Food History

This week we have an extra guest author, because Laura Goodin is a reader of this blog and she has a barbecue story that appeared yesterday. Such things deserve celebrating. Laura is both American and Australian: I never know how much sympathy she needs for being both.

Both Laura and Lucy have stories in my next anthology, just in case you were wondering how I know them. Except I knew them before they anthology. In fact, Laura has a story in Masques, the other anthology I’ve edited. Two anthologies, two stories. Just to keep everything in multiples of two, I’m going to run her story here over two nights.

The next anthology is going to be wonderful. Not enough food, of course (though Laura’s story has pies), and it will be ten months before any of you get to read it. In the meantime, though, you can meet Laura and get to know about her passion for barbecue.

It sat on the plate: a sesame roll containing a mound of steaming, glistening shreds of meat, garishly colored by the reddish sauce. The smell spread out in ferocious, vinegary-sweet, smoky waves. Suddenly, I yearned.

I picked the sandwich up awkwardly and bit as meat and sauce spilled over my hands and onto the plate. I closed my eyes and chewed and swallowed. Oh. Oh, this was what they’d meant all along. This was barbecue. Tender, welcoming meat that met the teeth easily and gave up subtle riches of smoke and care and the taste of time itself. The sauce, bright and combative, making the meat an adult’s meal, something to analyze, something to quest after and understand. Like good wine or fine, fine chocolate.

Barbecue is the essence of America. It is highly regional: I had grown up never tasting it until I moved a mere few hours south to Washington, DC — and, in fact, it varies widely from region to region even where it is common. It is highly competitive: google “barbecue competition” to gain an insight into the bizarre and emotional world of trying to win at food. It is deeply esoteric and detailed: a minute to learn, a lifetime to master, impossible to fully comprehend in all its forms. We Americans love all these things.

Australians may still be puzzled. “Barbecue” in this sense does not mean chucking some protein onto a hot metal plate for a few minutes. It means a day, two days, a week of preparation, culminating in sixteen hours of slow, careful, anxious alchemy. It means smoke and embers and spices that change the meat’s very essence. The question of sauce is all-consuming. And I won’t even get into the semiotics of the side dishes, except to say that whether there is coleslaw or not, whether there is cornbread or baked beans or beans and rice, are matters of great pith and moment.

To be continued…