Page 29 - NOV2020 BNM Digital Issue

barbecue books
Barbecue History & SPAM!
Doug Mosley
Resident Book Guru
doug_mosley@hotmail.com
Have you ever tackled a job, completed it and then realized you should do it all over again? Usually it is because it was- n’t done correctly the first time around and you feel com- pelled to take another shot at it and give it your better effort. I’m willing to wager that just about every one of us has been faced with that reality. But what if the original outcome wasn’t a screw-up; instead, what if you did it pretty well the first time around but yet over time saw an opportunity to do it even better? I’ll bet there’s not as many of us who would go back to do it over again once we’d already done it pretty well the first time. Well, let me tell you about someone who did do that, 10 years after he’d nailed it the first time.
Robert F. Moss is a writer from Charleston, S.C., who wrote a book about the his- tory of barbecue back in 2010. It was a really good book and was reviewed favor- ably in this space at the time. I most always really enjoy a well-told take on barbecue history and there have been a few who rose to the top, in- cluding Moss’s original edi- tion. It can be fairly daunting writing history, and espe- cially so when it comes to barbecue, because what you took as fact once can over time be countered by disput- ing facts. History is very much tainted by those who tell it and as times marches on the details can get tweaked a bit here and there by the re-tellers. Its also challenging to write history because once you’ve put it to print there will oftentimes
come along more background or significant stories. I would imagine these are some of what built the notion with Moss to write a good book all over again and that is what he’s done with “Barbecue: The History of an American Institu- tion, Revised and Expanded Second Edition” ($34.95, The University of Alabama Press, 312 pp.).
Like I said, I enjoyed the first book and it wasn’t hard for me to find my copy of it on my bookshelf. Even after four moves in the past decade and a serious downsizing of the library, I knew where to find it because I like to reread por- tions of it from time to time. Moss tracked barbecue history
literally back to the begin- nings of our nation, telling the story from Colonial America through the modern day. So when I picked up the new book, my first thought was “Where did he find a need to expand?”. After all, it’s not like authoring a good cookbook and then realizing a decade later that you should’ve put in a chapter dedicated to pellet cookers. Moss anticipated this ques- tion and explains it in his Preface to the Second Edi- tion, saying how there was very little written on barbe- cue history back when he began the first edition and since then a lot of excellent work and good research by many others has added to the story in whole. His second edition isn’t just a reprint of the first with a few new pages thrown in nor is it a complete tear down and rebuild. Think of it in terms of a barbecue
BarbecueNews.com - 24
NOVEMBER 2020