Whoever said barbecuing was a man’s job never met Helen Turner. The 58-year-old Brownsville woman is the owner and pitmaster at Helen’s Bar-B-Q, and she’s been serving up smokin’ good grub since 1996.

“I started working here 30 years ago when an older man had the restaurant, and I helped him,” Turner says. “He was aging and decided he didn’t want it anymore. He told me if I’d pay the taxes, it was mine.”

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Turner seized the business opportunity, and since then, she has developed a local – and national – following for her pulled pork sandwiches, ribs, bologna, Polish sausages and made-from-scratch sauces in hot and mild. Homemade sides include baked beans, potato salad and coleslaw.

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In 2012, Turner was featured in Southern Living’s Smokin’ Hot List, recognizing 10 of the South’s best pitmasters. And in March 2013, Turner boarded a plane for the first time in her life to attend the Wine + Food Festival in Charleston, S.C., where she was crowned the first-ever Queen of Barbecue by the Southern Foodways Alliance. Previous winners have all been kings.

“I don’t know any other females that do it, but you know, women are good cooks,” Turner says. “My husband Reginell comes in and starts the fire for me every morning at 5 a.m. before he goes to work. He’s been doing that for 17 years. We’ve been married for 30.”

Turner cooks on an open pit with plenty of hickory wood smoke on the restaurant’s screened-in back porch. She doesn’t season the meat – she prefers to let her customers do that themselves with her signature sauces.

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Rumor has it there are only a few female pitmasters in the country. Turner figures that’s because not many women want to work around smoke and fire. She admits the fumes sometimes drive her to tears.

“I guess I’m one of a kind,” Turner says, chuckling.

As for retirement? She doesn’t see herself abandoning the pit any time soon.

“I just enjoy working. It keeps me busy,” Turner says. “And I love my customers. They’ve been coming so many years that I start fixing their food when they walk in, ’cause I already know what they want. I just welcome everybody that comes in and tell them, ‘Make yourself at home.’”