Where There's Smoke, There's...Whiskey, Fish, and Barbecue!

26:53Most of us are one good deal away from finally replacing that worn out rug, fixing up the backyard, or getting the bedroom we actually want. Good news, that deal's almost here. Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale. Get up to 80 % off area rugs and up to 60 % off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget, and space. Plus, free shipping. Black Friday in July ends July 27th. Shop today at Wayfair.com. There's a civil war happening in the Democratic Party, and if there's one place that that's playing out most clearly, it's in Michigan.

27:31A crucial Senate primary battle in Michigan that... could determine control of Congress in November. Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. A progressive Democrat and a moderate Democrat. In the end, it all comes down to the dreaded E-word, electability. But in Michigan, one candidate is trying to turn the electability concept on its head. If we think that voters walk around asking, where do I sit on some theoretical left-right spectrum? Then in theory, the bulk of the voters are somewhere in the middle. The problem, though, is that that model hasn't really accurately predicted our politics for a very long time.

28:06If Michiganders wanted moderate, why would they have elected Donald Trump twice? Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is making the progressive case for America first, and he's trying to settle the Democrats' ideological battle in the process. This is about the many versus the money. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, finding the definition of barbecue is like trying to chase and hold a greased pig. It's really slippery. This is Adrian Miller. He's been on the show a couple of times before talking about mac and cheese and watermelon.

28:40And he's also written a comprehensive history of barbecue in America called Black Smoke. But even he struggled to pin down exactly what barbecue is. At the end of the day, in general, Adrian says what barbecue is. It's a technique that developed in America to cook meat low and slow. It's cooked usually in a pit over charcoal and wood for many, many hours at low temperatures. It might be a whole animal or part of an animal. It might have sauce. It might not. But really, this is barbecue. And even barbecue novices like us realize that in America, it is a very sacred and special thing. And in general, a very big deal.

29:17Slow and low. That's how we roll. These ribs are so tender. You can pull a rib off just like that. Mmm Damn Like it should be in a museum in case you know like it security guards everywhere this meat like when you break through this this little layer of spice perfectly Krusty slightly charred outer shell and you get to this part right here I'm gonna go ahead and call this the tender zone when you're in the tender zone You no longer need to do anything besides just kiss it and this thing falls apart See all that fat? When you take a bite, this will just start melting on your tongue, creating this magical, silky, smooth, rich, sauna-like experience for your taste buds.

30:00Those are clips from the Southern Foodways Alliance and Mike Chen of Strictly Dumpling, and that is some serious love there. What is it that makes people so obsessed over this particular style of cooking meat? Deliciousness. So the result would be sublimely smoked meat. You don't want it too heavily smoked, but just sublimely smoked meat that's tender, but still has a little bit of firmness to it. So it's no mystery why barbecue is such a big deal in the U.S. People like it. The real mystery, Adrian told us, is where barbecue was invented, where it comes from. So I was really interested in this question because, believe me, I wanted to say it came from West Africa.

30:38I wanted to say barbecue is West African, cross my arms in an X and say Wakanda forever. But when you look at pre-colonization or at least pre-European contact in West Africa, the way that West Africans cook meat does not really look like what we call barbecue today. Adrian says that the people who lived in the regions of West Africa who were enslaved in the U.S. in their food traditions, they cut up meat in small pieces and stewed it. They didn't cook large pieces over fires for a long period of time. So they didn't invent barbecue. The most common origin story for barbecue is actually that it's an indigenous Native American tradition.

31:13So Europeans who are lost show up in the Caribbean. They find some indigenous people cooking a type of meat. And the word barbecue tries to approximate what the indigenous people were calling that type of cooking. In fact, the story comes from Columbus's landing in Cuba in what's now Guantanamo Bay. His party arrives on this island and they see basically this wooden platform on raised sticks. and then, you know, this is a sign of things to come. Without even asking for permission, they just helped themselves to what was cooking. It wasn't until later, when the indigenous people came back to check on how their smoked food was doing, that Columbus learned that what he'd stolen was called barbecue.

