IN OTHER PARTS OF the country, the goal of barbecue is to make something delicious in a reasonable amount of time with the greatest chance of success. In those places the pig is the chosen animal. We Texans cook pig ourselves, having found that spareribs make an excellent hors d’oeuvre,
TEXAS BARBECUE IS NOT Southern barbecue because Texas is not the South. Okay, it is the South, but it’s the extraterritorial South, the afterthought South, that inelegant cartographic appendage you see on the map of the old Confederacy. It’s an unavoidable fact that Texas, against the ardent wishes of
The following is a correspondence between Daniel Vaughn and John Shelton Reed. Reed lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is the co-author, with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed, of Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue. Vaughn is the barbecue editor of Texas Monthly and the author of Prophets of Smoked Meat: A Journey Through
THE TERM “PIT” ORIGINATED back in the days when that’s just what it was—a pit in the ground, with wood coals inside and a grill made of wood or metal. Most people cooking with direct heat nowadays use an above-ground fire, but the method is essentially unchanged. It works well for
CALVIN TRILLIN: I’m pretty ecumenical. I like Texas barbecue and I like North Carolina barbecue. But there’s more to barbecue than the barbecue. I started going to Arthur Bryant’s, in Kansas City, at the beginning of the time when the oldest person or the most daring person among my friends
Robert Sietsema, the Village Voice‘s food critic, is a cheerleader. Back in January he, along with nearly every other New York food writer, wrote a piece rah-rah’ing the New York barbecue scene. Maybe penning a promotional article about local barbecue is required for admission to the New York BBQ
THE DISHWhy do we love brisket above all other barbecued meats? Is it because of its resonant beefy flavor, its exterior as shiny as black patent leather, its rivulets of fat moistening every mouthful and staining the eater’s shirt? Yes. The very nature of brisket is to be delicious.
For an adventurer in the Yucatán, suspicious bureaucrats and relentless pests stand in the way of tracking down a forgotten Mayan ruin.
