![\"Cornbread](\"http:\/\/www.uww.edu\/images\/library\/blog\/cornbreadnation2.jpg\")
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Cornbread Nation 2:<\/strong> I love barbecue so this book naturally caught my eye as I reviewed our New Arrivals shelves to pick a book for this week. I often get a hankerin’ for a plate of corse-chopped barbecue (just a little outside meat for some smokey tang), red slaw, hush puppies, and fried okra. Oh, and some sweet tea. (And maybe some peach cobbler.)<\/p>\n Living here far away from my home state of North Carolina, I fear that I may have to explain my terms to those of you not well-versed in barbecue theory and practice. First of all, barbecue is most definitely a NOUN and not a verb. Barbecue is the result of cooking meat low and slow over a (wood) fire for hours and hours until the meat becomes juicy, tender, and smoke-infused. Secondly, the meat should be pork shoulder.*<\/sup> Thirdly, the sauce (and there should be sauce, Texans!) should be the Western North Carolina-style mixture of vinegar, cayenne pepper, and a touch of ketchup (also called Piedmont style). No thick, sticky-sweet Kansas City-style sauce, thin, runny, vinegar sauce (I’m looking at you, Eastern North Carolina), blasphemous mustard-style (no thanks, South Carolina!), or truly bizzare mayonnaise-based sauce of Alabama (mayo?!?).<\/p>\n The essays in Cornbread Nation<\/i> are like wafts of sweet, hickory-smoke-filled air that whet your appetite for Southern barbecue and related foods. The force behind the book, the Southern Foodways Alliance, is a non-profit organization that helps revive and promote Southern-style cooking, food traditions, and farming throughout the country. The writers in this book range from nineteenth-century journalists recording their impressions of a Georgia barbecue and political rally to the foremost essayist on North Carolina barbecue today, John Shelton Reed.**<\/sup> Check out this book is you want opinionated, funny, enlightening, and fortifying thoughts on Southern food and culture—but don’t drip sauce on the book while you are eating!<\/p>\n *<\/sup>Although, as Ellen so graciously modeled the sense of open-mindedness that all librarians should aspire to last week in her post on dogs, I will admit that there are many barbecue traditions throughout the South that use meat other than pork. Beef, chicken, and mutton (Really, Kentucky? Mutton?) are the most popular. I will say however, that these other meats do not come anywhere close to being as good as pork.<\/p>\n **<\/sup>To get an idea of how seriously some folks take their barbecue, check out this exchange<\/a> between John Shelton Reed (an aficionado of Western-style NC barbecue) and the new barbecue editor of Texas Monthly<\/i>, Daniel Vaughn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue edited by Lolis Eric Elie TX840.B3 C67 2004 New Arrivals, 2nd floor I love barbecue so this book naturally caught my eye as I reviewed our New Arrivals shelves to pick a … Continue reading
\nThe United States of Barbecue
\nedited by Lolis Eric Elie
\nTX840.B3 C67 2004<\/a>
\nNew Arrivals<\/strong>, 2nd floor<\/p>\n