The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog

Though some will scoff at the suggestion that there’s one true barbecue, food writer, historian, and self-described barbecue dilettante Fertel (Imagining the Creole City) makes an argument for the primacy of whole-hog barbecue that, if it doesn’t convince, will at least leave you hungry. The book combines Fertel’s interviews and recollections with photos, historical accounts, and a fair amount of lore. Because of the labor involved in smoking a whole hog over a wood fire, this form of old-time barbecue, Fertel notes, is in decline. Fertel introduces the charismatic, reprehensible, humble, and loquacious characters behind the tradition, as well as the smoky pits, the feuds and legacies, the long nights, and the shuddered restaurants that were men’s lives. The prose is showy, with a preference for sounding good over making sense and a tendency to overreach for grandiose allusions (Fertel perhaps embraces to a fault his notion that “all barbecue writing is hyperbole”). But more than the writing, it is the stories of the pit masters and their predecessors, told with a sympathetic and fastidious eye, that give this hog its wings. [em](May) [/em]