ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 3, 1996 TAG: 9607030001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: summer & smoke
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: KEN RINGLE THE WASHINGTON POST
William Faulkner used to say the ultimate goal of a writer was to reduce the essence of all human existence to a single sentence. In ``Smokestack Lightning'' ($35, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Lolis Eric Elie and Frank Stewart tried something harder: to map out with exactitude the vast history and culture of American barbecue.
They didn't entirely succeed, of course (who could?), but their adventures in pursuit of their impossible dream have yielded perhaps the most engaging work of gustatorial anthropology since Calvin Trillin discovered crawfish.
Driving through the South and Midwest in their 1981 Volvo with a tape of Howlin' Wolf's ``Smokestack Lightning'' for company, they ate their way for nearly 10 months through everything from Carolina pulled pig to a kind of smoke-baked Texas cow's head known as barbacoa (from the West Indian word many believe to be the origin of barbecue).
They visited prized locales like the Moo & Oink, a South Side Chicago meat market where they vend raw ribs by the ton on Labor Day weekend; the Meat in the Middle barbecue competition in Perry, Okla.; Chuck's Smoke House, a rib place of presidential quality in Hope, Ark.; and the Big Pig Jig in Vienna, Ga., where one of the barbecuing teams is named Swine Flew.
They emerged with their appetites and outlook still sharp, and with an even deeper appreciation of both the noun and the verb they consider emblematic of American culture in all its saucy diversity.
``The thing we didn't want to do was turn out another `Redneck Guide to Barbecue' .. something frivolous,'' says Elie, chewing over a plate of ribs and brisket at Old Glory restaurant here.
``I mean, barbecue is about good times and about fun, but it also has a certain meaning to it. What we wanted to do was capture the whole range of barbecue and the things that it means.''
The idea, hatched while Elie and Stewart were traveling as roadies with Wynton Marsalis's band in 1991, quickly developed some defining parameters. First of all, ``barbecue'' would mean something, usually meat, cooked with smoke, not just grilled.
``We had to make a distinction between good food and good barbecue. Somebody can cook some ribs on their grill that will be nice and tender and well seasoned, but not have any smoke in them. That's perfectly good food, but for our purposes, it wouldn't be barbecue.''
Second, sauces, as wondrous as they are, would definitely be sidelined. The true test of barbecued anything would be how it tasted right off the fire, without further adornment.
Third, they would try to look past the food and process of barbecue, to what both said about the people and the society that gave them birth. Barbecue alone, as Elie writes, ``encompasses the high- and lowbrows ... the urban and the rural ... the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the reds, and the whites'' and is thus ``a fitting barometer for the changes, good and bad, that have taken place in the country.''
In the end they ate so much barbecue, Stewart says with a sigh, that they had to take periodic breaks ``to go to a real restaurant and eat Italian or Chinese ... somewhere with a tablecloth where they wait on you instead of asking, `What you want?'''
Frequent timeouts were staged in New Orleans, where Elie grew up and acquired his bona fides as a serious eater, not to mention his present job as a metro columnist with the Times Picayune newspaper.
It was a fortunate birthplace for half of the team, since the Crescent City, despite its gourmet reputation, has always been curiously innocent of barbecue. ``I was sort of a clean slate,'' he says.
Photographer Stewart, on the other hand, was raised in Memphis and Chicago and grew up virtually marinating in hickory smoke and flame-kissed opinions. ``Memphis barbecue remained the standard of achievement against which everything was judged,'' he says proudly.
They argued fiercely, happily and eternally on their travels - Elie, 33, owlish and ebullient, ever the voluble theorizing optimist; Stewart, 46, terse, ironic and very funny - Sancho Panza with a Hasselblad and Leica.
As for the weather forecast from their barometer of America, returns were mixed.
``Much of what we ate was pretty mediocre barbecue,'' Elie says, ``and that was inevitable. In order to find good barbecue, you have to be in a place where they do a lot of it. Then, out of 20 people doing good barbecue, you maybe get two doing great.''
But what surprised him, Elie says, was how often vastly different theories, philosophies and processes in distant regions of the country yielded similarly superb food.
``Texas was a revelation,'' Elie says. ``I never would have believed there were as many different kinds of good barbecue as we found in Texas.''
On their travels, they ate barbecued chicken and barbecued beef, barbecued turkey and barbecued deer, barbecued sausage, barbecued Cornish game hens and barbecued mutton, which for some reason is very big in Owensboro, Ky; and, of course, all manner of barbecued pork from the hams to the snouts, a species of pig cheek highly prized in Chicago's South Side.
They were tempted to get disheartened, because the one unescapable generality they found is that great barbecue is time- and labor-intensive, involving in some places 12 hours of careful fire-tending with an assortment of woods and seasonings. It flourished in times and places where there was little else to do, and the economics and distractions on the eve of the 21st century are cutting corners and quality everywhere.
``Like, I didn't even know you could make barbecue without wood,'' says Stewart. ``But we were warned that as we moved east from Texas we'd run into more and more gas flaming and electric grilling, and we did.''
One of their finds - certain to outrage Tarheel loyalists - is that electric grilling appears to be galloping through the once-sacred pork pits of North Carolina, reducing the hallowed ribs of much of eastern Carolina to indifferent fare.
``But we didn't spend near as much time in the Carolinas as we wanted to,'' Elie acknowledges. ``The places that we were told about didn't turn out that well, but we make no pretense that this book is a comprehensive survey of every place. What interested us most was the people doing barbecue as an art form. Whenever we found somebody who either had great food or was a great character who really said something about this, it renewed us.
``Like at the end of the book we went to Dreamland'' in Tuscaloosa, a barbecue temple almost as famous throughout Alabama as the Crimson Tide. ``To be honest, that was not my favorite barbecue. But sitting there with Big Daddy Bishop talking, I knew I was getting great stuff, and Frank was getting great pictures, and that renewed us.''
On the other hand, Elie says, some of the very finest barbecue they encountered cropped up in a Memphis hole in the wall called the Cozy Corner, a place so devoid of atmosphere ``I had a hard time making a story.''
``But oh, those Cornish game hens!'' drools Stewart in memory. ``And those people really became our friends.''
In Arkansas, Elie says, ``we met this guy ... and this says so much about this thing we're trying to deal with. He's a white guy who lives in Little Rock, but he comes from somewhere in north Louisiana, where there was one black man in town who was, like, the town barbecuer, and he had been the white guy's father's best friend.
``The white guy, unlike the black guy's children, got really interested in the craft and one day near the end of the old guy's life took a tape recorder down to Louisiana and had him tell how to make barbecue.''
Much to his astonishment and horror, Elie says, ``the young guy discovered the old guy parboiled his ribs before he cooked them. Which tells us that parboiling is not just some quality-cutting modern shortcut like many of us had thought, but an authentic old tradition. The young guy still won't parboil his ribs. But he insists the old guy who did made the best ribs he ever tasted.''
Summer & Smoke will run weekly in the Extra section throughout the cookout season. If you have a great grilling recipe or other grilling-related information that you'd like to share, send it, along with your name and a phone number where you can be contacted, to Summer & Smoke, c/o the Features Department, The Roanoke Times, P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, Va. 24010-2491.|
LENGTH: Long : 142 linesby CNB