Entry · catalog no. 2415
snoots
/ /snuts/ /SNOOTS
noun · St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
Pig snouts — often including the surrounding face and cheek meat — with the nostrils trimmed off, scored, and cooked until crisp by deep-frying, smoking, or boiling and then frying, cut into strips and doused in barbecue sauce. Eaten by hand, immediately, before they soften; commonly served on white bread or with potato salad used as a dip. A standing menu item at Black-owned barbecue counters in St. Louis and across the river in East St. Louis.
“He ordered snoots and rib tips, wrapped in butcher paper, and ate them standing at the window.”
Origin & Attribution
Snoots come out of whole-hog, waste-nothing Black cooking carried north out of Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South during the Great Migration and kept alive on the barbecue counters of north St. Louis and East St. Louis. The best-documented carrier is C&K Barbecue, opened in the mid-1960s by Forris King and Ozvie Carr, whose barbecue roots and sauce recipe came from Mississippi, and run since 1982 by Daryle Brantley and now his daughter from a walk-up window. St. Louis did not invent the dish: Black street vendors sold snoot sandwiches in Atlanta in the late 1920s, and by the 1930s snoots were sold in Harlem and were a nightlife staple on Beale Street in Memphis. What St. Louis did was keep them on the menu. The correction worth making is that St. Louis-style barbecue in national usage means a rib cut and a sweet tomato sauce — the marketable, largely white-facing half of the city's barbecue. Snoots are the other half, and when the food press notices them at all it is usually under a heading like bizarre foods.
late 1920s
Black street vendors sell snoot sandwiches in Atlanta
1930s
Snoots sold in Harlem and on Beale Street in Memphis
1965
Forris King and Ozvie Carr open C&K Barbecue in the St. Louis area
1988
Real Barbecue prints snoots and C&K for a national readership
2017
Feast Magazine publishes a long profile of C&K and its snoots
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Midwest
St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois · 1960s
Spoken by
Black St. Louisans and East St. Louisans; pitmasters, counter workers and regulars
$SNOOTSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady38 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1988
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@chitown
Chicago, IL
@detlex
Detroit, MI
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Greg Johnson and Vince Staten, Real Barbecue (1988; revised edition 2007) — names snoots at C&K in St. Louis
book
■
Adrian Miller, Getting Snooty about Barbecue, Soul Food Scholar, 26 September 2012
glossary
■
Jane and Michael Stern, 500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late (2009) — a passage on C&K's snoots
book
■
Nancy Stiles, How C&K Barbecue Became a St. Louis Legend, Feast Magazine, 25 August 2017
newspaper
■
+ Cite a sourceAdrian Miller, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021)
book
See also