San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Getting it right
Putting Blacks back in center of BBQ culture
Adrian Miller begins the introduction of his new book, “Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue” (University of North Carolina Press, April 2021), with the admission that he once canceled a blind date because he smelled like the barbecue he had for lunch. The romance lasted only a few dates after Miller washed off the smoke, but his love of barbecue is still going strong.
Miller was born in Denver and lives there now. His parents, from Arkansas and Tennessee, made barbecue on holidays, and Miller’s first full-time job was at a barbecue chain. A lawyer and public policy adviser by way of Georgetown and Stanford universities, Miller served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton and senior policy analyst for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter Jr.
Today, he is best known as the “soul food scholar” for his work as a culinary historian and food writer. His books “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time” (UNC Press, August 2013) and “The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas” (UNC Press, February 2017) highlight Black people’s impact on American food.
The seed for “Black Smoke” was planted when Miller watched a barbecue special on the Food Network with Paula Deen that didn’t include any Black pitmasters. And it wasn’t just Deen: Miller noticed it was a problem across food media. He set out to return African Americans to the center of the narrative.
His book starts by explaining how Native Americans invented open-fire cooking, eventually transferring those skills to enslaved African Americans. Through themed chapters, Miller shows the reader how intrinsic African Americans have always been to barbecue. They used it as a tool for resistance and liberation when enslaved, becoming specialists and eventually entrepreneurs, spreading it across the country.
Texas barbecuers are highlighted throughout the book but get their biggest nod in a chapter devoted to church culture, where Miller says he found more pastor-run barbecue joints in the state than anywhere else.
“I don’t know what the correlation
is between preaching the word of God and smoking meat, but if there is a promised land, it’s Texas,” Miller said in an interview. The book tells the story of holy barbecue destinations such as Davis Grocery and Bar-B-Q in Taylor and New Zion Missionary Baptist Church’s
BBQ in Huntsville, which closed in 2019 after 40 years.
During a Zoom video chat, he said he wants people to expand their definition of Texas barbecue beyond Central Texas, and discussed restoring Black people’s place in the smoked-meat conversation, how he researched his book, the nasty history of barbecue he wants readers to know and his favorite sides.
This interview was edited and condensed.
Q: At what point did you decide “Black Smoke” was a book you were going to write?
A: When I started writing a book on soul food 20 years ago, I always felt that I should start getting to know more about barbecue because so many soul-food restaurants have barbecue options and so many Black-owned barbecue joints
have soul-food sides. So I thought there’s probably a synergy there, I probably have to write a chapter on barbecue. The more I looked at barbecue, I thought: It’s really its own thing.
Q: The focus of the book is African American barbecue, but it also feels like the history of barbecue, period.
A: By the time you get to the mid-1700s, barbecue history was African American barbecue history because African Americans were the ones primarily doing it. Even though I argue that African Americans are not the originators of barbecue, I certainly believe they were the innovators and the standard bearers. Barbecue spread across the country because of African Americans. Either they were recruited to do barbecue in places, or they came to a community and kick-started its barbecue scene. I argue that the reason for that is that barbecue is very labor-intensive, and it was scalable. The racial dynamics at the time was if you wanted somebody to do a lot of work and you didn’t want to pay them, you make enslaved African
Americans do it. Later, if you wanted somebody to do a lot of work but you didn’t want to pay them much, you had African Americans do it.
Q: You devote a chapter to the lack of Black barbecue representation in food media. Do you see your book as setting the record straight?
A: For at least 150 years, not only were African Americans given credit, you couldn’t have legit barbecue unless an African American was involved. And even a lot of the white men who were giants in the field would admit that an African American taught them how to do it. And a lot of prominent white people in barbecue had all-Black staff, the people who were actually doing the cooking and the labor. It’s just weird that we’re at a point now where African Americans don’t even get mentioned.
“Black Smoke” is really two things: It’s a celebration of African American barbecue culture, and it’s also a restoration of African Americans to the barbecue narrative. It’s a thump on the head that says, look, if you’re gonna talk about barbecue in the United States, you’ve
gotta include Black people.
Q: In the book, there’s a theme of resistance and also a theme of barbecue used as a weapon by whites and colonizers. Can you talk about that?
A: I had heard about the slave insurrections, but I didn’t know that so many were planned over barbecue, so much so that you had whites saying: “Hey, y’all gonna need to stop letting African Americans barbecue unsupervised.” We found out about barbecuers who actually fed the Union Army as a way of resistance.
And then the nefarious side is that in order to punish the enslaved, slaveholders would use barbecue. They would whip somebody and pour vinegar and red pepper into the wounds, which would cause excruciating pain. The oral histories of the enslaved exposed the sadism that was part of slavery. Somebody was basically barbecued as a punishment. There was a lynching that involved fire; it was called a barbecue. I just wanted people to understand that barbecue has complexity, and because barbecue was associated with Blackness, there’s always gonna be a good and bad in this country.
Q: In Texas there’s this focus on beef and brisket, but you say that African American barbecue is more about the pork, spare ribs especially.
A: That’s more of a national perspective; in Texas, it may be that beef is a much bigger draw. But these days when people say Texas barbecue, they immediately gravitate to Central Texas and the smokehouses run by Central European immigrants, and they don’t give much love to South Texas, with the strong Latino traditions, and to East Texas, which is more African American-influenced. I’m trying to expand what people think of when they think of Texas barbecue. In my experience, beef is part of it, but it’s presented in a different way, so instead of these well-manicured slices of brisket you see in Central Texas, in the East it’s gonna be chopped up, it’s gonna be messier, it’s gonna be sauced. It’s a different aesthetic.
Q: What are your go-to barbecue sides?
A: Definitely potato salad. Coleslaw without raisins. And then depending on how I feel I might get some greens.