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By Root 1203 0

of dinners. Raymond’s thoughts were as follows: The best barbecue he had ever eaten was in Terre Haute, Indiana, eight hours and a stiff cab fare away, both of which I considered for fifteen seconds longer than I should have. His Memphis favorite is Jim Neely’s Interstate on South Third, at the opposite edge of town from my hotel, closely followed by the world-famous trio of Leonard’s, Corky’s, and Charlie Vergos’s Rendezvous. In the black neighborhoods of south Memphis, Raymond directed me to the tender and juicy ribs at Hawkins Grill, in the 1200 block of McLemore, and Al’s Tasty Burger Inn, at McLemore and College. Raymond recommended that if I managed to eat my way through all of these, I try the Raines Haven Rib House on East Range Road, the Commissary in Germantown, and Brown’s Barbecue, just down from Neely’s Interstate on South Third.

Raymond’s palate turned out to be as discriminating as any, at least judging from the two handfuls of barbecue restaurants I was able to try. In both sandwich and rib, Neely’s Interstate Bar-B-Que Restaurant serves the best commercial product I had ever tasted. (Notice that real barbecue lovers often refer to their favorite food as “product.”) And by the time I had left Memphis four days and four hundred ribs later, I had added several of his other picks to my permanent list of barbecue shrines. In the meantime, I collected another ten places to visit when the opportunity arises—among them Cozy Corner, Payne’s, Gridley’s, and the Bar-B-Q Shop Restaurant, all in Memphis—plus others from human settlements too distant for this visit: Bozo’s in Mason and Bar-ba-rosa’s in Millington (both Tennessee), L. C. Murry’s BBQ in De Valls Bluff and Freddie’s B-B-Q in Stuttgart (both Arkansas), the universally revered Dreamland Bar-B-Q Drive Inn of Jerusalem Heights, just outside Tuscaloosa in Alabama, and Freddie’s, a little beer joint sixty-five miles from Little Rock. This last suggestion emerged from an exhaustive conversation with Jerry (J-R) Roach, who runs the School of Southern Barbecue and whose J-R Enterprises makes championship barbecue cookers. “The best sandwich I’ve ever put in my mouth,” he had confided. Now that I have returned from Memphis, I leave a light suitcase packed and ready, just in case the chance to fly to Stuttgart or Jerusalem Heights unexpectedly presents itself.

My official duties commenced early on Thursday morning, when I and twenty-five others reported to the crumbling old New Daisy Theater on Beale Street for a grueling day of instruction in judging barbecue according to Memphis rules. The Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest has three main divisions—Ribs, Shoulder, and Whole Hog. When I was asked to serve as a judge, I had signed up for Ribs, because I felt thoroughly unqualified to judge the other two. Ribs, I figured, was easy. Volunteering for Whole Hog would have been the height of irresponsibility.

Before flying down to Memphis, I knew four things about real southern barbecue: (1) the origin of the word, (2) the dramatic difference between grilling meat and cooking barbecue, (3) the happy chaos of barbecue styles around the South, and (4) how much I love to eat any style of real barbecue.

1. If you think the word “barbecue” comes from the French barbe à queue, “from beard to tail,” then you are one of those silly people whom The Oxford English Dictionary accuses of an “absurd conjecture.” Coming from the OED, these are fighting words. “Barbecue” derives from the Spanish barbacoa or the French babracot, both adaptations from the Taino and Arawak languages of Haiti and Guiana. The Indian words referred to a framework of sticks set upon posts either for sleeping or for supporting meat above a fire. But though the word may have been invented by the Indians of the Caribbean, the technique was probably not: Waverly Root considers it “a method of cooking so natural under primitive circumstances that it would practically invent itself everywhere, especially in societies accustomed to living outdoors most of the time.”

2. Real barbecue has