“The World Championship Barbecue Goat Cook-off” is a wonderful string of words: twelve luxurious syllables that would feel cramped if they weren’t so evenly spaced. Say them slowly and feel them naturally fall into place. The world. championship Barbecue. goat To cook. Switched off. Even sped up (barbecue world championship, cookoff) and delivered with an exaggerated twang, the words roll off the tongue like Dr Pepper from the soda fountain of a Central Texas Sonic. It’s music to my ears.
I doubt anyone but me has so romanticized the name of this annual holiday, which has been held in Brady, the city closest to the geographic center of the state, every Labor Day weekend since 1974. (By To be clear, the goat served at the cook-off isn’t technically a true South Texas goat, known as “the beef of the goat world,” but everyone uses “goat” in Brady, so I will too .) But the World Championship Barbecue Goat Cook-off has a very special character. place in my heart I was more or less raised there. Or at least I spent the first ten Labor Day weekends of my life there, inhaling wood smoke, dodging my brother’s bungee gun, and letting myself be picked up and pushed around by various family members and friends of the family, most of whom fell somewhere on the spectrum between drunk and blind.
I saw many similarly inebriated festivalgoers in the crowd this past Labor Day weekend when I attended the 48th annual event. This year, 206 chefs entered the competition, and all (or at least those still standing) gathered in the center of Richards Park to see the winners announced. Attendees dragged folding camping chairs around the venue, and cooking equipment could be distinguished by the matching custom clothing they wore. There was a group in bright orange T-shirts with “Los Dos Cabritos Brady, Texas” emblazoned across the front. “Goat Willies Cooking Team” had arrived from Brownwood. Next to a trash can full of empty Miller Lites and Lone Stars was the “Dad Bod BBQ” team, which took home number eight in the goat contest (there are also prizes for everything from Bloody Marys to “mystery meat”. ). Glass bottles haven’t been allowed in the park for years, so people had koozie-covered cans, large imitation Yeti Ramblers, and plastic cups from Pecos Pete’s tea + soda stand, which cost a minimum of $15 but they came with unlimited refills. all day.
Despite the lack of glass bottles and the prevalence of iPhones, the scene was almost identical to the one I had witnessed as a child. There seemed to be as many happy children as there were drunken adults, and all were desperately trying to cool off, fanning themselves with loose-leaf paper, pieces of cardboard boxes, or the heart-shaped fans of “Kiss My Cabrito” that had been created for the event. The air was tinged with a familiar smell to anyone who has ever visited a Texas barbecue, goat or otherwise. And just as it had been back in the day, my belly was full of juicy goat, after I gorged myself on a cane cooked by a local man everyone calls Piggy.
Cabrito fans are waiting for the winners of the cooking competition to be announced. Photo by Emily McCullar
The biggest difference between now and then, though, was that I didn’t know anyone. None of the family and friends of the time competed or judged this year. My dad was on vacation in New Mexico and my brother was at home in Austin. My mother was dead. My aunt and uncle were in town but avoiding Richards Park as my cousin was getting married in three weeks and they didn’t want to risk getting COVID. Thus the only familiar faces I had seen that day were the tombstones of a dozen of my ancestors, as I had been strangely obliged to stop at the cemetery on my way into town. I don’t always do this, and the activity hardly aligned with the holiday spirit, but it felt weird to go to the goat kitchen and not at least say hello to my mom.
My mom was born and raised in Brady, and we visited her hometown all the time, so goat cooking was just another reason to do it. Once my dad was appointed as an official cooking judge, it became one of our family’s signature events. Every Friday before Labor Day, we’d make the two-hour drive from our home in Austin, sometimes bringing friends from the city who might marvel at this smoky display of rural quirkiness. We always stayed at my mom’s house when I was growing up with my Uncle Bart, Aunt Bonnie, and Cousin Fred, who would drive down from Dallas. The house was only a five-minute walk from the festival site, which allowed us to come and go if we were too tired, too hot, too dusty, or too wet from the rain. Some of my most memorable childhood epiphanies were goat-related, like when I realized there was no state or national goat cuisine prior to this one. Brady’s people just made up the “world championship” part for fun. This clarified a lot about my life and the people I come from.
