Page 36 - Barbecue News DEC 2020 Digital Issue

barbecue book
2020 Book
Doug Mosley
Resident Book Guru
doug_mosley@hotmail.com
My oh my, thank goodness De- cember is finally here! That means we have just a few more weeks until we put 2020 in our rearview mirrors. I am so look- ing forward to the day when the term 2020 can be used in a joking reference, as in “prep- ping for that colonoscopy was like living through 2020 all over again”. For the moment, however, 2020 isn’t yet a joking matter as just about every one of us has had family or friends who’ve battled the virus or we know of a business that shut- tered its doors through the re- sulting economic downturn. This pandemic forced change upon so many and now we look to go forward in a new normal that is actively shaping before us.
The pandemic certainly had an impact upon media in gen-
BarbecueNews.com - 36
DECEMBER 2020
of the
Year
eral and book publishing par- ticularly. New releases were no- tably less this year and many of the people at publishers who are the point of contact for folks like me were either fur- loughed or laid off, making it just a bit harder to keep up on what new releases did make it to market. Nonetheless, really good books did make it into print. Let’s take a look at the ones that stood out among the rest and earned their way into consideration for our annual selection of the Barbecue News Magazine Barbecue Book of the Year Award.
First, a quick rehash of how we do this. We choose from any book under the outdoor cook- ing genre that has been re- leased from November of the
previous year to November of the current year. This is in order to make sure we don’t overlook a December release that came out after this particular column had already been completed. Outdoor cooking is a broad category and we ac- knowledge bias is allowed to books relating to smoke cook- ing and competition barbecue although that is not an eliminator. For the past winners of this honor, see the list at the bottom of this column. Every one of those books de- serves a place on your bookshelf.
From the many eligible books, we select a short list of fi- nalists. Here’s the book that made that very difficult cut: “Texas Q: 100 Recipes for the Very Best Barbecue from the Lone Star State, All Smoke-Cooked to Perfection” by Cheryl Alters Jamison ($26.99, 192 pp.) – In the July review of this book I said that Jamison is a name that deserves very seri-