Paper Palate

It was an early Saturday evening in the midst of summer and I was at a gas station somewhere in North Carolina, filling up my car. However, as it was dinner time, my car wasn’t the only one running on empty, and I felt a great hunger coming on. I was in an unfamiliar country, but that didn’t worry me, because I had it on good authority that there was excellent barbecue nearby and that authority was Lolis Eric Elie and his book, Smokestack Lightning, Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country.

(above: “J.C. Serving it Up” by Frank Stewart)

I was on a road trip, the genesis for which was a friend’s layoff. He was granted a surplus of free time and decided that he wanted to drive from Boston to New Orleans. I offered to drive down with him, and thought of it as an opportunity to drop in on friends in Raleigh, Atlanta and Tuscaloosa. Then he picked up a new gig, and backed out of the trip. But I thought that I’d go anyway, cut out the New Orleans segment and just use it as an excuse to spend more time with those friends who had, for various reasons, moved to the South. I looked forward to seeing them, but I also anticipated what the South might have to offer. Warmth, history and, of course, barbecue.

My first stop, though, was my older sister’s apartment in Brooklyn. As I told her about my plans and my itinerary, I followed her to her bookshelf, massive and creaking with cookbooks that she’d picked up in her years in New York. She fished out Smokestack Lightning and said, “Here. If you’re going to hunt for barbecue, then take it. Give it back to me whenever you’re done. Tell me stories afterwards.”

As a quick summary, Smokestack Lightning is an account of a summer spent exploring America’s barbecue belt, as Elie and his photographer friend, Frank Stewart, traveled from Memphis to San Antonio to Chicago to Kansas City, indulging in the rich tapestry of slow cooked American meat on offer in roadhouses, corner shacks and festival competitions. While it delves into the regional characteristics of barbecue, and spills more than a little ink on What It All Means, its highlights are in the closeup capsules of the several dozen joints visited and their idiosyncratic owners and pitmasters. It is a series of portraits collected as survey, a journalist’s mosaic of folks with a passion for smoke and sauce, and who believe that “the ability to distinguish a brisket from a butt is no less basic to a civilized existence than are lounge chairs and chilled beer.”

It was those capsules that I had found most valuable, and when I’d get hungry on that road trip, I’d pull over, grab the book, flip to the directory in the back, and used mapping software on my laptop to figure out the route to my next meal. That was how I set a course for Lexington, NC and Lexington Barbecue, with an annotated tip to ask for a sandwich with “outside meat.”

Not that you should consider this to be a guidebook in the vein of Roadfood or a Zagat’s. It is a record of a summer spent meeting, eating and meandering, and while ribs and snouts show up frequently in the text, they are background to the rambling, unguided wandering of the author as he chases one rumor after another about which restaurant has the best sauce or the sweetest meat.

It is an invariably common fact that, despite the existence of mapping software, GPS and Google Earth, we will invariably get lost if we take the path less traveled. It’s part of a road trip experience, and the measure of a traveler is not whether they can avoid losing their way but, once the way is lost, how they go about regaining it. In my particular case, I got lost in Lexington in less than fifteen minutes, and had difficulty getting my bearings in a suburban town where houses tended to blur together and the only thing distinguishing various residents were the toys that lingered in their yard. Then I caught a whiff of smoked meat, drifting heavy in the summer breeze, and I turned my car upwind.

Earlier in the trip, when I was in Tuscaloosa and driving around with my friend Hyson, I mentioned that I wanted to check out the local barbecue and I had read that this place called Dreamland was pretty good. But, Hyson, who had recently spent her last four years at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington shook her head and said, “Dreamland ain’t barbecue. That’s a rib place.” Before I would’ve been confused by that comment, but instead I just chuckled, remembering the book’s geography lessons — the east is pork, the west is beef, Tennesee and the Carolinas are about pulled pork, everywhere else accepts ribs; and every region has its particular sauce.

I found Lexington Barbecue eventually, and the sandwiches with the outside meat, charred and crispy with their prolonged exposure to flames and seasonings, were exactly what the book had promised. It was the closest that I had come to the lechons of my youth, where suckling pigs are roasted over an open pit for fiestas and gatherings. Filipinos are less fixated on smoke and more interested in a crispy skin and juicy meat; but the idea was the same and the pleasure was equally savory.

There are recipes in the book, but they’re almost all restaurant scale preparations of the “dig a pit, cook a whole hog” variety. In case you’re curious about vegetarian recipes, it’s worth pointing out that the recipe for barbecued cabbage calls for coring a head of cabbage and filling it with beef bouillon cubes and a stick of butter. There are a few entries that can be made at home, but they’re more the exception than the rule. The sauce recipes yield in gallons. The comment “serves 24″ is more common than you might expect. These are less instructions for the home cook and more testaments to style and craft. Which is fine. This is the sort of book that you can’t just read at home. It tempts you with the open road and the promise of good food, fine memories and heady adventure just around the corner and a little further upwind.