While writing his first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time (The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Miller considered including a chapter on barbecue, since it’s common for soul food restaurants to offer barbecue options, and so many Black-owned barbecue spots have soul food sides on the menu. Photo by Paul Miller/University of North Carolina Press Black Smoke is James Beard Award-winning author, attorney and certified barbecue judge Adrian Miller’s third book. Compelled to dig deeper, Miller became a certified barbecue judge with the Kansas City Barbeque Society in 2004: “Best conversation starter I’ve ever had,” he says and this is coming from someone who once worked in the White House as a special assistant to U.S. in 2002 that he saw it as having meaning in the broader context. It wasn’t until he attended a “life-changing” Southern Foodways Alliance barbecue excursion in Austin, Tex. Growing up in Denver, Colo., Miller only ate barbecue at home or at church events. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.This beautifully illustrated chronicle also features 22 barbecue recipes collected just for this book. Miller celebrates and restores the faces and stories of the men and women who have influenced this American cuisine. Though often pushed to the margins, African Americans have enriched a barbecue culture that has come to be embraced by all. It’s a smoke-filled story of Black perseverance, culinary innovation, and entrepreneurship. In Black Smoke, Miller chronicles how Black barbecuers, pitmasters, and restauranteurs helped develop this cornerstone of American foodways and how they are coming into their own today. But why is it, asks Adrian Miller - admitted ‘cuehead and longtime certified barbecue judge - that in today’s barbecue culture African Americans don’t get much love?

And people aren’t just eating it they’re also reading books and articles and watching TV shows about it. Prepared in one regional style or another, in the South and beyond, barbecue is one of the nation’s most distinctive culinary arts. WINNER–2022 Colorado Book Award for History!įINALIST–International Association of Culinary Professionals Book Award in Literary and Historical Food Writing.Ī Garden and Gun Magazine Best Book of 2021.Īcross America, the pure love and popularity of barbecue cookery has gone through the roof. WINNER–2022 James Beard Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship!

Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecuewill be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2021.

Black smoke adrian miller