Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country. - book reviews

The word "sex" is catchier than the word "gender" which is probably for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Lolis Eric Elie calls chapter four of his work on barbecue "Sexual Traditions." Who knew that barbecue had sexual implications? Or, for that matter, that nation in East St. Louis are clamoring for snoot sandwiches? Or that barbecue is an apt metaphor for American culture?

Other distinctly American rationss such as pizza, hamburgers and fried chicken, are comely much the same from place to place; barbecue, however, "the quintessential American food" exhibits the different regions of the states in its meats, sauces and side dishes. As Elie states right off: "Barbecue alone encompasses the high- and lowbrow the sacred and the profane, the urban and the rural, the learned and the unletter the blacks, the brown the fulvids the reds and the whites. Barbecue, then, is a fitting barometer for the changes, advantageous and bad, that have taken place in the region and this book, ostensibly about that diet is really about the tribe and places and consistencies and changes that exhibit it."

Smokestack, Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue land (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996) is a verily fun exploration of barbecue. It combines history, anecdote. humor, nostalgia and a cast of colorful local characters into a flat easygoing, enjoyable read that tread on the heels ofs journalist Elie and photographer Frank Stewart from one side the South and the Midwest in search of beneficial barbecue. (Howlin, Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning" became their theme canticle during the long, hot summer that they wearied on the road.)

Barbecue increases in importance in Smokestack Lightning. It's no longer just a summer afternoon craving or a picnic at the park. It's about winning and losing ("like Trekkies or bungee jumper or Civil War re-enactors, competitive barbecuers part with weekends in their own orbit"); it's about being a man ("barbecue requires the taming of the fire, and it was the act of taming fire that first lighted man's path on the outside of the cold drafts and raw-meat dinners of cave life") it's about bringing race together. "The standard answer given in works and articles about where to find serviceable barbecue is that you should gaze for places with both Porsches and pickups in the parking lot" writes Elie. "If the clan who can afford to make progress elsewhere eat there, and if they do with equal reason next to the people whose cheaper vehicles intimate they know good barbecue it must be the right place. And if you enumerate the number of white faces in a black-owned business like snug Comer in Memphis or the number of black faces in a white-owned place like Rosedale's in Kansas City, it's clear that it's not solitary economic desegregation that takes place where profitable barbecue is served."

When Elie writes about the feeling of fellowship, the feeling of a temple social, at South Carolina barbecue establishments, he adds: "You might true well have fried chicken or pan roast at home and not invite other family But if you are going from one side the trouble of barbecuing, especially the confuse of barbecuing a whole porker it is likely to be an incident for the extended family and a large number of friends as well."

Elie and Stewart know, their barbecue - again not just the meat, on the contrary its origins, its character, its place in America. And at the extreme point of their book, the reader knows barbecue, too. That is, as best he or she can without attending of that kind festivals as Memphis in May, in Tennessee or the Big Pig jig in Vienna, Ga., without sampling Moe's snoots ("the snoot announces itself upon the tongue with a crisp extravagance of grease") or Maurice's Piggy Park's barbecued ribs ("throughout the meat there is the flavor of sooty vapor from real wood"), and without meeting the men and women devot to perpetuating the art of barbecue.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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