary--grew up in Jackson, Tenn., just a few miles from the barbecue mecca of Memphis. According to Tigrett’s testimony, Memphis and other cities across the South were for years dotted with small barbecue shacks known to one and all as pig stands, and the sandwiches they served were called, generically, pig sandwiches. So he was within his rights to put the pair of words on his menu.

“It was one of the most extraordinary cases I’ve ever seen,” said Hard Rock attorney Ralph Kalish Sr.--who doesn’t even like barbecue sauce all that much--”and I’ve been practicing law for 43 years.” Kalish took depositions from people all over the country who testified that sticking barbecue between two pieces of white bread was sure enough a pig sandwich.

The presiding U.S. magistrate, John Primomo, must have felt the weight of the matter as he dismissed the jury for a weekend break before deliberations. With great solemnity he instructed them not to talk to their families or each other about the case. Not to watch television. Not to read the newspapers. And, above all, not to eat any barbecue.

Lest you think this was an isolated incident, a quick scroll through an index of recent lawsuits provides a number of other juicy examples, most notably a $1-billion breach-of-contract suit filed against entertainer Redd Foxx in 1986. In the suit, Foxx was accused of backing out of an agreement to endorse a line of barbecue products.

If barbecue has begun to spice up the bar, surely it’s only a matter of time before the Southern delicacy insinuates itself into other aspects of our culture--medicine, sociology, education--so the more we know about the subject, the better off we’ll be. To that end, perhaps the time is right for a college entirely devoted to the study of barbecue culture, a sort of Barbecue U.

The president of the college would have to be Nashville’s John Egerton, author of the definitive opus, “Southern Food,” who knows barbecue the way Bo Jackson knows everything else. The deans would be Greg Johnson and Vince Staten, two reporters for the Louisville Courier-Journal who wrote the book on barbecue called “Real Barbecue.” The school colors would be red and brown. The nickname would be the Chefs. And with no apologies to the University of Arkansas, the mascot would be a razorback. The course list might look something like this:

WORLD HISTORY

By way of introduction, President Egerton will explain to students how Spanish explorers discovered Indians in the Caribbean who roasted meat on wooden frames. The Spanish called the framework barbacoa and from that word comes the present-day barbecue. The reading list will include numerous treatises on pork preparation through the ages, including Charles Lamb’s 1822 essay on roasting pigs.

In his essay, Lamb speculates that barbecue was first discovered in the Far East when a villager’s hut burned down, charring the pigs and chickens in the yard. The distraught villager, looking for a morsel of food, pulled the roasted meat from the ashen rubble and discovered that it was very tasty. Word of the newfound delicacy spread, and soon people throughout the land were burning down their houses and enjoying barbecued pigs and chickens.

AMERICAN HISTORY

Students will learn that pork was the meat most commonly eaten by colonial Southerners because it was easy to preserve. But pork could get a little tough, so a great deal of energy was spent on the sauces that were believed to enhance the flavor of an otherwise unappetizing dish.

Guest lecturers will include celebrity chef Paul Prudhomme, who once wrote that while growing up in Opelousas, La., he didn’t know what the word rare meant when applied to food. “My mother never served anything that wasn’t really cooked, because you never killed an animal that was still productive.” As a result, when an animal finally was slaughtered on the Prudhomme farm, it was fairly old. And what made it tasty was the sauce.

LITERATURE

You’ve heard about people who talk about reading cookbooks the way others read novels. In this course students will receive credit for doing just that. The reading list will include works by Craig Claiborne, Julia Child and James Beard. Prose works by Calvin Trillin and William Faulkner, on the other hand, will be read as cookbooks.

Visiting poets will drop by to delight students with samples of their works. For instance, Roy Blount Jr. might read “Song to Barbecue Sauce” from his book, “One Fell Soup, or I’m Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life”:

Hot and sweet and red and greasy,

I could eat a gallon easy:

Barbecue sauce!

Lay it on, hoss.

Nothing is dross

Under barbecue sauce.

Brush it on chicken, slosh it on pork,

Eat it with fingers, not with a fork.

