The First Ozarkiana State Fair and Barbed Beecue Competition was the hot topic of colony discussion for weeks. When first proposed by The Founders Council, the idea seemed absurd. None of the settlers had ever actually been to a State Fair; none of them had even been born on Earth.
After a month of debate, though, most Ozarks were swayed by the members of the Council who spoke with passion and longing for a return to the traditions of their Earth-born forepeoples, who had died on transportation ships over one hundred years earlier, but whose stories had been passed down to the first Ozark settlers through their letters and journals. “This is why they were required to keep journals,” Mr. Poincey said, shaking a weathered elctro-tablet in his hand. “So that we might know what it meant to be citizens of Earth and carry on their traditions in the new world.”
So much had been lost in the efforts to resettle Earth’s population in the face of increasing geothermic instability that little remained of Earthian history. The settlement ships had been packed with essentials for survival. Other than the recollections recorded by that first generation of travelers and the digitized archives of music, art, and literature, not much of original Earthian culture survived.
Complicating things for the descendants who ultimately settled on Ozarkiana was the fact that much of their library and museum records had been lost in entirely when the Alexandria mainframe of their ship was damaged in an asteroid storm, destroying the storage drives intended to provide the surviving humans, now scattered far and wide among the stars and with limited ability to communicate with one another, with a blueprint for human culture.
The Ozarks, as citizens of the newly christened Ozarkiana had come to call themselves, were forced instead to rely on the journals kept by various individuals who made up the first generation on the settlement ship along with stories told and retold as they were passed down through the successive children and grandchildren who spent their entire lives on the ship during the trip, dying before the colonists reached a planet suitable for settlement.
Like the most massive game of telephone in humanity’s history, the stories had been altered and misremembered down through the generations. No one had any certainty the State Fair planned for Ozarkiana would be anything like those of Earth, but they didn’t seem to care. Other than Settlement Day, an annual day of thanksgiving for finally locating a habitable planet, it was the first time the Founders Council agreed on a settlement-wide holiday, to the great relief of Ozarks everywhere.
Plans were made for entertainment and games and other distractions, including consumption-related competitions. Transition off the ships and into settlement had been challenging, but few aspects had tried the patience of Ozarks everywhere as much as efforts to feed themselves. Traditional planet-bound methods of food preparation were lost during the settlers’ travels, everyone subsisting largely on the algae-based nurtino packs grown in large crates on the ship at zero gravity. The algae packs had little variation in consistency or appearance, and a bland taste that was tolerable if nondescript in its lack of discernible flavor. The settlers had come to call the algae packs chexin, which they understood to be the name of an Earth-based food that could be cooked a variety of ways and made to taste like almost anything based on its consistency and lack of individual flavor. Before making its final descent into the planet’s atmosphere, the Council implemented plans to store enough chexin to get the settlement through its first two years if the Ozarks ate only enough to survive. Beyond that, they would have to relearn how to cultivate their own food and hunt the animals native to the planet.
Once the settlers made it onto the surface and secured their needs for basic shelter and safety, cultivating local food stuffs had been the first order of business. Much of the energy of the settlers was poured into determining which native plants and animals could be eaten without detrimental effect, and these explorations were furthered by the seemingly endless search for rediscovering methods of food preparation and the cultivation of what Earthians had called speeces, which were used to flavor and preserve food stuffs. More than one Ozark had fallen into a fitful sleep filled with gastronomical discomfort after second sundown to dream fondly of the days when a belly full of chexin was a foregone conclusion.
The primary focus of the Fair, as everyone understood it, was eating the fair itself. There had been some heated debate on whether that meant all the decorations and structures were required to be edible, but ultimately this was deemed too difficult and time-consuming an Earthian concept to attempt the first year. Instead they turned to one of the things every descendant of Earth, no matter how far flung or temporarily removed, knew to be true of their forepeoples – they loved a competition.
So it was that Mrs. Norlina De’Lanta watched as her husband, Tallenassie, pulled on his finest jumper and headgear in preparation to leave for the Fair. Mr. De’Lanta was a prominent member of the Founders Council and had been selected as one of the judges of the premier consumables competition, which was understood by Ozarks to be known as a “Barbed Beecue.” This Earth tradition seemed to involve capturing and killing a small bird known as a bee, which was then hung on a barbed hook and cooked over a fire made of the large square black seeds of flowering cue plants.
Having none of these original Earthian resources, the Ozarks who made up the Fair Foods Committee had come up with as close an approximation as manageable. Entries were to be made up of the cooked flesh of the various indigenous animals, which had been either rubbed down with a dried mixture of roots or stewed in a plant paste, and cooked in small earthen containers over a fire made of the hard bark of a large native shrub Ozarks called meskit. The bush was so-named because the plant stems were coated with a thick sticky substance that stuck to every stray hair or fiber and required the use of a sterilization kit to remove the mess, but made for a long, slow-burning fire during cold nights.