The first annual World Goat Championship cook-off, hosted in August 1974, was an effort to reestablish the old county fair. It was organized by the local Jaycees (also known as the Junior Chamber of Commerce, a collection of young local boys dedicated to fostering the civic and economic growth of Brady). They wanted something that could attract visitors to Brady and give local businesses a good influx of cash. Modeling the event after the seven-year-old Terlingua Chili Kitchen, the Jaycees chose cabrito because Brady was right in the middle of Texas “goat country” (this was before the area was so overrun of coyotes that it no longer made sense to lift anything smaller than a steer). They timed it for Labor Day weekend to coincide with some horse racing taking place at a track down the road. Everyone expected the whole affair to make Brady — a place so rural that the local motel displayed “Do not clean the birds in the room” signs — a must-go destination for the who’s who of the state.
When I joined the party in 1986, horse racing was a thing of the past, but the World Championship BBQ Goat Cook-off had become quite the thing to do. Every year, hundreds of hopeful smokers park big barbecues in Richards Park on the banks of Brady Creek, bringing trailers, tents, campers, coolers and lots and lots of beer. Smoking began on Friday night, and the official competition began on Saturday afternoon around four o’clock. Sometimes the judges were assembled under an old tin pavilion, although more often they were installed in a huge flatbed trailer, five or six feet high, parked in the center of the action.
To protect the integrity of the jury, contestants left goats in identical Styrofoam containers differentiated only by the anonymous numbers scrawled on top. When a particular container was disqualified, it moved from the top of the table to the bottom. This was an important detail for us kids because we wouldn’t get in trouble for eating anything that was already on the floor. I spent a good part of those afternoons crawling from table to table tasting everything I could get my grubby little hands on. My father remembers eating some pretty bad goat in his judge days, but to me it was all delicious: a real delicacy, a sumptuous culinary adventure, probably because everything tastes a little better when it’s sneaked in.
The kitchen’s official $20 “goat patty,” plus $15 iced tea. Photo by Emily McCullar
In the fair section of the event, children shop and play games. Photo by Emily McCullar
Still, goat meat wasn’t the big draw in the kitchen, at least not for the kids. This was the fair, the dozens of booths surrounding the park, selling everything from t-shirts to homemade jam to toy guns that had been carved out of wood and designed to propel rubber bands at truly dangerous speeds. Every year, my brother and I got to choose a rubber band gun; usually one of us got something with a long barrel while the other got something handheld, so we could switch off and share. We were in big trouble if we were ever caught pointing them at each other, not only because the rubber bands could take your eye out, but because when Dad was a kid his friend had accidentally died while cleaning a rifle , and the father was very very insistent that we never feel comfortable pointing something gun-shaped at another human being. It worked, but mostly we tried harder not to get caught.
Cooking had been one of the McCullar family’s most cherished annual traditions, but like most other aspects of our lives, everything changed when my mother died. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1994 and left a couple of months after Labor Day weekend in 1996. My dad stayed on as a kitchen judge for at least another year, but we eventually eliminated the most of our Brady activities because it was just too much. an unbearable place to spend time. We stopped staying at my mother’s house when I was an infant. The World Championship BBQ Goat was no longer something I frequented, but something I talked to people about, usually for a laugh. City people, Yankees, and any other non-rural Texan I’ve encountered finds it unbelievable that such a competition exists. Between my thirteenth and thirty-sixth birthdays, I think I actually attended the cookout only once.
The most annoying thing about grief is the way it makes even good memories feel bad. I was afraid to walk into Richards Park. If the scene were identical to that of my childhood, it would be a painful reminder of all that I have lost. If it were dramatically different, it would be a painful reminder of everything I’ve lost.
It turned out to be a mix of the two, and thankfully more entertaining than painful. As I wandered around the dusty grounds, I spotted some bouncy bounce houses in the kid-friendly section. It wasn’t the hastily constructed carnival ride I remember almost throwing up back in the day. Overall, the park looked safer than it had before: cleared of all the rusty metal equipment my mother and I used to play with in our respective childhoods. I walked up and down the aisle of booths and saw no one selling stun guns to kids, although there were at least two booths selling knives and an opportunity for visitors eighteen and over to enter what appeared to be a raffle a file -green AR style rifle. This was still Texas, after all.
The kids I saw didn’t seem to realize how much they were missing out on. They were happy to be in the park with their family and friends, content with an inflatable Paw Patrol character attached to a plastic stick as a souvenir. It was, as always, an event defined by its collectives: families, cooking teams, circles of camping chairs. I saw an RV with a generator-powered forty-inch flat screen propped up on a folding card table, broadcasting some sports game. There was an area that looked like a real party, complete with string lights, cornholes, and a couple of dozen adults and kids having a ball. There was as much good news in the air as there were tantalizing aromas of cooked goat, and the positive spirit rubbed off on me, even as I walked alone through the crowd.
