Smokelore, Jim Auchmutey
Smokelore, Jim Auchmutey
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Smokelore
A Short History of Barbecue in America

Author: Jim Auchmutey

Narrator: Chris Abernathy

Unabridged: 5 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/29/2019

Categories: Cooking, Nonfiction


Synopsis

Barbecue: It's America in a mouthful. The story of barbecue touches almost every aspect of our history. It involves indigenous culture, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the Great Migration, the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles. It encompasses every region and demographic group. It is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations.

Jim Auchmutey follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking for the US Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost two hundred years later. The narrative covers the golden age of political barbecues, the evolution of the barbecue restaurant, the development of backyard cooking, and the recent rediscovery of traditional barbecue craft. Along the way, Auchmutey considers the mystique of barbecue sauces, the spectacle of barbecue contests, the global influences on American barbecue, the roles of race and gender in barbecue culture, and the many ways barbecue has been portrayed in our art and literature. It's a spicy story that involves noted Americans from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama.

About Jim Auchmutey

Jim Auchmutey spent twenty-nine years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a reporter and editor, twice winning the Cox Newspaper chain's Writer of the Year award. His food writing has been honored by the James Beard Foundation, the Association of Food Journalists, and the Sigma Delta Chi journalism society. He is coauthor of The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook and author of The Class of '65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness. He lives in Georgia and descends from a long line of pitmasters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Cat

I love BBQ! This was a funny and factual book about BBQ. What could be a better read for summer than this? And it even has some recipes. I kind of imagine cooking over an open fire predates our indoor kitchens and ranges, so I have always assumed most people in the world are cooking over open fires.......more