31:52Although, Adrian says that to the best of our knowledge, it seems as though the word barbecue originally referred to the wooden platform thing that the meat was sitting on. And the native islanders weren't even actually barbecuing the meat as we'd know it today. They were more smoking and drying it out like jerky. But the word itself seems to have stuck. So then where did this low and slow method of cooking whole animals come from? Not Europe. Back home in Spain, Columbus, and even my compatriots in Britain, we also didn't have a barbecuing tradition. We had spit roasts, which is cooking a whole animal over fire, yes, but at a much hotter temperature while the carcass is being rotated around.

32:31That's kind of the same spirit as grilling, which also uses really high heat, but that's usually smaller, thinner pieces of meat that will cook more quickly over that really hot fire. So the long and short is that barbecue as an American cooking style has no obvious single ancestor. I think it is a mix of Native American smoking traditions in Virginia that were kind of melded with European grilling traditions and then later West African expertise in cooking meat. So I think all of those things come together the Cree barbecue in Virginia. It's kind of a fuzzy origin story and not so great for most of the people in it.

33:07So one thing I wasn't really aware of previously is the extent that Indigenous people were enslaved by whites first before they transitioned to African slavery. So the first barbecue cooks were Native Americans, of course, as free people, because they were doing their own thing that was called barbecue. And then when Europeans started redefining what barbecue was, they actually started having enslaved indigenous people making this food. But indigenous slavery didn't work for a number of reasons. And so they transitioned to African slavery. And here's the thing. Old school barbecue is hard work.

33:38Somebody's got to chop all the wood. Somebody's got to start burning it down and tending the fire. Somebody's got to get those animals, butcher them and process them and prepare them for the cooking. And then somebody has to do that cooking where they're flipping whole animal carcasses over a live fire and dousing with sauce. And so the racial etiquette of much of our nation's history is that if there's hard work to be done, make black people do it and don't compensate them. Despite, well, really because of all the hard work involved, African-Americans became experts at barbecue. Adrian says their contribution in particular to this uniquely American cooking style was their skilled use of spices.

34:14And thus, barbecue was transformed from a native word for a platform for smoking meat to preserve of it to today's expansive and slippery term. Barbecue means a cooking method, the dish itself, and the social event around it. And barbecues certainly became the center of social life in the pre-Civil War South. Yeah, so barbecues start out as rowdy parties, really, with white people shooting guns, drinking liquor and gambling. And then in the late 1700s, as we coalesce as a nation, barbecue became part of just kind of civic pride. And I argue that barbecue was well suited for these occasion because barbecue was scalable.

34:53Really, it just depended on how much land you had, how many animals you had and how much labor you had. You could cook a ton of a barbecue. And we get reports that, you know, there were barbecues where 30 ,000 people show up or 50 ,000 people. Now, satellite technology was not really developed then. So I don't know if these crowd sizes are accurate. it. But what we do know is that there were a lot of people showing up for barbecue. And for a long time, too. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, people held barbecues for social gatherings, for political campaign events, for Independence Day parties.

35:25Barbecues were it. White people loved attending barbecues and eating barbecue. But the production of all things barbecue was an entirely African-American area of expertise. Barbecue for a long time was a black experience in this sense. African-Americans were primarily responsible for the preparation of the barbecue, for the serving of the barbecue. And then after the barbecue was finished, they were the entertainers. And so, you know, you have all of these accounts of whites just watching barbecue being made, which, you know, it's a spectacle. I could see why people would be interested in watching that.

35:59And then blacks serving them. And then there would be another set of African Americans to entertain. So they would sing spirituals. They would do dances, sometimes games and something called a cakewalk. So they would do all of these things and it was white entertainment. Barbecue didn't just stay in Virginia where it was invented either. It moved around the country in two ways. Plantation agriculture expanded throughout the South and further westward and the barbecue experience came along. So the earliest reports that we have of Tennessee barbecue, Kentucky barbecue and Texas barbecue are these Virginians who brought their enslaved people and they're trying to transplant their culture.

36:37And then after the Civil War, African-Americans were free to move to cities or leave the South entirely, and many did. And of course, they needed to earn a living. So barbecue was one of the three ways that food entrepreneurs made a lot of money. When people left the South, or even in the South, when they started restaurants, usually they featured special occasion food. It was the stuff that you normally couldn't get or make yourself, and you relied on some expertise. And so typically it was fried chicken, fried fish and barbecue. Those are like the three main sellers for these entrepreneurs. And so what you find is that during the Great Migration, a period that lasted seven decades, you're finding African-Americans going to a new place.

