Title: Searching for the Dixie Barbecue
Subtitle: Journeys in the Southern Psyche
Description: At first glance, this may appear to you to be a book about food, but it is not a cookbook, nor is it a food guide. And although it offers photos and lingers at the rickety tables of scores of tiny hole-in-the-wall dives savoring good barbecue and then chewing the smoky fat with the purveyors and creators of some of the best barbecue on the planet, it is not really a restaurant guide either. So what is it exactly? Well, you are about to discover that in the rural South barbecue is not just a food. In most of Dixie, the preparation and consumption of pork barbecue revolves around deeply ingrained mores, closely held secrets, and its own mysterious dogma. Some will even tell you that barbecue is actually a religion involving hallowed rites and ancient rituals reaching all the way back in time and place to the twisted myth of true Southern-ness. You are about to explore every nook and cranny of Southern barbecue technique and lore. And along the way you will find opportunities to peer into hundreds of small, smoky windows through which you can catch glimpses into the inscrutable Southern psyche. Searching for the Dixie Barbecue explores those lingering cultural relics that still point to an old style of “Southern-ness” that is quickly vanishing from modern American life. Here are crude essences of the frontier, unswerving backwoods mentalities, rural respect for tradition, insights into rural humor, and examples of the wild braggadocio that has created many of the tall tales that are still a part of rural American life today. In short, this book seeks a present-day manifestation of a myth. Real or remembered, it does not matter. The Real Dixie Barbecue is a place where the traditions of fire and hog and smoke and sauce are revered and combined in the old ways; where rustic ambiences are a treasure, not an embarrassment; where a crude code of service and an unbending orthodoxy overrides modern niceties. Better hurry. It won’t be around for long. It is doomed. All across the South new generations are forsaking the old ways and moving to the city. For now, the Real Dixie Barbecue is still out there somewhere, but as ol’ boys on Main Street will tell you, “It’s a riiide.”
Subjects: Barbecuing, Southern states, description and travel, Southern states, social conditions