The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog

The result of four years of long road trips, eating as many as five barbecues a day and endless hours of writing, The One True Barbecue is a historic and documentary study of Southern barbecue. Rien Fertel has collected information while tasting countless barbecues along the way for Southern Food Alliance. A historian and writer, this is an excellent, well-written result of those four years. Nevertheless, this book if far too detailed for most readers — long chapters of unillustrated pages of text would make most readers lose interest unless they are intensely interested in Southern barbecue. Fertel visited many barbecue joints in the Southern states and two in New York, twenty-five of which appear on his location map, including detailed history of the place and bio of the pit master. He included few illustrations — his traveling companion and photographer supplied a number of black-and-whites and eight in-bound color photos. Most readers would’ve liked many more, as the subject is visual as well as gustatory. But we learn a lot about barbecue in which generally whole hogs are smoked and slowly cooked over specific wood fire. Some of these joints are huge — cooking as many as hundred whole hogs a day!