Texas BBQ

Wyatt McSpadden

University of Texas Press

By Michael Louis Albo

Vegans and vegetarians, Wyatt McSpadden's Texas BBQ will set you on the right and holy True Path. One look at the sumptuous photos of the state's barbecue joints, meat markets and brick pit rigs will have you questioning your core beliefs.

Just tell yourself it's alright and realize that the consumption of  flesh is perfectly natural and speaks to our shared ancestral roots.

Think of early humankind: naked, not too smart, hiding in trees and hoping that, with the coming of each night, they wouldn't be eaten by some bigger, stronger creature.

And then, maybe after lightning had hit a tree, one of these early people discovered, let's say, a tree rat or squirrel that had been slowly smoked and cooked in the tree's smoldering ruins.

Suddenly, the connection between heat and meat became clear. It tasted good and didn't make one sick. And as a bonus, the pure, concentrated protein made human brains grow bigger.

Pretty soon, that bigger brain led these newly-minted carnivores to make simple weapons and sally forth in small bands from the trees and onto the grasslands as mighty hunters. The rest, as they say, is history. Or a fractured condensation of the way things could have unfolded. No matter, because the fact remains that once we left the trees, conquered the environment and were able to stop looking over our shoulders in the fear that something large and ferocious was going to eat us, we had time to perfect this thing called cooking.

And while it's obviously, on the surface, a very simple process by which heat is applied to food, the style of preparation we know as barbecue is hotly debated among its adherents. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the American South. There, from the Carolinas through Appalachia onwards through the bayou country and finally into the wide open spaces of Texas, barbecue inspires the kind of passion only given to those other essentials of life: beer and whiskey. And Texas, being the wide-open and diverse place that it is, has put its own unique stamp on the practice.

Like lowriding, the key to Texas barbecue is to keep it low and slow: low heat and slow cooking. Hence the importance of the brick pit in which the cooking is accomplished through indirect heat and a certain amount of smoking. The wood is another critical factor: mesquite is the star of many a Texas barbecue, but so are other hardwoods like pecan and oak.

But one can babble about what the particulars of Texas barbecue are, but words will hardly ever do it justice. Although Texas BBQ's forward by Jim Harrison and the essay by John Morthland are both full of sage and knowing insights about barbecue, it's McSpadden's photos -- both black and white and color -- that capture the appeal and almost religious mystery that surrounds his subject.

Wyatt McSpadden truly took a historian's journey in the making of this book. The dust jacket notes that he spent over twenty years documenting his subject, and the pictures have the warmth of old tintypes. These images could have come directly out of the Texas past.

Like ghosts, McSpadden captures the stone-faced and impassive chefs who harness the fire and tame the heat and produce a soul-filling plate of meat that will carry the weary traveler through whatever hard curves life might throw.

But it's not just the cooks that McSpadden captures and frames with such delicacy. There are pictures of dusty stairwells, closeups of toothpicks in glass bottles and ancient-looking butcher blocks that have taken on a curved, soft-edged appearance from all the years of cutting and scraping along its surface.

Searching deeper into this wondrous book, there's a sense of melanchol and nostalgia for an America that's rapidly disappearing because of this horrible age of homogenization in which we live.

The photos of dining counters with split vinyl stools and weathered road signs show that, at one time, individualism and a healthy disregard for corporate conformity were the norm and not the exception. They made us great.

With the advent of the modern superhighway, where each offramp seems to sprout a forest of national chain restaurants -- each one serving up meals that taste exactly the same no matter where one might be -- something important was lost.

Thank goodness that Wyatt McSpadden stuck to the backroads. His photos capture things we'd be poorer without and. thankfully, the index that closes the book gives the names and addresses of a number of places to sample the real deal. Hunger for and knowledge go hand-in-hand here. 

An America without Texas barbecue is not one in which any any of us would want to live.


Check out Wyatt McSpadden's Texas BBQ videos here.