37:19And maybe they were brought there to do a special event barbecue and they stay. But we find African-Americans showing up in places and starting businesses. And as African-Americans moved around the U.S. and moved into cities, the meaning of barbecue started to shift. In urban spaces, it's harder to, you know, clear out a bunch of land and roast a bunch of pigs or animals. And so you get the development of artificial pits, concrete, cinder block pits. You also have mobile pits. Barbecue also stopped relying on wood. The first patent for charcoal briquettes was issued in 1897. Although they didn't become popular until Henry Ford, yes, the car manufacturer, he teamed up with his cousin, realtor Edward Kingsford, to create their own version in the 1920s.

38:03Barbecue could now happen anywhere. Another aspect of this transformation was that space was kind of limited indoors. It'd be hard to barbecue an entire pig. And so they started focusing on individual cuts of meat. And we also have some influences from immigrants from other parts of the world who start to barbecue. So, for instance, North Carolina, the Lexington or Piedmont style is known for cooking pork shoulders. There's a lot of evidence that that doesn't really develop until we get Central European immigrants bringing their kind of pork shoulder traditions to the American South. Oh, yeah.

38:34Barbecue styles. That's a whole thing. Barbecue people get very obsessed about all the different barbecue styles. Eastern North Carolina would be more whole hog cooking with the red pepper and vinegar sauce. Lexington or Piedmont style is more pork shoulders with a little ketchup added to the vinegar sauce. Then you've got South Carolina. That's also a whole hog cooking area. Then you've got a North Florida style, which is pork spare ribs with a kind of a mustard-based sauce. And then there's an amorphous kind of deep South barbecue, which is, I would say, pork shoulder, just kind of chopped pork, chicken with a thin kind of slightly sweet sauce.

39:02West Tennessee is more whole hogs. That seems like a direct transplant from Virginia. Kentucky barbecue has become known for lamb. And with a Worcestershire-based sauce, St. Louis is known for ribs and also snoots, which are the tips of pig snouts. And then going back down to Kansas City, you've got beef. And that's where burnt ends were invented. Sorry for speeding that up, but that isn't even all the different kinds of barbecue Adrian describes. We left out the barbecue spaghetti. You can thank us later. And all the while, barbecue remained completely central to African-American life. So barbecue is key to the African-American community.

39:30It's one of those types of food that just shows up everywhere. And so it's definitely part of our social life, church life, family reunions, especially during the summer. Adrian may not have been able to find an African origin for barbecue, but he's pretty conclusively made the case for it being a food that belongs to the African-American community. So then, how did barbecue get so white? That's coming up after the break. Hey, it's Christy from Lululemon. I'm in the office with What's New, and the Breezley collection has definitely caught my eye. If you're like me and want to add some lighter, airy pieces to your wardrobe, this is a great place to start.

40:07There's a Breezely tank, shorts, and pants, all in our Swift fabric, which is super lightweight and stretchy. They're flowy staples you can mix and match for a really easy, elevated vibe, whether it's to and from the studio or just for every day. The Breezely collection is in store now, or you can shop online at lululemon.com. The whitewashing of barbecue became apparent to Adrian after watching Paula Deen's Southern Barbecue, which was a Food Network special in 2004. Now, whether you like your barbecue basted or brown, sizzled or seared, we're going to hit the road for the mother of all barbecue events in Memphis, Tennessee, home of Elvis and where everyone agrees.

40:51Pork is king. So I watched this show and it was an hour long show. And when the credits were rolling, not one black person was interviewed. And I just thought, OK, well, maybe I got it twisted. Maybe it was Paula Deen's Scandinavian barbecue. But where's the beef, you're asking? Don't you worry. We're off to the Lone Star State where bigger is better and where barbecue means brisket. So then I started looking around and I just noticed in magazines, TV shows, it was the same thing. This is basically when the Food Network was in full swing and food TV in general was everywhere. We talked about this recently on our TV dinners episode.

41:26And so Adrian watched a lot of food TV and everything he saw about barbecue, it was all white. Hey everybody, I'm Bobby Flay. Welcome to Barbecue Addiction. Today, we're cooking some southern food on the barbecue. You know them as ribs. Proud favorite. We're going to cook some pork ribs on the grill. We're going to smoke them. We're going to make a root beer barbecue sauce. This season on Barbecue Pitmasters. For the next six weeks, the top 20 barbecue pitmasters in the country face off on the road to a$100 ,000 prize and the Kingsford Charcoal Cup. And it wasn't just TV that was taking African Americans out of barbecue.