For many of the dualinal days and unolunars since the announcement of the competition, the residents of Ozarkiana had been out trapping and hunting and cooking, trying to perfect their own receipts and math-oods of Barbed Beecuing. The winner would not only have bragging rights for the whole of a double sun turn, but their entry would be replicated in Aluminal Yurts across the settlement. They would become, overnight, a yurthold name.
“Are you ready to go Nor?” Tallenassie asked as he pulled the door open.
“I’m coming Tallen,” his wife said, hefting a large box over her arm. “I was making sure we didn’t forget any of the ingredients for the ply competition.”
Tallen scratched at his bread, frowning. “I still don’t understand why our ancestors would cook the bulbs of sweet plants and then spread them over flat pieces of wood.”
Norlina shrugged. “Maybe Earthian wood was edible. Either way, I aim to come home with that blue gibbon. I could use a helper monkey around here.” Tallen took the heavy box from his wife and she pulled the thatched door shut behind them.
. . . . . .
Six anxious orals later, when the second sun of Ozarkiana finally sank beyond the jagged-edged muttons of North Horned-Eyes-On, Tallenassie De’Lanta sat in front of the large audience, preparing to taste the maiden entry into the First Ozarkiana State Fair Barbed Beecue competition. Tallen shot a nervous look at Councilors Saffana Tennosey and Coalumbria Districk, his fellow judges, before gamely giving the audience a wide smile and biting into the first dish, a piece of rawlshide that had been prepared in the approved method for competition. Following Tallen’s lead, the other two judges shoveled in a bite of the entry and chewed at it vigorously.
The audience leaned forward, holding their collective breath as they waited for the judges’ pronouncement. Swallowing hard, Tallen and his fellow judges bent their heads together and whispered intently before picking up the small talk-extender to describe the item to the crowd.
“After consulting with my fellow judges, we would describe entry Number One as follows: though the texture is a bit chewy, the overall flavor is a deep smoky one that is not only pleasurable but reminds us, undoubtably…” Tallen looked toward his fellow judges, who nodded in smiling approval. “Of chexin.”
The crowd erupted with wild cheers.
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Demeter Mesquite is described as follows:
The Native Americans used the wood from the Mesquite trees for incense, believing the scent would attract good spirits. Today, we do the same on BBQs throughout the United States, seeking that special scent and flavor of the southwest. But why wait for summer weather? You can experience Mesquite from Demeter Fragrance Library whenever and wherever the urge strikes.I don’t know what to tell you. It smells like mesquite.I tried layering it with DSH Lush Honey, which made it smell like a honey barbecue sauce, I tried layering it with CB I Hate Perfume Smoky Tabacco, and it created a lovely layered smoke effect, lots of different kinds of smokes together. Really wonderful. I feel like there's a lot of opportunity for layering experiments with this one.
There is no way to tell you about this scent without talking about the intense relationship with I have barbecue . Now I love all barbecue – Kansas City, Memphis, Carolinas, dry rubbed, sauce soaked, thick and sweet, thin and vinegar. But in some ways I am and forever will be Texan, and I love Texas barbeque, and Texas is big enough to have four styles of barbecue all by its lonesome. Personally, I swear by East Texas-style, but what can I say? I am my professional grade BBQ competition winning, four foot tall trophy sporting father’s daughter.
Barbequing happens all over the world, and feels fundamental to our human omnivore experience. Why wouldn’t I tell you a story about it? The question was, what kind of barbeque? Was it a family event in a backyard? A regional event? Or was it both intimately familiar and (literally) completely alien all at once? My love for barbeque, and barbecue as a cultural event, is so deep I like to think that several hundred years and several thousand light years away, people would still be smoking their food over mesquite, or some native equivalent.
According to Wikipedia, “The origins of American barbecue date back to colonial times, with the first recorded mention in 1610, and George Washington mentions attending a ‘barbicue’ in Alexandria, VA in 1769.” I don’t know if that’s true (there’s no citation) but I like to think so. And I like to think that, were humanity to spread across the universe, they would take barbecuing with them, a universal experience shared across cultures, nation states, generations, world. We are humanity; we love our meat smoked over a wood fire. As it was, it ever will be. And the love of barbequing held by my father, who has already passed out of this world and into another one, will live through me and through others and go on and on forever, even if our individual lives will not.
I think I would like that. I would like that very much.
Thus ends your week of Demeter Fragrance Library inspired fiction. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
See other pieces in the series here.
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