Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America by Jim Auchmutey (review)

Jim Auchmutey opens Smokelore by stating that barbecue "is America in a mouthful," that it "encompasses every region and demographic group," and that "it is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations" (2). He argues that barbecue is "one of the most authentic expressions of our culture … something universal, yet uniquely American" (4). While Auchmutey acknowledges that there are thousands of barbecue books, he writes that Smokelore is unique in that it is an illustrated history. Indeed, the book is brimming with over 200 vintage images, including seventeenth-century engravings; eighteenth-century cookbook pages; nineteenth-century lithographs, political cartoons, advertisements, and broadsides; twentieth-century postcards, matchbooks, cookbooks, magazines, and photographs; and twenty-first-century paintings.

Smokelore began when Auchmutey, then an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer and editor, was an advisor for Barbecue Nation, the Atlanta History Center's 2018–2019 exhibit on the history and culture of barbecue. The topic is personal for Auchmutey because his grandfather was a renowned pitmaster in Bartow County, Georgia, and was featured in a 1954 Saturday Evening Post story about southern barbecue. He has previously co-authored, with Susan Puckett, The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook (Atlanta, GA, 1995), and, with Puckett and Mara Reid Rogers, The South: The Beautiful Cookbook (San Francisco, CA, 1996). He is incontestably passionate about barbecue and admits that he has associated barbecue with fun since his childhood. As such, the book is written in an enthusiastic, celebratory tone.

The chapters of Smokelore focus on the origins of barbecue; North Carolina's barbecue pedigree; the history of political barbecues; Texas barbecue; the evolution of barbecue restaurants; Kansas City barbecue; backyard barbecues; contributions of African Americans to barbecue culture; barbecue in music, literature, painting, photography, film, theater, and television; barbecue sauce; barbecue contests; and the global reach of American-style barbecue.

The twenty-six recipes included in Smokelore are useful, even to readers who don't intend to follow them in the kitchen, because they are contextualized. Some notable recipes are "Mrs. Dull's Brunswick Stew" from Henrietta Stanley Dull's Southern Cooking (Atlanta, GA, 1928), "Kentucky Burgoo" from The Southern Cook Book of Fine Old Recipes (Reading, PA, 1939), a version of Dwight D. Eisenhower's favorite charred-on-the-outside steak, and "Caribbean Jerk a la Zora" (the spicy jerk seasoning that Zora Neale Hurston fell for when doing anthropological fieldwork in Jamaica).

Some of the primary sources Auchmutey features are a 1585 barbacoa drawing by a mapmaker who accompanied the Roanoke colony settlers; The Country Housewife's first barbecue recipe from 1732; an account of George Washington's 1793 barbecue; Vanity Fair's 1860 Walt Whitman parody, "The Song of the Barbecue"; an 1874 report on "barbecue groves" by Frederick Law Olmsted; the Washington Post's coverage of an 1889 barbecue; slave narratives about barbecuing collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s; a 1935 radio address by Huey Long; Sunset magazine's Barbecue Book editions from 1938 and 1945; a 1942 Tennessee Williams letter about working at the Pig 'n Whistle in Macon, Georgia; a 1954 Canada Dry advertisement for a cowgirl barbecue; a 1957 Popular Mechanics article on building a do-it-yourself oil barrel barbecue rig; and a personal interview with Ollie Gates, patriarch of the Gates BBQ chain in Kansas City.

Some of the secondary sources Auchmutey draws on are Lolis Eric Elie's Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country (New York, NY, 1996), Doug Worgul's The Grand Barbecue: A Celebration of the History, Places, Personalities and Techniques of Kansas City Barbecue (Kansas City, MO, 2001), Jessamyn Neuhaus's Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking (Baltimore, MD, 2003), Robert Moss's Barbecue: The History of an American Institution (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2010), Elizabeth Engelhardt's Republic of Barbecue: Stories beyond the Brisket (Austin, TX, 2009), Myron Mixon's Smokin' with Myron Mixon (New York, NY, 2011...