Bowing at the Altar of Barbecue
What is it about barbecue? Why is it such a religion? Why is it that Bright Sky can publish all kinds of books about subjects from museums to musicians to mucho mas, and our all-time-bestselling book is a barbecue cookbook?
It took publishing one more barbecue book to find out. As it turns out, barbecue in Texas is the ultimate soul food. We’ve all heard people in the Carolinas crowing about that pale sour stuff they call Carolina barbecue, and my sister who is a former Kentucky Wildcat will make noise about barbecue in the bluegrass sometimes, but I never thought much about it. Never entered a cook-off; never got into fisticuffs with anybody about my dinner. I’d just head down to Goode Company and enjoy. Every once in a while, as I added extra pickles to my chopped beef sandwich, I’d see a poster: You might give some serious thought about thanking your lucky stars you’re in Texas. I’d get misty in a yearnful way for a state of mind I didn’t yet have a passport to reach. I did buy that bumper sticker for a friend from Tennessee who was a recalcitrant Texan for a long time, and I do have several pairs of cowboy boots, but until this author set me straight, I never really got the barbecue thang.
That was then. Now there is this book called Follow the Smoke. The author, John DeMers, will tell you that before this book, he was a food guy, not a barbecue guy. This is his thirty-seventh published book—I’d go out on a limb and say I wish we had published them all, but not having had a chance to read all thirty-seven, maybe I shouldn’t. John is a food-everything: food-critic, food-writer, food-radio guy, food-connoisseur , food-fixer, food-lover, maybe even a food-fighter somewhere in his past. He knows about food.
Transplanted to Texas from New Orleans, he did not take the everything is better in fill-in-the-blank attitude that some who join us take. John decided he really liked Texas. It embraced him and gave him a good home and lots of, well, food. Great food. Food with history, food with character and food with soul. When he wanted to write a book that showed the character of Texas, he thought about it for a minute (less than a minute, as he says), and he realized that book would be about barbecue.
John got in his car and set out across miles and miles of Texas to eat barbecue. But what is most interesting is that he was not drawn to burn all this gas because of the food, he was drawn by the stories. Texas, he says, has four faces of barbecue. And as he drove 14,785 miles and ate in 114 great barbecue joints—sometimes eight meals a day—he discovered amazing stories behind every brisket, rib and sausage that he encountered. And being a thinker, as well as an eater, he pulled all these stories together in a real philosophy of Texas barbecue that does as good a job of explaining the demographics and population history of the Lone Star state as anything Steve Klineberg has ever opined in the hallowed halls of Rice University.
So, even though I don’t have a ranch, and I can only eat barbecue for lunch when Tums are handy, after reading Follow the Smoke, and hearing John explain barbecue in these humanistic terms, I feel more Texan than ever. Although I wasn’t born here, I got here as fast as I could, and, somewhere in my cluttered life I do have one of those aforementioned posters now; but understanding barbecue helps me to be just a little more Texan. Not in need- more-sunscreen-on-the-back-of-my-neck way, but in a really nice Houston, It’s Worth It way, a way that, like Follow the Smoke, recognizes that we have a great state made up of a great diversity of people, many of whom can cook up a whale of a meal.
And that is indeed something to be thankful for.
