Few have missed Fat Ham’s investment in the sensorium of Southern barbecue. Reviewers have dubbed James Ijames’ Pulitzer-winning comedy a “Delicious Piece of Work,” a “meaty new play,” and a “savory, lip-smacking gumbo.” Given this playful culinary punning, one would be forgiven for thinking that Fat Ham uses barbecue culture in a simple or lighthearted fashion. But, as Ijames himself has noted, barbecues are “violent, visceral spaces.” This article takes seriously the play’s engagement with Black culinary traditions and reads them against a history of racialized enslavement, resistance, and the appropriative predations of white supremacy. Fat Ham suffuses descriptions of Southern foodways with what Kyla Wazana Tompkins has called “the trope of black edibility,” meaning the discursive suturing of Black life to blackened, charbroiled foodstuffs. The play uses its gastronomic motifs to interrogate how the residual violences of American plantocracy routinize the social consumption of Blackness. My argument unfolds in three parts. In the first, I connect open-air cookouts to the obscene violences of chattel enslavement and the Jim Crow South. In the second, I explain how Fat Ham uses the troping of Black edibility to thematize generational trauma. And in the third, I place Ijames’ comedy within a dramatic lineage centered around the voracity of white mouths and the theatrical consumption of porcine bodies—a performance genealogy that comprises antebellum minstrelsy, the comedies of Langston Hughes, and the so-called Chitlin Circuit. Fat Ham ultimately transcends this lineage by harnessing barbecue in the service of afroeuphoric possibility—the imagining and opening up of Black pleasures in excess of the traumas scripted by a plantocratic past.