41:59Adrian found an article called Who's Who in Barbecue from Bon Appetit back in 2003. They profiled, I want to say, like 20 people, and they made it look like this backyard barbecue scene. And they're all playing croquet and badminton and all this kind of stuff. There's not one African-American featured in that whole thing. White people had been increasingly interested in doing some barbecuing themselves over the course of the last century, not just watching black people barbecue. But then in the past few decades, they eclipsed black people entirely. How did African-Americans disappear from the barbecue universe, the one they'd basically created?

42:34Unfortunately, when it comes to media in this country, most of the people who decide what stories get told are white. And if they don't have diversity as a value, they just talk to their other white friends about who they should spotlight. And so at the very time that barbecue was becoming of interest and people were looking for curators, they were just presented with white people, mainly white dudes, over and over and over again. Adrian says those white guys had all learned how to barbecue from African-Americans. Not everybody admitted it. But if you if you read their bios and pay very close attention to how they say they got in the barbecue game, you'll find out that they learned from an African-American because African-Americans dominated barbecue cooking for a couple centuries.

43:18So it's hard for somebody to say that they were not influenced by a black barbecue at some point. There were, of course, plenty of black-owned barbecue joints around the country, but they didn't have the same spiffy look to them that a lot of white reviewers expected from a restaurant. Black-run barbecue joints are going to look run down, and that speaks to the chronic lack of access to capital that black entrepreneurs face. So usually they're getting a building that's worn down, and they don't have enough money to fix it up or do all the other things that you might see in other barbecue places.

43:45Plus, those black-owned restaurants were likely going to be in neighborhoods that had been systematically underinvested in thanks to redlining and more racist loan making and government policies. And those weren't the neighborhoods that local newspaper restaurant reviewers tended to head to to find a place to review. You know, a lot of people in our community looked, back then at least, looked to the local dining reporter or the restaurant reviewer for guidance on where to go. And so even if a place was good, there was often coded language saying, oh, you might get killed if you go to this place because it's in a place where it's in a part of town where there are a lot of black people.

44:20And so, you know, there are co-words like, oh, it's a sketchy neighborhood or it's an up and coming neighborhood or, you know, things like that. But this is even if a black place got to the point where it was profiled by restaurant reviewers. A lot of times they just didn't pay attention to them. The situation is starting to change today. Eaters are searching out a wider variety and diversity of restaurants. Black chefs are getting more attention, like Mary and Deborah Jones, who were featured on Queer Eye. My name is Deborah Jones, and they call me Little. And my name is Mary Jones, and they call me Shorty.

44:53Our passion is to barbecue. It's like an art. Okay, we got a combo play, burn-ins and beef with a baked bean. I don't know who would get out there and cook that barbecue like we do. So we have a few people who are making their way. You know, Rodney Scott got the James Beard Award for Best Chef a couple years ago. May of 2018, we won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Southeast. When I got to the stage and I looked back and I thought about all of the chainsaw cutting and the smoking hogs all night and learning different styles and techniques from different areas and regions, all of this came full circle.

45:32And that was the night that I said, it's time for us to go to work and spread the love. I would say like Rodney Scott is definitely charting that path. He's got multiple restaurants now. And, you know, truth be told, he's gotten backing from some white entrepreneurs. That helps. I think the same is going to be true for Ed Mitchell. So the question is, will they inspire others, African-Americans to do this? And I think they will. Adrian is actually a part of this movement. He's trained as a barbecue judge to increase representation, and he's joined the board of the Barbecue Hall of Fame, whose inductees were very pale indeed until quite recently.

46:12Black-owned barbecue is finally on the rise again. Adrienne says it's not getting as much attention as it should, but at least it's a positive trend. And smoke in general is in the spotlight again. Like Harold said, ever since humans learned how to tame fire, smoke became our constant companion until we began to figure out other ways to preserve our food. First canning, and then the all-important, most interesting subject in the world, refrigeration. Smoke kind of fell out of favor, but it is hot once again. Everyone's writing articles about smoky flavors. People are smoking all kinds of foods at home.

