THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605290602
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: 79 lines
SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING
Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country
LOLIS ERIC ELIE
Farrar, Straus Giroux. 224 pp. $35.
It often seems that the more low-brow something is, the greater the pretense it attracts. In Smokestack Lightning: Adventures Into the Heart of Barbecue Country, Lolis Eric Elie tries too hard to find Deep Meaning in a mouthful of barbecue. He makes good connections between barbecue and Southern culture, and barbecue and black music, but when he reaches for the stars, look out.
Here's but one example: ``Barbecue, then, serves as a metaphor for American culture, bridging and embracing the nation's various facets.'' Ouch. When one tosses in ``metaphor'' while discussing parts of a pig, it's time for a Pretension Alert.
I say this as one who lived many years in the South, who loves barbecue, who has probably eaten too much of the stuff (and certainly too much bad barbecue). Barbecue is a part of certain American cultures - as well as being tasty to eat. But a writer needs a sense of humor amid all that theorizing - Calvin Trillin is the model here - and Elie is lacking.
Elie came up with the idea for this book ``over a plate of barbecue in Wilson, North Carolina.'' At the time, he was road manager for the group led by jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. He and photographer Frank Stewart, who was shooting Marsalis for another book, found themselves in a lot of places eating barbecue. And so the idea was born: Why not collaborate on a book about barbecue?
Others, such as former Black Panther Bobby Seale, have written books about barbecue, but this volume must be the most adventurous. Elie and Stewart roamed the country in their 1981 Volvo, nicknamed the Living Legend, searching for that perfect barbecue. They talk to cooks and consumers, visiting hole-in-the-wall places and juke joints and fancy chain restaurants.
They go to Memphis and Kansas City and Chicago, to Texas and North Carolina and Arkansas and many points in between. They are present at May in Memphis, the nation's premier barbecue competition and, hearteningly, confess they don't much like it - too many good barbecue-makers can't afford the hefty registration fees, and competitions tend to encourage a certain blandness in the barbecue.
They discuss the origins of barbecue, just what a barbecue is - chiefly, the slow cooking of a meat over an open fire - and whether burning hardwoods is essential to good barbecue, or could one just use charcoal, mesquite or (gasp!) gas?
When it is all done, Elie, a native of New Orleans, champions Texas barbecue. He goes from Brownsville to Mexia to San Antonio to Houston (where he pronounces Otto's Barbecue, George Bush's favorite place, as ``real good''). He raves about the establishments in what he calls ``the barbecue belt'' in the middle of the state - where there is ``a series of restaurants that, almost without exception, serve some of the best barbecue in the country.''
The chapter on Chicago barbecue is strong, with Elie deftly showing the connections between barbecue and African Americans on the South Side (it's an essential part of Saturday night social life). But when he reaches the Carolinas, Elie's enthusiasm lags. Either he's tired out or he just doesn't like Carolina pork barbecue. He complains it doesn't have a smoky taste, though he should know that Carolina pork barbecue isn't supposed to have one.
That may be a matter of the palate, always a subjective area. Elie talked to a number of people, and when he lets them speak, the book has a simple eloquence. Stewart's spare black-and-white photography nearly always enhances the text.
But spare us the speechifying! We really don't need such lines as ``But not only does barbecue embody the combination of folk roots and high-culture intellectual engagement, it also has the flexibility to go as upscale as the culinary imagination can take it.''
And while we hear many diverse voices, the author doesn't tie them together well. Smokestack Lightning digresses a lot, addressing a point, dropping it for no discernible reason and then picking it up again. The result is a rambling, scattershot book, sometimes quite informative but often hard to take. Sometimes, barbecue is just barbecue. MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. by CNB