Both a practical guide to cooking home barbecue and a guided tour of Texas barbecue history, The Legends of Texas Barbecue gives readers advice straight from the pitmasters themselves on preparing 85 mouthwatering recipes for smoked and roasted meats, side dishes, sauces, mops, and rubs. In a state where the perfect rub or sauce is a closely guarded secret, author Robb Walsh has managed to persuade many amateur and professional barbecuers to offer tips to prepare the perfect smoked meat and the hottest barbecue sauce, and even some of their favourite recipes. Their outlandish stories and outspoken opinions are sometimes funny and always interesting. Archival black and white photography will look back at more than 100 years of barbecue, from the first mutton and squirrel roasts in the late 1800s, to today's modern cookoffs, where technology has changed the way the food is prepared, but can never alter the state's obsessive devotion to roasting meat in a pit. The text covers important topics like the eternal battle over whether to use sauce or not, the German and African American influences on the recipes, and the details of slow roasting. Also included are lists of the best barbecue joints and a month-by-month rundown of the most influential competitions in the Lone Star state. These folks are dead serious about their barbecue and this cookbook captures the magic of the era, the history of the region, and the sublime flavours of authenic, tasty barbecue deep in the heart of Texas. * Find out everything you ever wanted to know about roasting meat in a pit - from the history and rivalries between pitmasters to the outlandish stories and unforgettable recipes that have made Texas famous. * The author is a true expert/aficionado of Texas barbecue, is a frequent judge at competitions, and knows everyone there is to know in the barbecue biz. He has been called by NPR as the "Indiana Jones of Food Writing" and is a multiple James Beard award winner. This book preserves a fascinating piece of Texas history. Many of the old barbecue methods are no longer being used and some of legendary barbecue joints are starting to close their doors.

Reviews

It's summer, and that means a new crop of barbecue books. One that stands out is "Legends of Texas Barbecue Cook Book: Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses" by Robb Walsh.

It includes plenty of recipes, but the best part is the fascinating lore about the history and folkways of Texas barbecue. The cliche about Texas barbecue is that it's about beef - open pit mesquite barbecue. Actually, Texas barbecue is a mixture of Southern, Midwestern and Southwestern elements.

So in east Texas, people make classic Southern pork barbecue, in the west, there's a lot of Mexican goat or cow head "barbacoa," and this tradition has spread beyond the Latino population. As Walsh says, no matter how much cowboys like beef, it wasn't worth slaughtering a cow for a meal, but a single goat was about enough to feed four or five cowboys.

In the center of the state, there's a sizable colony of Germans and Czechs, who follow their own European tradition of smoking pork, though sometimes in Texanized form. The famous Elgin sausage (the "gin" pronounced as in "begin," not as in the liquor) is basically a smoked German garlic sausage with extra red pepper.

This has given a unique spin to Texas barbecue. The German and Czech places were originally markets that only sold their barbecue out their back doors. The reason was that their barbecue customers were migrant cotton pickers who went to the shops for something to eat because regular restaurants wouldn't serve them (or, to put it another way, because the cotton pickers wouldn't have to take off their dirty coveralls and dress up if they were just eating a handful of barbecue behind a butcher shop).

To go with their hot smoked meat, they'd buy a few things like crackers, pickles or canned peaches. In a few old barbecues, that's still all you get. Kreuz Market in Lockhart, one of the most revered barbecues in Texas, serves your order on a piece of butcher paper with nothing but bread and crackers - and not a drop of barbecue