He touches on a curious 1909 episode when William Howard Taft was served barbecued possum with persimmon sauce during a quixotic quest to popularize a Taft-inspired Billy Possum political mascot after the Teddy bear was so successfully linked to Teddy Roosevelt.Īnd he recapitulates the lament of former Georgia Gov. Yet despite writing with authority, he's anything but pedantic. He's descended from Georgia pit masters and even was guest curator for the Atlanta History Center's 2018-19 exhibition "Barbecue Nation" on the history and culture of barbecue. And in modern times, there's the backyard barbecue where suburbanites grill burgers and hot dogs over charcoal.Īuchmutey, who wrote and reported for years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject. There's barbecue as a means of cooking meat over open flames or coals, as natives of the Caribbean did on a raised framework they called a "barbacoa" - hence, the word "barbecue." There's barbecue as a meat dish itself - likely pork in the Southeast or beef in the western U.S. In the process, he delivers a thorough and entertaining discourse on a subject that has come to mean many different things, depending on where you are and when you happen to be there.įor instance, there's barbecue as event, like the giant cookout attended by President George Washington when the foundation for the U.S. In "Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America," Atlanta-based author Jim Auchmutey packs a vast store of history, culinary sociology and colorful anecdote into 266 richly illustrated pages. A great deal could be written about barbecue, and much of it already has been.Īn online search for books about barbecue yields more hits than even the most fanatical barbecue enthusiast is likely to read in one lifetime.īut this recent offering from the University of Georgia Press demonstrates there's clearly room for one more.
0 kommentar(er)
