From the Huffington Post
It is late Wednesday morning and Candy Sue Weaver is on the road again,
barreling through Arkansas. Her iPod is pumping Henry Gross, Eagles,
and Delbert McClinton through her radio and she is just as pumped. She
can taste victory up the road. Weaver is a sportswoman, and she is on a
700 mile drive in her pickup, trailer in tow, towards a baseball
diamond wedged between a cornfield and a soybean field in northwest
Illinois. But Weaver is not a baseball player. She is competition
barbecue cook.
Competitive barbecue may be the fastest growing sport in the nation
with more than 500 cookoffs across the country. Many of the cooks at
each event are locals, but a growing number are, like Weaver, part of a
band of roving gypsies who drive for days and get fired up to go for
gold and glory. Some hit the highway every weekend from May through
October.
In July, that baseball field in tiny Shannon, IL, population 900,
becomes the "Barbecue Field of Dreams" because Shannon is the home of
the Illinois State BBQ Championship
(ISBC) and the destination for a fleet of RVs and trailers loaded with
meat and steel and some of the best barbecue cooks in the world. These
are the real Iron Chefs towing torpedo shaped smokers the size of
sportscars on their way to a throwdown Bobby Flay wants no part of.
My mother's bedside table was laden with books about food. On any
given night it might be Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French
Cooking. Or Michael Field’s Cooking School. Or the massive two-volume
set of The Gourmet Cookbook.
I’ve had some interesting influences in my life. Two of them were goats. Both were in baseball, but in very different ways.
It is Sunday late morning, the North wind is howling outside and the
rain has changed to half inch hail but the farmhouse walls are more than
two feet thick and we are very cozy. We hear nothing, just the sounds
of the wood fire crackling, a knife on the cutting board and two friends
engaged in a lively conversation catching up on many things since our
last visit. We are sitting at a 8 foot long chestnut kitchen table
boning out the leg of a wild boar, removing sinew, fat glands and
chipped bones from the bullet wound. Alain has told all his neighbors of
our visit and one has shot a wild boar for the occasion and foraged for
black truffles. It was long decided before the boar was cold that we
would make a daube just like his mother made for him in his child hood
home in Avignon and it will marinate today and simmer over a wood fire
all afternoon tomorrow. Tonight we are having raclette with charcuterie
for dinner that they brought home from their skiing vacation in the
Alps. Not a bad way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon!
You probably don’t remember me, but as you read this it may all come back to you after the leagues of students that you have mentored pass by in a blur. You changed my life and I’m sure there is a long line behind me. The first time that I came to your cooking school in Newton Center, Massachusetts with Heidi Wortzel to introduce me, I was where I had always dreamed of being.