46:44The big green egg is the new Weber grill. The people at the Nordic Food Lab put out a guide to smoking all kinds of trendy foraged ingredients. And the author of a book on smoking called Project Smoke says smoke is the new salt. I just got an email advertising smoked rhubarb preserves, smoked salt, smoked maple bourbon, smoked salmon bacon, and smoked lemon cocktail syrup. It is officially a trend once Cynthia gets an email. I'll be honest, alongside smoked fish, smoked booze is, in fact, where it's really at for me. Mezcal is having a moment right now. That's a traditional smoked agave spirit.

47:20But mixologists are taking the smoke trend to an entirely new level. And we know someone who's a cocktail expert. It's Tom Gilliford. You might remember him either from the Great British Bake Off or perhaps from the Great Gastropod Pudding Off. And he quite generously agreed to help us out from afar. Hello, Gastropod. We're going to make you a really smoky drink today. We're going to call it the All Smoky. It's going to be a twist on a classic old-fashioned that incorporates five different types of smokes. We asked for some smoke and we got five different kinds. But that is Tom for you. As you may remember from Bake Off, he loves a good kitchen gadget, so he got out his home smoker gun.

47:58We're going to start by infusing some caster sugar with cherry wood smoke. We're going to use a little home smoker gun to do that, and just pump some smoke from cherry wood wood chips into a sealed container full of caster sugar. Just give that a little shake, and it's going to infuse it with that beautiful scented cherry wood flavour.

48:20that. I'm going to admit, I don't even know what a smoker gun is, but I think it sounds amazing. I might need one. Next up, the whiskey. Our listener, Keith, the one who asked us to make an episode about smoke, he wrote to us because he was enjoying a glass of Lagavulin, which has a lovely smoky taste from the malt, which is dried over burning peat. The malt, or fermented barley, it's dried for all whiskeys, but the drying process for most other kinds uses a fuel that isn't as smoky as peat gets. Peaty whiskeys are smokier tasting whiskeys. And the smoke from peat has a particular flavor that smoky whiskey people love.

48:53Keith was drinking Lagavulin, which is especially peaty and briny. Tom used a different whiskey from the same part of Scotland. Same basic idea. So we're going to use a great one, the Portiskeg eight-year-old today. We're going to use 50 milliliters or two ounces if you're an American.

49:12Tom actually made his own bitters for the drink from chipotles and lapsang souchang tea, both of which are super smoky. Chipotles are smoked jalapenos, and lapsang souchang is a tea that's smoke-dried over pinewood. Once you've got your bitters in there, give it another little stir.

49:32Just to mix them in. And then it's time to add your ice. So if you've been keeping count, that's four kinds of smoke, but Tom promised us five. The last one is a bit of a dramatic flourish. So to do this, what you need to do is grab yourself a little bit of tinfoil or aluminum foil.

49:54Place that over the top of the drink. And then take a piece of cinnamon and poke it through the top of the tinfoil so that it's half in and half out. then take your aluminum foil off and you're going to set fire to the bit that's dangling into the drink once you've got a little layer of cinnamon smoke the drink is ready to go so just before you serve it either to yourself or someone else you're going to pop off that aluminum foil lid and they'll just have a waft of beautiful scented cinnamon smoke to start them off on this smoky drink journey. It kills me that we couldn't watch, smell, and taste this all ourselves.

50:41It was all done in London, but Tom did at least let us know how it turned out. We've got the cinnamon smoke, we've got that beautiful pine resin smoke from the Lapsang Sushong tea, and then sitting behind that, that really earthy, peaty smoke. And when we give it a taste,

51:02that's where we really get that beautiful cherry wood smoke that fresher smoke from the sugar and what we get is layer after layer after layer of different smokes by gastropod and as i take a drink microbes tom guilliford made us recipe cards for his old smoky cocktail because he is literally the best and we've got them on our website for you all Make it and share the pictures. Thank you, Tom, and I hope to try it in person one day. Also, thanks, of course, to Harold McGee, Matt Bauman, and Adrian Miller. We've got links to their books and companies on our website, gastropod.com. Plus, a huge thanks to former Gastropod producer Sonia Swanson, whose brilliant idea most of the things in this episode were.

51:43We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.