Barbecue haggis -- seriously

My last name is Scottish, so it was only a matter of time before the Robert Burns Club of Atlanta asked me to come to one of their monthly dinners and speak about "Smokelore" and the history of barbecue.

I went to the Burns Cottage in southeast Atlanta, a replica of the great Scottish poet’s home in the old country. It was a chilly, rainy evening fit for the occasion, and the club members greeted me with a dram of Scotch whisky, which warmed my soul and loosened my tongue.

In all the things that have been written about Burns, the bard best known for "Auld Lang Syne," it has never been suggested that he was a barbecue man. He did plan to relocate to Jamaica in 1786, for work, but he never made it. If he had, he doubtless would have encountered New World barbecue near its very birthplace. 

So I scrambled to think of Scottish barbecue connections other than the fact than many American barbecue lovers and practitioners have Scots-Irish blood. I thought of one: smoked salmon. While indigenous people in the Americas certainly smoked fish, it’s a thing in Scotland as well. Maybe that’s why we smoke salmon every year at my family’s Christmas Eve feast. 

Then I found another connection on the buffet table, where the potluck dinner that preceded my talk featured side by side trays of Southern pork barbecue and … yes, barbecue haggis (the darker stuff). Club member Jason Graham had made a mess of haggis — that hearty, stereotypically Scottish dish of sheep meat and organs — and smoked it on a Big Green Egg. I must admit that I preferred the pork, but I liked the haggis just fine and loved what it said about the mingled ancestry so many of us share.

Not that I expect smoked haggis to show up at many barbecue restaurants.

Thank you to the Burns Club for an enjoyable evening, to member Charles McNair for setting the invitation in motion, to member John Thrasher for meeting me with that dram of Scotch, and to club president Lee Landenberger (with me in the photo) and VP Scott McAlpine for their hospitality.

I’ll think of you all next time I raise a "cup o’ kindness," as Rabbie put it.

Kosher 'cue

The title really cuts to the meat of the matter: "No Pork on the Fork."

I had the honor of appearing in this short documentary, which premiered last weekend at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. The filmmakers apparently didn’t hold it against me that the cover of my book "Smokelore" contains some 50 images of pigs and nary a cow. 

Directors Adam Hirsch and Jacob Ross focused on the Atlanta Kosher BBQ Festival, one of many such contests across the nation, which takes place every October in Sandy Springs. Jody Pollack, the good-humored head of the event, is one of the stars of the show. (That’s the four of us pictured below, from left: Adam, me, Jody, Jacob.) I appear in the film a good bit as well, droning on about how barbecue has always been bigger and more diverse than its bubbas-and-boars image. Not that there’s anything wrong with bubbas and boars. I mean, those are my peeps! 

The kosher barbecue festival has a costumed cow mascot that looks like something out of the movie "Bull Durham." Teams with names like the Wandering Que and the BBQ’N Hebrew Hillbillies cook kosher briskets on smokers whose coals have to be fired under kosher supervision. It all adds a level of complication to the already complicated task of cooking good brisket. 

Congratulations, Adam and Jacob, for creating a fun and informative film. I especially appreciated the ironic quote you used to begin the documentary. It came from Lewis Grizzard, the late Atlanta newspaper columnist and well-known barbecue lover, who I’m pretty sure was not a member of the Hebrew Order of David.

"You don’t put coleslaw on [barbecue]," sayeth Lewis. "I think that’s in Deuteronomy somewhere." *

• People in Memphis and parts of the Carolinas would dispute Grizzard’s  interpretation. So it goes with barbecue’s many sectarian distinctions.

Did Brunswick invent stew?

I visited the Brunswick area recently to speak about barbecue history at the Firebox festival, a fun event organized by Southern Soul Barbeque in St. Simons. While I was there, I stopped by the Brunswick stew marker at the I-95 rest stop nearby and noticed something interesting: They’ve changed the inscription.

The old marker, as seen on Page 23 of "Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America," stated that the first pot of Brunswick stew was made on July 2, 1898, on St. Simons – a claim that I’ve always found charmingly suspect. First, there’s the specificity of that date. What’d they do: file for a patent? Second, people were probably making something like Brunswick stew many decades before 1898 in Brunswick County, Va., which also claims to have invented the dish. They’ve got a marker, too, also pictured on Page 23 of "Smokelore."

Well, I was looking at this photo of me taken recently at the Georgia marker and saw that the inscription now says Brunswick stew was first made in the Golden Isles during colonial days. I guess Georgia has back-dated its claim.

