New Arrival: The Slaw and the Slow Cooked

The mail just brought me my two contributor's copies of The Slaw and the Slow Cooked: Culture and Barbecue in the Mid-South, which just came out from the Vanderbilt University Press.  It's edited by Jim Veteto and Ted Maclin, who also wrote a couple of essays on sauce and the future of barbecue.

My own contribution was a historical summary of barbecue in the Mid-South region, which can roughly be defined by drawing a big circle with Memphis at its center: western Tennessee, north Mississippi, Arkansas.    There's a decided anthropological bent to many of the essays (Veteto and Maclin are both anthropologists), but there's plenty of other takes, too, like John T. Edge's profile of Jones Bar-B-Q Diner in Marianna, Arkansas, and an assessment of barbecue as slow food by Angela and Paul Knipple.

All told, it's the most comprehensive treatment of the region's barbecue I've seen yet. Plenty of meat, and a little sauce, too.