“You got your recipes, and you got your tips. The tips are just as important as the recipe. People don’t listen to the tips, don’t matter what recipe they got.” Desiree Robinson, Cozy Corner (Memphis)
Bullshit and beer fuel the competition barbecue circuit as much as hickory and hardwood charcoal. Barbecue cookoff legend Mike Mills and daughter Amy Mills Tunnicliffe take us inside a subculture of swarthy, smoke-burnished bubbas and self styled good ol’ boys and lift the curtain on the wizards of barbecue.
The reader is taken along on a road trip across America to meet dozens of colorful personalities who share a beer or two, eat some `cue, and swap lies. Through that knowing banter of been-there, burned-that, took-home-a-trophy competition pitmaster patois, we’re bathed in the smoky haze of valuable tips from expert cooks who rightfully take pride in making America’s most beloved culinary legacy.
The authors persuaded highly secretive pitmasters to part with their closely guarded recipes for this project. The book’s subtitle, “recipes, secrets, tall tales, and outright lies from the legends of barbecue” reveals the incomplete recipes, the half-truths and conveniently forgotten instructions that barbecue cooks share with each other. Mills claims the hardest part of this book was to tinker with these recipes that had never been written down by their creators to begin with, and reverse engineer them to resemble the original.
The smoky back room stories all entertain, but deciding whose advice to take is a much more personal matter. Mills takes a hard line against the evils of liquid smoke flavoring, yet concocts a recipe using it that’s similar to the world famous sauce from Gates in Kansas City. It’s not the specific recipe that matters as much as the reader’s own experiences as a barbecue connoisseur. Your preferences will guide you through the sometimes conflicting advice from the assembled cast of characters. Call it your culinary compass; your BS detector; it’s what homes in on your own personal definitions of delicious or disgusting.
There are as many different denominations in the church of barbecue as there are flavors of Baptists across the Bible belt. By documenting so many practitioners, the authors show the tapestry of real barbecue is not just one shade of spice rub brown. Various regional preparations are explored in detail: recipes for the sweet tomato based sauces favored in Kansas City; Memphis style dry rubs; minimally seasoned (salt & pepper only) Texas brisket; a replica of Maurice Bessinger’s famous South Carolina mustard sauce; the original recipe for Big Bob Gibson’s white mayonnaise based sauce, a style found only in a narrow swath of Alabama.
In addition to the expected array of dry rubs and meat preparations, many side dishes, desserts, and even drink recipes are presented. With names like “Pink Pull Your Panties Down Punch,” and “Strip and Go Naked Punch,” the adult beverages served during the long nights of cooking at big barbecue contests makes me wonder what I may have missed as a daytime visitor to the Memphis in May world championships.
In summary, this is not a beginner’s barbecue book that holds the reader’s hand through the steps of operating a smoker. Rather, it’s an insider’s view of the competition barbecue circuit and an introduction to the diverse range of people who live and breathe hardwood smoke every day of their lives. Some, like Mills, were born into the culture. Others adopted the lifestyle later in life, like the classicly trained chefs at the upscale New York restaurant Blue Smoke. Some pitmasters earn a princely wage at rib burn-offs. Others do just well enough to keep their family traditions alive for another month, another year, another decade. While the authors’ most engaged narratives and recipes draw from their own family’s history, they also compose an oustanding “class photo” with others that documents America’s most delicious food culture.
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Epilogue January 11, 2006: My interview with Mike Mills is posted. For those who linked in to my site, the interview is located here.
January 2007: Q Magazine, the trade journal of the National Barbecue Assocation, ran this book review in its inaugural Winter 2007 issue.
