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First of all, I have to tell you that food authors all over are weeping into their cornbread that they didn't write this book. So many people see barbecue in the terms you did: as a thoroughly American creature, and a metaphor for America's bigness and diversity. But you beat everyone to the punch.
I think it's a very important topic, and it's been done before. But I don't think anyone tried to do it in a serious way, in this way, before.
With barbecue, there's the variety of races and cultures and traditions. There's the geographic expanse that makes it difficult to define an American identity. For instance, we kept searching for dichotomy between black and white barbecue and we couldn't find it. In Atlanta the black places have ribs, white places have sandwiches. In Memphis, all places serve ribs.
This food really is about the amalgamation of culture that defines America.
Also, barbecue is the only food that people all over America claim as their own. Ain't nobody saying that about hamburgers or chicken fried steak. That was a big part of what we were trying to say. This is the quintessential American expression.
You found an immense diversity of barbecue: burgoo, Brunswick stew, mustard sauces, snoots [the cheeks], briskets, sausage, shoulders, whole hogs, gas cooking, open pits, closed pits. Did the diversity of it appeal to you?
To be honest, we didn't realize how diverse it was when we started. I grew up in New Orleans, and we don't really a barbecue tradition. My photographer Frank [Stewart] grew up in Memphis and Chicago, and in both of those places barbecue is it. He knew about those two places and other regional differences.
We were in North Carolina, on the road with Wynton [Marsalis] doing Sweet Swing Blues on the Road [a book project]. They served us barbecue, and it was totally different there. We said, "We need to write a book on barbecue."
In the course of going around, and doing library searches and talking to folks, it became obvious to us we had hit on something very important.
Your trip and book have detours: into Memphis's nightclubs, Texas rodeo history, a Chicago stepping dance party, the decay of East St. Louis, into why men barbecue. These are all fascinating in their own right, but I presume you include all this as context for where and why barbecue is produced in the United States.
Exactly. First it's very difficult to write about food because you can't convey taste on the page. You just have to add more adjectives, and you have the problem of the faster you run, the further behind you get.
So I said, "Let's see how it fits into people's lives, how it fits into the context of other events."
The whole idea of barbecue is always a kind of celebration. There's a section in the book on how barbecue may have started as a celebration of a successful hunt. It's become a central feature on occasions like Fourth of July or Juneteenth. So our question was "what's the tradition in your community or family and how can we examine that?"
Then there are the various contesters you interview at the Big Pig Jig, Memphis in May, and other barbecue competitions.
I find the competitions important in another way: they are conservatories of the tradition. In a business, there are issues of profit and loss. People doing competitions got nothing more important to do than to make it better. I don't mean these people are better cooks, but that as some of these old family businesses close, these contesters are continuing the tradition.
These competitions are like hobbies to them, like golf, those things keep going on, and it's the same with barbecue thing. Competitions end up being a family thing like barbecue is a family celebration. There's camaraderie that isn't dependent on winning and losing.
Did you write the book you wanted to write?
I didn't figure out what the book was going to be like until I wrote a sample chapter, which was the first chapter, on Memphis.
I wanted to get away from a redneck conception of looking at barbecue. I wanted to treat these people's work as craft. My idea was not to put on overalls and go hang out with Slim, but to treat him with the respect that he deserves.
How did you talk people out of their recipes for the book's recipe section?
It varied. In a lot of instances we got a recipe but not THE recipe. Or we got a sausage recipe, but we don't have the barbecue sauce recipe.
The two things I wanted to accomplish in the recipes was to give a sense of the range of regional recipes, so you can see that this coleslaw has mayonnaise and this one has vinegar. I also wanted folks to be able to make some of the stuff themselves.
Nicki Pendleton is Food Editor at the Nashville Banner.
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