Page 36 - DEC2021 Digial Issue: Barbecue News Magazine

Doug Mosley
Resident Book Guru
doug_mosley@hotmail.com
It’s that time again – the annual announce- ment of the Barbecue News Magazine Barbe- cue Book of the Year!
This is always an exciting time as we give care- ful consideration to all the new books released during the previous 12 months to honor the best. This will be the 15th year, which to the best of our knowledge is the world’s only award presented to barbecue-specific books. But then again we really didn’t look very hard to see if anyone else is doing it, either.
If you’ll recall last year in this space how we
wrote that it was such an odd year and we were
glad everything would be back to normal in
2021. Welp, it didn’t quite work out that way,
did it? It turned out 2021 was sort of like eating 2020 leftovers all over again. To swipe a quote from the Grateful Dead, what a long strange trip it’s been. This year saw a significant downturn in the number of books that came to print and even had many wonder- ing about the relevance of books in this digital age. Will the changes in our lifestyles be the event that brings about a shift in our habits when it comes to preferences shifting away from printed books? The opinion here is no or at least not yet. After all, the fate of books has been eulogized many times through the decades and it hasn’t happened yet. The Kindle turned 14 this year and the Amazon e-reader wasn’t the death knell for printed books that everyone feared it would be.
The number of books released this year may have taken an overall
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DECEMBER 2021
2021 Barbecue
Book of the
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downturn but there were still many great books brought to the marketplace. Each year when we announce this award we also have a list of final- ists which are books we felt deserved special mention. So without further ado, here are the fi- nalists for the 2021 Barbecue News Magazine Barbecue Book of the Year:
From the winningest man in barbecue, “Keto BBQ: Real Barbecue for a Healthy Lifestyle” ($24.99, Abrams Books, 200 pp.) by Myron Mixon with Kelly Alexander.
Two books from the Cook’s Illustrated brand, “Meat Illustrated: A Foolproof Guides to Under- standing and Cooking With Cuts of All Kinds” ($40, 440 pp.) and “The Chicken Bible: Say
Goodbye to Boring Chicken with 500 Recipes for Easy Dinner, Braises, Wings, Stir-Fries, and So Much More” ($40, 544 pp.)
The really fun book “One-Beer Grilling: Fast, Easy & Fresh Recipes for Great Grilled Meals You Can Make Before You Finish Your First Cold One” by Mike Lang ($21.99, Castle Point Books, 144 pp.)
From a member of our barbecue books Mt. Rushmore (remember that column?) Steven Raichlen “How to Grill Vegetables: The New Bible for Barbecuing Vegetables Over Live Fire” ($24.95, Workman Publishing, 326 pp.
A book on Southern barbecue written by a New Yorker living in