ALL HAT, NO BARBECUE

From the Chapter "All in the Family"

A very popular monthly periodical about living in the South recently devoted a large helping of the food section to the subject of barbecue.  The writers admitted that different regions of the south have different ideas about what constitutes good barbecue. I began reading the article with undisguised enthusiasm, as I am always on the lookout for places where you can get good barbecue when traveling.  Sadly, it became quickly apparent that the writers/researchers of the article evidently had not one clue of how what we call real southern barbecue is cooked, the best kind of barbecue sauce, or even how the “que” is supposed to look and taste.

Any magazine article about good southern barbecue that devotes two pages to so-called Texas barbecue and less than a column to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi barbecue, must have been written by some Yankee transplant posing as a southerner,  but who can’t correctly pronounce y’all or tell you what to put on your grits.

I wouldn’t feed a starving dog that stuff they call barbecue in Texas ; it would be better off starving.  Serving this pabulum of “barbecued beef” on pieces of wax paper in a ratty building with peanut hulls on the floor, a drugged out country and western band wailing from the juke box, and a ragged screen front door isn’t all that is needed to get the job done.  Texas appears to be a state that is all “hat” and no barbecue.

How can you possibly make real, honest-to-goodness barbecue dressed like Red Ryder, like the people in the pictures?  They should have at least dressed them appropriately for the task of making real barbecue, in a pair of ragged Oshkosh B’Gosh “Overhalls”, a faded Red Fox work shirt, Wolverine work shoes, and a broken down wool fedora that looked like a platoon of Confederate soldiers used it for bayonet practice. 

The writers of the article not only disgraced the great state of Texas , but they also had the audacity to devote valuable magazine space to a description of “barbecued bologna” in Kentucky.  If there isn’t a law against using barbecued and bologna in the same sentence, there should be.  Why not go ahead and write about how tasty they found barbecued Spam, for heaven’s sake?  Have they no shame?

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