Peace, Love, & Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue [Paperback]

Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue

Mike Mills & Amy Mills Tunicliffe

A Book Report by Gerry Dawes (Appeared in Food Arts magazine.)

This is a book report, not a review. I wrote the June 2004 Food Arts Silver Spoon Award piece about Mike Mills, the Southern Illinois Barbecue Legend Mike Mills, who, with his Apple City Barbecue Team won the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest more times (three, four in ribs) than any team in history. Mills has long been a friend of mine and still is, despite the outright lies he told about me and a lot of other people to his daughter, Amy Mills Tunicliffe, who wrote her father's story's in the remarkable, but veracity-challenged Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue.

At least I am in good company. Bill Clinton, Calvin Trillin, Tom Viertel (producer of The Producers, Smokey Joe's Café, Driving Miss Daisy), the New York super-restaurateur Danny Meyer, Chef Michael Romano and star Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, along with most of the `cue superstars world are all in this book on down-home and championship circuit barbecue. In the foreword, Meyer, Mills's partner in New York's Blue Smoke Barbecue joint, wrote a pean to pig and to Mills. The exalted Vogue food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote the saucy introduction calling Mills "one of the greatest barbecue cooks of all time," once wrote an article claiming that Mills's Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas are his favorites, only after Nobu.

While this indispensable guide to American barbecue could have been just that, a guide, it is much more. It is a loving (the "Love" in the title is no tall tale or outright lie) look at the Who's Who of American Barbecue as seen through the eyes of this country's greatest barbecue hero, who, like some starry-eyed youngster (Mills is in his 60s), often refers to these barbecue legends, his peers, as "awesome."

Mills takes us on visits to all the great barbecue legends of the south (and a few in the north as well), eating their barbecue,"visiting" with them, letting them tell their stories, and then trying to pry cooking and recipe "secrets" out of them, which is no easy task since they will sometimes tell him the ingredients (usually minus the "secret"), but they often won't give him the recipe quantities. (Mills plays this game himself; he told Steingarten that he would give him the recipe for Mills's celebrated 17th St. Bar & Grill `Magic Dust' Dry Rub, but then he said, "I would have to kill you.")

Besides picking pork, Mills picks the brains of such American Barbecue superstars as Don McLemore and Chris Lilly at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q (Decatur, Alabama); Desiree Robinson at Cozy Corner (Memphis); Billy Bones Wall (Midland, Michigan); Vencil Mares, The Taylor Café (Taylor, Texas); Paul Kirk, The Baron of Barbecue (Kansas City, Missouri); Wayne Monk, Lexington Barbecue (Lexington, North Carolina); the legendary El Mitchell, Mitchell's Ribs, Chicken & BBQ (Wilson, North Carolina) and many others. The story about Rick Schmidt, the owner of Kreuz ("Krites," Lockhart, Texas), ceremoniously moving-along a road thronged with his loyal barbecue customers-the hot coals, which have never been allowed to got out, from the old family establishment to his new place after a family feud with his sister is alone worth the price of this paperback book.

There are "secret' barbecue recipes galore-Mama Faye's Home Style Potato Salad, 17th Street's Tangy Pit Beans, Big Bob Gibson's White Sauce, Wilber Shirley's Hush Puppies, Eades Family Banana Pudding and Strip and Go Naked Punch (don't ask!)-enough to open the world's greatest barbecue joint. However, if you did, several somebodies would have to kill you and, besides, you would be too disabled by the hernia you would get from lugging in the 100-pound sack of sugar it would take to make all these sauces, potato salad, salad dressings and iced tea, many of which call for a minimum of two cups of sugar, refined white sugar, by long-standing habit.

The last chapter is devoted to a good nuts-and-bolts barbecue tips and a terrific list of this country's greatest real barbecue joints, but he whole book is full of Mike Mills's indispensable barbecue (and life) wisdom, practical tips, recipes and, indeed, secrets like my Gerry's World's Finest Barbecue-Friendly Margaritas. It seems that one day down at Mike's 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Southern Illinois, he induced me to give him my Andalucian Sangria Recipes, then after we drank two pitchers of white and red sangria, he wormed the margarita recipe out of me. However, I didn't give him the "secret" twist that I put in them, otherwise I would have had to kill him.

But, on second thought, I couldn't kill him. He might have another great book like Peace, Love and Barbecue in him. And I certainly wouldn't want to deprive the world of that.

The book is awesome.

- The End -

I really enjoyed this book...I own a smoker and have used the Apple City Ribs recipe and the Chile recipe (non-healthy version) and both were tasty...my only question is whether the author listed the true ingredients for his "magic dust"...after all, his mother didn't want him to give away the family secret...hmmmm....

***UPDATE!! (6/11/06): Ok, on a discussion board someone said they actually got an answer to my question from the author...he DID give us the dust recipe his mother said to protect BUT his feeling is that it will be hard to duplicate his quality because of the unique QUALITIES of each dust ingredient he uses.

A great book for any barbecue (not grilling) fan!

Mike Mills, known to barbecue afficionados as The Legend, has fashioned a wonderful book about the world of barbecue. His often humorous tour of the barbecue world is also chock full of recipes that people would gladly have given their eye teeth for over the years. Some of the greatest names in traditional american cooking are represented; the book is a treasure trove of information and the stories Mills relates are the type one usually only gets to hear late at might after more than a few beers while the hog is slowly roasting away.

This book is an absolute delight; along with Smokestack Lightning one of the two best books ever written about barbecue.

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