I could eat barbecued turtle or squash--

I could eat tar paper cooked and awash

In barbecue sauce.

I’d eat Spanish moss

With barbecue sauce. . . .

PHILOSOPHY

A course that studies people, such as Bobby Seale, who’ve raised barbecue to a higher plane. “There was a time,” wrote Seale (who believes that barbecue should be spelled with a q ) in his book, “Barbeque’n With Bobby,” “when 20 million liberals and left radicals across the country were saying ‘Free Bobby Seale.’ Now they’re grown up and have their own barbeque grills and pits in their backyard. This is an American pastime. I love it. Barbequing can change a grumpy attitude to a pleasant kind of sereneness.”

GEOGRAPHY

Calvin Trillin was right when he said, “Barbecue is a touchy subject all over the country.” The college hopes to foster understanding among regions by bringing together a group of cartographers and geographers who believe that America can be divided into regions according to barbecue preferences. Students will learn from visiting scholars that Texans barbecue beef as well as pork and prefer a tomato-based sauce, while North Carolinians live by pork alone and tend toward a sweet, vinegar-based sauce.

Guest speakers might include University of South Carolina professors Charles Kovacik and John Winberry, who wrote a 200-plus-page geographic treatment of their state in 1988. One of the ways they divvied up the state was by pointing out which region uses which sauce. According to the authors, the Low Country loves mustard-based sauce; along the western side the sauce resembles ketchup; tomato-based sauce is found in the northwest; and up around Myrtle Beach the shag dancers go for a pepper and vinegar sauce.

BUSINESS

Students will spend their spring term in Memphis, observing preparations for the Memphis in May International Festival, the centerpiece of which is the annual World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. This year the contest will draw 175 teams--with names such as the Pot Bellied Porkers and the Porky Pilots, competing for $10,000 in prizes before 100,000 spectators. The real money, however--more than $350,000--goes to the festival in the form of corporate sponsorships, and the citywide economic impact of the barbecue contest alone is about $1.8 million.

POLITICS

Politics and barbecue have gone hand in hand since before the founding of the nation. Readings from the textbook “Real Barbecue” will include the Acts of the Virginia Burgesses in 1610, which forbade “the shooting of firearms for sport at barbecues, else how shall we know when the Indians are coming,” and an entry from the 1769 diary of George Washington, which reads, “Went up to Alexandria to a barbicue. Back in three nights.”

Students will take field trips to political barbecues in most of the 50 states. And a barbecue lobbyist from South Carolina will explain why in 1986 his state legislature passed a Truth in Barbecue law, which requires barbecue restaurants to advise patrons how the barbecue is cooked and what parts of the hog are used.

MUSIC

Guest artists will perform various renditions of Louis Armstrong’s 1927 hit, “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” and “B.B.Q.U.S.A,” written by Mojo Nixon in 1987.

ETHNOGRAPHY

Participants will include John Marshall, whose 1981 master’s thesis, “Barbecue in Western Kentucky: An Ethnographic Study,” is the first and last word on the subject.

Alas, Barbecue U doesn’t exist yet, so in preparing to make legal war against Hard Rock Cafe International, Kalish Sr. had to put together his own curriculum. In the end, after all the depositions were taken and the issues presented, the jury found in favor of Texas Pig Stands. The case will probably be appealed, so until a final decision is reached, the pig sandwich will continue to appear on the Dallas Hard Rock Cafe menu. Hard Rocks outside of Texas, such as the Washington cafe, have not been affected by the suit.

But for the attorneys in another barbecue lawsuit, there’s still time to learn a thing or two. It seems that Christopher Carroll, owner of the Spring Creek Bar-B-Que in Arlington, Tex., has filed suit against former employee Londell Fisher, owner of the newly opened Stage Coach Bar-B-Que. Carroll--who likes his sauce very red and a little sweet is charging that Fisher--who also likes his sauce very red and a little sweet--has stolen his recipe. “I was shocked and disappointed,” Carroll said. “I treated him like family.”