The One True Barbecue

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog (Touchstone, 2016).


Some of you may know that my wife and I have been writing a travel and food blog called Marie, Let's Eat! regularly since 2010. It gets updated a whole lot more frequently than this one, anyway. We don't do "restaurant reviews" in it, we just share stories of our experiences eating in wonderful places, and one thing that I enjoy doing is looking around for other blog posts about the restaurant we've just featured, and maybe send a little traffic in the direction of some blog posts so that our readers may get additional information and see more photos about the place.

In 2014, I visited a really good, and really popular place in Shelby NC called Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge, and I think that's when I discovered a great blog called The Barbecue Bus, written by Rien Fertel and illustrated with some downright stunning photography by Denny Culbert. The pictures are such a sore point with me. I have been able to persuade myself that my writing is not awful, and in fact it's occasionally pretty good, but nothing makes me more envious than somebody with better photographic equipment, training, and talent than me. Culbert's photos for their story on Red Bridges led me to read all of the short-lived blog - it covers tours through North Carolina in 2011-2012 - and I found myself triply envious. I wish I could shoot as well as Culbert, I wish I could write as well as Fertel, and I wish somebody'd sponsor me to spend a month or ten on the road doing their jobs.

Fertel's particular passion is whole hog cooking, which is typically associated with eastern North Carolina. As I've come to learn, that doesn't mean "the eastern half of the state," it means the region east of I-95 and north of Fayetteville. It's farmland, chiefly, with a few small cities, a big USAF base, and lots of old one-horse towns. In most of the south, barbecue places will typically smoke pork shoulders, but in this region, the whole hog is used, smoked low and slow, and served with a lightly-seasoned vinegar dip.

It's not specifically limited to this area. Fertel's new book The One True Barbecue - part travelogue and part memoir, very much a first-person narrative - introduced me to some other places and regions where whole hog cooking can still be found, such as Scott's-Parker's Barbecue in Lexington TN. It discusses the curious contradiction of whole hog over wood in an outdoor pit slowly losing out to less expensive ways of cooking, while at the same time younger enthusiasts and entrepreneurs in cities like Asheville NC and Nolensville TN have revived the form and made it trendy.

I like it when a book makes me rethink a position. I had read Fertel's blog post about Grady's BBQ in the middle of nowhere - sort of around Dudley NC - along with Dan Levine's especially rhapsodic story at his blog BBQ Jew, and concluded that I simply must have come on an off day, because the meal that I had here in 2014 was pretty good, but nothing like these fellows described. Here, Fertel goes into even more detail about Grady's technique and history, and the sad reality that the business will not live beyond its owners, who are getting on in years. It breaks my heart that I didn't really love my meal here, since Fertel loves the place so much. I am very hopeful that I can go back one Friday this coming October. My fingers are crossed.

It's just an incredibly well-written book that talks honestly about history and family, poverty and economics, race and difficulty. Fertel spends a lot of time with pitmasters and packs in the detail. There are some great stories here. You will absolutely want to take a barbecue road trip yourself with this book at your side. Even if you can't get to a whole hog place, this book will make for absolutely fine reading at any table that serves pork with any kind of sauce.

He also, sensibly, doesn't give himself the opportunity to piss me off like Robb Walsh did by dismissing Georgia. Nobody in this state seems to cook whole hog, so there's no reason for his travelogue to take him here. Our loss. Highly, highly recommended.

(Clicking the link in the image will take you to Amazon, where you can purchase the book. A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.)

Goldtiger

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Goldtiger (Rebellion, 2016).


If there's a flaw at all in this very unusual and very fun "collection" - we'll explain why that's not quite the right word - of this long-lost 1960s action comic strip, it's that it might have been even more fun for me five years ago.

I used to do a blog called Reprint This!, and one of the many things that made that kind of tedious in the end - it really did feel like work - was that in making room and news for all the things that I wished to see collected in nice editions, I felt responsible for sharing news about everything else that was being collected. And everything was being collected. IDW has this line called The Library of American Comics that wants to release everything, but it's not just them; there is, or at least there was in 2009-2011, a publisher-in-waiting for every forgotten project. The Heart of Juliet Jones? King Aroo? Who buys all this stuff?

And so naturally, Antonio Barreti and Louis Shaeffer's weird, uncompleted, and rarely-published Goldtiger would finally find a new home on shelves, what with Titan publishing its ninety-ninth Modesty Blaise book, the strip that influenced Goldtiger so very, very much. It was a reaction to Blaise, at least initially, before the paper cancelled it after seeing the first six weeks of strips. It eventually found a home in Malta, but the strip got progressively weirder. Some of the strips that were printed showed Barreti throwing out Shaeffer's script and addressing the readers directly. Some, he didn't bother to finish. Some rough pencils have since been "discovered" to bridge the gaps in publication.

Guy Adams and Jimmy Broxton, who are credited with "presenting" this old strip, have included a wealth of additional material, including interviews, selections from Shaeffer's novelizations, Barreti's other artwork, all to make some sense of the material. But... well, you might have caught on to the first big wheeze about Goldtiger. It never really existed, not in our world, and it's all a fun meta game that they're playing, using '60s-styled designs and found photos to create this world.

And, because I'm not as clever as Adams and Broxton, that's about as far as I could take this kind of gag, but they take it farther and farther. There's a method and a structure to how they tell this story, and it doesn't just exist as a simply dumped "fake collection." It's an original, hidden, story that uses this format, and I've read it three times now and found new things with each read. It's absolutely charming and really, really smart. I was looking forward to this book, and, honestly, it's better than I had anticipated. Highly recommended.

(Clicking the link in the image will take you to Amazon, where you can purchase the book. A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.)