Q

It’s funny about food. Brilliant, eh? There are all kind of articles and recipes published for the “best” (something) . As much as I harp about the dumb word “best”, there are probably some items that you can roughly apply this to. Like maybe a steak where there aren’t too many variables. It’s done or not done, grilled or pan fried, but out the other end is a cooked piece of meat that maybe you can regard of as “best”. People don’t much go out of their way for this steak or that..

But there are some foods that people really get excited about, and I kind don’t like the word, but passionate is probably appropriate. A lot of this kind of food is regional. There are devotees of Chicago Pizza, New York Pizza, Imo’s from St. Louis, that kind of thing. Crab cakes are another example, although somebody needs to explain to me what “Maryland Style” crab cakes are sometime. Coming up the passionate scale would be Chili – beans, no beans, meat, no meat, beef, venison, and the folks from Cincinnati who put cheese on it no less. And actually I would put chili almost as a subset of the king of regional foods, Barbeque!

Every year, the food magazines will devote a whole issue (usually June or July) or at least include a major section on barbeque. I gathered some as few and went through them, Saveur Cover: “BBQ Nation”; (STL's) Sauce: “Barbeque”; Cook’s Country: “Guide to the perfect ribs”; Food & Wine’s “Grilling Issue” with articles including “Learning to Barbeque helped make me a man!; Pit Master Recipes Made Easy – Cheater’s Barbeque, and also recipes including: Country-Style Ribs with Apple Bourbon BBQ Sauce (trite); Rob Walsh’s Texas Barbequed Brisket”, on and on. We already know Bon Appétit’s June issue featured a grinning Gwyneth Paltrow, a far cry from barbeque, although I guess she does have ribs. And finally Garden and Gun, my current fav, has a cover picture of a pulled pork sandwich and a major article inside called “The South in a Sandwich – BBQ”.

The latter does their usual great job of blending photos and substance, with some 36 places (Bear’s Restaurant, Covington Louisiana; Bunn’s Barbeque, Windsor, North Carolina, etc.) and sandwiches. Saveur focuses on not only the places and sandwiches, but has wonderful pictures of the people. It’s worth the price of the issue for them alone. The feature story is by John T. Edge, who alert readers will know is head of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and knows his culture and stuff.

And out of this comes an astonishing variety of preparation of such humble beginnings, with basic cuts of beef, pork, and yes, chicken..(we’ll ignore the salmon of the northwest ). Just to hit a few: Pork Ribs, Chicken parts, pulled pork, beef ribs, brisket, sausage, burnt ends, tri-tip, on and on. The method and preparation of all these tends to be extremely geographical. There are major differences between east and western North Carolina for instance. In Memphis you can get barbeque spaghetti or bologna. In Kentucky there’s chopped mutton. Texas? Beef territory. Preparations vary. Chopped or pulled? Shoulder or whole hog? Baste or rub? And after you chop or slice or pull, you can make a sandwich. Bread? How about sub roll, regular bun, corn bread, white bread, potato bun. At Papa Kayjoe’s you can get your shredded Boston Butt between cornmeal pancakes. Now, what do you add? Slaw? Bacon strips? Pickles? Onions? And then there’s the side fixin’s… cole slaw (Lexington style red or Sorth Carolina vinegar?); hush puppies, banana pudding (??).

And, of course there would be another whole volume about the holy sauce. Heavy tomato (in the Delta region and Texas); Light tomato (eastern North Carolina; Georgia); Mustard (South Carolina); Vinegar-pepper (East Carolina, Western Kentucky); White Sauce (Northern Alabama, notably Big Bob Gibson’s in Decatur AL). All of which are of course personalized according to the secret family recipes, tradition and so on. And of course Rubs, basting sauce..

In reading over above, I come away with “holy cow, feeder, you’re all over the place – it’s confusing!” And that is precisely the whole point. How in the world can there be a "best"? What a variation.. If I remember my statistics class, there was some formula like “N things taken N at a time” that will give you the number of combinations. Think about all the stuff above and that’s exactly what happens. It’s the melting pot in America in action. People arrived from different cultures with various eating traditions and translated them with what was familiar and available. How cool is that?

I’m not sure you could make a case for Barbeque being our national dish, but pretty close. Right here in good old Southern Maryland, how many barbeque places, trucks, stands, caterers are there? Many. I have a friend who says “I could eat Barbeque every day”, and FOJTY has been known to drive hundreds of miles just to get his fix in Kansas City or Memphis.

Just keep your eye out as you travel around the country, find the local places and enjoy. Meet the real people.

And maybe just this once you can

D however the heck you darn well please