Jim Harrison - Texas BBQ: Photographs by Wyatt McSpadden

Mesquite fire (P.1) : COOPER'S OLD TIME PIT BAR-B-QUE : Llano

Red-hot coals (P.2) : COOPER'S OLD TIME PIT BAR-B-QUE : Llano

German steel (P.4) : KREUZ MARKET : Lockhart

TEXAS BBQ

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

WYATT McSPADDEN

FOREWORD BY

JIM HARRISON

ESSAY BY

JOHN MORTHLAND

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

NUMBER TWENTY-THREE

JACK AND DORIS SMOTHERS SERIES IN TEXAS HISTORY, LIFE, AND CULTURE

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 2009 by Wyatt McSpadden Foreword by Jim Harrison 2009 by Jim Harrison Essay by John Morthland 2009 by John Morthland All rights reserved

Printed in China

First edition, 2009

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McSpadden, Wyatt.

Texas BBQ / photographs by Wyatt McSpadden ; foreword by Jim Harrison ; essay by John Morthland. 1st ed.

p. cm. (Jack and Doris Smothers series in Texas history, life, and culture ; no. 23) ISBN 978-0-292-71858-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-292-78629-5 (e-book) 1. Barbecue cookeryTexasPictorial works.

2. Restaurants-Texas-Pictorial works. I. Morthland, John. II. Title.

TX840.B3M456 2009

641.5'78409764dc22

Book and jacket design by Nancy McMillen, Nancy McMillen Design, Austin, Texas

For Nancy, the soul of this project and the heart of our family.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my parents: George, who taught me to go to work, and Betty, who nourished me and my siblings, Holly, Laurie, and Drew, with great food and music. To Trevor, for traveling with me on my earliest barbecue assignments. To Stuart, for falling in love with the Chop just like his old man did, and for helping me out on the final round. To Nora, for her wry sense of humor and for sharing her mom with me. To John Morthland and Charles Lohrmann, with whom I share a long and abiding love of both the Kreuz Chop and the drive to Lockhart. To Rick and Keith Schmidt and Roy Perez for making each Chop the best one ever. To Cilla McMillen for her encouragement and keen sense of language. To Annie Dingus for turning my raw text into real writing, and for her enthusiasm and efforts on behalf of this project. To fellow photographers O. Rufus Lovett and Michael O'Brien, whom I admire as artists and gentlemen. To Texas Monthly magazine and all the art directors who assigned the projects that started me down this path, especially the members of the quintessential art team: DJ Stout, Kathy Marcus, Hope Rodriguez, and Nancy McMillen. To Keith Patricio at API and Travis Smith at Holland Photo, for technical assistance. To Steve Sammons and Calumet Photographic for their special brand of support. To Robb Walsh for his essential books and articles on the subject of authentic Texas barbecue. To Dave Hamrick for his interest and guidance, and to the whole team at UT Press for their support. To Will Phillips, Robert Baumgardner, Matt Lankes, and Jeff Stockton for all the meals and miles we've shared. To Eddy Davis, whose enthusiasm for the Chop is genuine. To all my Clay-Kizer friends. To Erv and Linda Sandlin for all the years. To Stanley Marsh 3, who provided subjects, film, and chemistry. To Jim and Linda Harrison and Joyce Bahle for their generosity and their significant contribution to this book. To every client who ever hired me to do this thing that I love to do. And to all the folks at all the places I've visited and photographed: Thank you.

FOREWORD

by Jim Harrison

It is odd to consider that within a millisecond everything we see becomes memory. It wasn't until my twenties that it occurred to me that my single eye was an aperture, the other was lost to a childhood accident, and by blinking this aperture I could embed certain images forever in my neurons and recapture the images when I so chose, and thus have an immense photo gallery in my head. These mental photos can vary from a lioness in Kenya reaching down a warthog's hole and uprooting the beast for lunch, to a carp wallowing in the shallows of the Neva River outside of St. Petersburg, to a girl changing into her bathing suit in the backseat of a Mercedes limousine on a hot afternoon in Rio de Janeiro.

The trouble is my mental photos fail aesthetically. I mean the eye can be a monster camera through which we frame our visual life but this is a private rather than an artistic affair. The camera, like the typewriter, is a matter of technology and we have produced billions of photos and billions of pages but by common consent to all except dullards it all depends on who is manning the typewriter or camera. I don't really want to look at Aunt Dottie's ten rolls of snapshots from Honolulu.

When I first looked at Wyatt McSpadden's photos I fancied that someone had given the soul of Edward Hopper a camera and sent him off to Texas. I won't push this comparison any further than the beauty and starkness of the images because I don't recall Hopper ever painting something you could eat and the contents of McSpadden's book made me quite wild with hunger beyond consideration of his obvious genius as a photographer.

Let me back up a bit. Years ago in the eighties I was in Nebraska researching a novel to be called Dalva. I read a great deal on the history of the Sandhills and drove thousands of miles but it wasn't until I visited the vast photo collection at the Nebraska Historical Society that I came close to truly understanding the past. The curator, John Carter, guided me through the years, county by county, through thousands of photos which though mostly harmlessly inept added immeasurably to the lives of the characters I had imagined. Occasionally a photo would transcend its snapshot limitations: an elegantly dressed old man standing before his mansion in Omaha with several coyotes on leashes, two Indians dancing in the foreground while men looking at cows ignore them, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan jumping over a high hurdle while wearing the very proper twenty pounds of clothing.

To a certain extent we become what we see. It is a large part of the contents of our lives. A photograph when it reaches the condition of art becomes as permanent as a fine painting. Our lives are properly a search for the genuine and we unfathomably enrich ourselves by nearly suffocating ourselves in fine music, art, literature and photography. After a dozen trips to Mexico over the years my perception of Mexico was added to immeasurably by reading