Christina Hendricksen
Liz Shinefrom Guest Blogger, Nate
For the last thirty years or so, give or take, the thing that gets me tuned in and inspired to write is the cooking of barbecue. I’ve been obsessed with cooking barbecue since my early teens, and I find long, slow cooks on the pit to be a sort of meditation. The cooking of truly good barbecue is a nearly religious experience. Like any religious experience, it needs to have mystery. It is the creation of this atmosphere of mystery that is responsible for pitmasters’ infamous tendency to distract you like a good magician. They spend a lot of time joking about how they’d have to kill you if they gave away the secret to their sauce, but like a good magician, they’re distracting you from what’s really important. The simple marriage of meat, smoke, salt, and time. They’re perfectly aware that even if they were to give you their exact recipe, that they pretend so zealously to guard, that you still wouldn’t be able to produce a product anything like theirs. As long as they keep you thinking that, the real process remains shrouded in mystery. And that’s just the way they like it.
GOT IT?
“How old were you when you learned to cook barbecue?”
“I was thirteen or fourteen when I first started, but no one ever really learns to cook barbecue.”
“What do you mean by that Grampa?”
“Barbecue isn’t something you learn really. I mean you can learn how to start a fire, you can learn how to judge it’s heat, and when to replenish your coals. You can learn what wood combinations go best with which meats, and which spices improve their flavor when exposed to heat. You can learn how to make a good sauce, and a lot of folks get particularly hung up on that one, even though it really don’t matter.”
“Well, isn’t that learning to cook barbecue?”
“Nope it ain’t.”
“How is that Grampa?”
“Making barbecue is like making music. You could have all the skill in the world, but that don’t mean you coulda played with Bird or Miles and them boys, and it don’t mean you can make barbecue. You just got to have IT.”
“Do I have it Grampa?”
“Can’t nobody tell you whether you do or not, if you have IT you know it and can’t nobody tell you different, ’cause it’s in you, it’s part of who you are, and it’s always been there and will always be there. And if you don’t get it, you don’t, and you ain’t ever going to get IT. Got it?”
allthemuses 