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Like to Take Some Home?

We’ve put together excerpts from the interviews with short essays on the themes and history they bring out, and added in more than 60 full-color photographs and even a few sidebars for fun. It’s the first barbecue book (as far as we know) to be written collaboratively by such a diverse team.

What People Are Saying:

“Tar Heels probably shouldn’t own up to liking Texas barbecue, but we have no hesitation about saying that we love this book about it. The voices of the folks who make it happen and this book’s wonderful photographs add up to a splendid portrait of Lone Star barbeculture.”

—John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, authors of Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue

 

“Rare is the barbeque book that is more than the contents of a single, obsessed, and usually male mind; rarer still are words on barbecue that move past the nostalgic, the macho, the well-known, and the quest-for-the-best. Republic of Barbecue moves beyond clichés as naturally as a pit master transcends the limits of meat and smoke. Through interviews and good old fashioned shoe leather, a team of eleven graduate students and their professor look at what barbecue means in the lives of twenty-five people whose lives are, in some way, touched by national ritual.”

—Molly O’Neill, former food columnist of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, editor of American Food Writing, and author of New York Cookbook and Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball

 

“This is a signal moment in American foodways. Scholars, and laymen too, are waking up to the import of regional food culture. They’re recognizing that barbecue is one of our great American folk foods, a vernacular cultural creation worthy of intellectual energy and acuity. In the years to come, this book will serve scholars as a roadmap for further inquiry. More important, perhaps, it will serve workaday Texans as a back-of-the-bar reference when arguments fueled by comestible communication arise.”

—John T. Edge, from the foreword