Whatever its origin, Brunswick stew is more likely to be served with barbecue in Georgia than anywhere else in the United States. In my view, it’s the most distinctive aspect of Georgia’s barbecue culture — the thing that sets us apart from all the other Dixie pigs you find across the South. While we were on the coast, Pam and I visited Southern Soul and discovered that it’s as good as everyone says. More to the point, they serve one of the best Brunswick stews I’ve ever tasted.

Many thanks to Griffin Bufkin of Southern Soul for inviting me to appear at their barbecue festival. Thanks to Robert Moss, barbecue editor for Southern Living (pictured with yours truly on the grounds), who appeared with me as part of a conversation on the history of barbecue, and to Stephanie Burt, host of the podcast The Southern Fork, for moderating.

And special thanks to our hosts in St. Simons, Phil and Leslie Graitcer, who also threw a book party for me and Pam the night before the festival. The party was co-hosted by my former AJC editor Hyde Post. Several former AJCers attended, including Bert Roughton, Jingle Davis, Kevin Austin and David Davidson. It was great to see everyone. And it was great to try some exceptional Brunswick stew in a place that might not have invented it but sure acts like it. 

From Russia With Sauce

I experienced political whiplash on the barbecue trail today. It involved two very different red states. I’ll explain.

This morning I did a 20-minute interview about "Smokelore" and the history of barbecue with Radio Sputnik, a controversial Russian government-funded broadcast operation out of Washington aimed at Americans. When Radio Sputnik first contacted me, I didn’t know what to make of it. Turns out that one of the hosts of their morning drive-time show, "Fault Lines," is a big barbecue fan and saw "Smokelore" touted by one of the authors of a popular economics blog called Marginal Revolution.

So I talked barbecue with the cohosts: Lee Stranahan (the barbecue lover) and Garland Nixon (a vegetarian). It wasn’t much different from other interviews I’ve done. Well, they were pretty interested in Bobby Seale and the way the Black Panthers used to hold barbecue fund-raisers. I pointed out that the Ku Klux Klan held them, too. It’s America, people. Anyway, thanks to the "Fault Lines" crew for a good interview.

Three hours later, I was addressing a group of Congressional staffers over lunch at Georgia State Universit (right), part of an annual tour my alma mater puts together for the state’s delegation in Washington. Georgia, of course, is the other red state I referenced at the top because of its decidedly Republican lean in recent years. 

My lunch audience was amused to hear about Radio Sputnik. I’m amused as well. I never dreamed that in one day I’d be doing barbecue talks funded by the governments of Russia and Georgia.

Bison anyone?

I’ve tried a lot of barbecue, but I never had barbecued bison ribs until I visited Denver this week to talk about "Smokelore" and the history of barbecue at the invitation of Colorado Humanities and culinary historian Adrian Miller (below). The event sold out, which made this Georgia boy feel very welcome.

I confess that I don’t have much about Colorado in my book. When we think of Western barbecue, we tend to concentrate on Texas and the long shadow of Kansas City, and then it’s hundreds of miles of fly-over country until you get to Santa Maria barbecue in California. But there’s a lot to see in Colorado, barbeculturally speaking.

I talked about the Denver barbecue riot of 1898, a melee that erupted when 30,000 people showed up for a livestock show barbecue intended for 4,000. And we talked about "Daddy Bruce" Randolph, the late, beloved Denver barbecue man who fed thousands at charity dinners every Thanksgiving for years. They named a street after him.

Colorado barbecue is heavy on beef, as most Western barbecue is, with occasional forays into lamb and bison. Adrian. my host (who is working on a book about African Americans and barbecue called "Black Smoke”) took me to Roaming Buffalo, a top-ranked barbecue restaurant where the owners, Coy and Rachael Webb, served us samples of their bison ribs. They were charred and rich-tasting and made me feel like Fred Flintstone digging into dino-ribs at the that prehistoric drive-in.

The meat-fest continued at my talk, catered by Rolling Smoke BBQ of Aurora, as pit master Terry Walsh served us barbecued rack of lamb. Wow. I need to switch to smoked tofu for a few days.

Many thanks to Margaret Coval and everyone else at Colorado Humanities, to the Cheluna Brewing Co. (which hosted the event), and to Adrian, who instigated my visit and wants to build barbecue awareness in his beautiful hometown of Denver. It was a blast.