|
Kirk and Davis team up to author book that fully lives up to this pair’s legendary status
America’s Best BBQ: 100 Recipes from America’s Best Smokehouses, Pits, Shacks, Rib Joints, Roadhouses and Restaurants
By Doug Mosley
dmosley@ulm.edu
 Paul Kirk and Ardie Davis certainly stand as two of our legends. Kirk – a.k.a. The Kansas City Baron of Barbecue, a certified master barbecue judge, KCBS board of directors member and inductee into its Hall of Flame – and Davis – a.k.a. Remus Powers, judge extraordinaire, the man who brought you The Diddy-Wa-Diddy National Barbecue Sauce Contest (later renamed The American Royal International BBQ Sauce, Rub, & Baste Contest) and the founder of Greashouse University and its highly desired Ph.B. (doctorate of barbecue philosophy) – have in their years assembled such a barbecue body of work that few will ever achieve. Kirk is the author of six-plus books on barbecue and Davis has at least five to his name, including the recently released pair 25 Essentials: Techniques for Smoking and 25 Essentials: Techniques for Grilling (both of which were favorably reviewed in NBBQN pages). Now Kirk and Davis have teamed up to author a book that has fully lived up to this pair’s legendary status.
America’s Best BBQ: 100 Recipes from America’s Best Smokehouses, Pits, Shacks, Rib Joints, Roadhouses and Restaurants ($19.99, Andres McMeel Publishing, 224 pp.) is simply outstanding. From their decades of traveling about the U.S. promoting barbeuce, Kirk and Davis have chronicled their experiences into a book of the best of the best. They tell the story of each, plus a few sidebars on other barbecue topics thrown in as a bonus, and then share a delectable recipe from there. How they coerced some of the country’s top pitmasters to give up some of their top-secret recipes is beyond me.
Some of the most revered names in barbecue are included within these pages. County Line Bar-B-Q in Austin; Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Ala.; Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque in Kansas City; Dinosaur Bar B Que in Syracuse, N.Y.; McClard’s Bar-B-Q in Hot Springs, Ark.; Maurice’s Gourmet Barbeque in West Columbia, S.C.; 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Ill.; Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, Texas; Smitty’s Market in Lockhart, Texas; and Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn in Owensboro, Ky., among other. These are barbecue shrines, the kind of places that folks put on their bucket lists to visit.
The book is superbly written and smartly illustrated with a great graphic layout. Although the title talks about 100 recipes, this is a book about people and places and I loved how it was complemented with loads of full color pictures of those people and places as well as the mouth-watering dishes. But to stay true to its boast of being a recipe book, it is laid out in four chapters - Starters, Main Dishes, Sides and Condiments and Desserts - before finishing with a real treat of the authors lists of their favorite barbecue restaurants and the places they’d love to visit but haven’t yet.
All in all, this a book that you will definitely want to have on your bookshelf. It is one I have thoroughly enjoyed.
**********************************
Dear readers, please accept my sincerest apologies for a very abbreviated column this month. My alibi is that it is the middle of football season and that’s when my day job is at a fever pitch. Even today, on my deadline, I’m rushing this column to my beloved publisher on the heals of a road trip that saw our team return from Arizona State at 6 a.m. and then after a few short days in the office I’m off again to south Florida for next week’s game. Over the nine years that I’ve been privileged to write this for you, I’ve missed an issue only a couple of times and it always comes during football season. However, I felt this book by Paul Kirk and Ardie Davis was so special that I wanted to go the extra mile to bring it to you as soon as I could. And that almost didn’t happen this month without the extra help from Paul Kirk himself and his editor at Andrews McMeel, Lane Butler. Thus, I beg your forgiveness this month and promise I’ll do better next month. As always, you can reach me via e-mail at dmosley@ulm.edu.
Back
to Top
|
