Steven Raichlen scans the menu, takes a breath and places our order: "Rib tips, we oughta have some of those. We'll have some baby backs, we'll have some short ends. And some deep frieds, because why not? We need some brisket, we need some smoked duck, and we need some barbecued beans, and collards—a big one of those."
We're at RUB (short for Righteous Urban Barbecue) on West 23rd Street in New York City to talk about Raichlen's most recent grilling guide, Raichlen on Ribs, Ribs, Outrageous Ribs (Workman, on-sale May 24). Before the feast begins, Raichlen, who's written 25 books—the last six on different aspects of barbecue—explains why he's now writing about ribs. Ribs have become "iconic" and "universal," but, he says, they are "deeply misunderstood." The food arrives and, hoping to understand, we dig in. "Let's find our inner caveman," says the author, picking up a rib with his hands and tearing into the succulent meat.
Raichlen started on the path to barbecue in 1975, when he graduated from Oregon's Reed College and won a one-year Watson Fellowship for independent study and travel. He went to Europe for 18 months, where he studied medieval French cooking; pored over manuscripts; visited wineries, cheese making plants and monastery kitchens; and trained at Paris's La Varenne cooking school. Twenty years later, when publisher Peter Workman gave Raichlen the green light to embark on a three-year, 25-country tour to research The Barbecue Bible (published in 1998), Raichlen joked, "This is my midlife Watson."
Even before Raichlen set off on the barbecue trail, he was a busy guy. The Maryland-raised writer started writing cookbooks in the 1980s and hasn't stopped since. Covering restaurants for Boston Magazine from 1980 to 1990, he chronicled the rise of American nouvelle cuisine (which stressed lightness and freshness). He ran a cooking school in New Hampshire in the early '80s, which resulted in his first book, A Taste of the Mountains Cooking School Cookbook (Poseidon Press, 1986). Moving to Miami to be with his new wife in 1990, he had a front-row seat for the birth of New Floridian cuisine and, observing it all, wrote his first Workman book, Miami Spice (1993).
Publishing that book "was unbelievably important for my career as a food writer," Raichlen recalls, because it was the beginning of his enormously successful partnership with Workman. Raichlen had previously published other cookbooks with Rodale and Viking, but admires Workman's publishing model; it agrees with his approach to writing. "They look for books that are 'category killers'.... Then they package them in a way that's really engaging to look at. It's very much the way my mind works. I'm a linear thinker, but also somewhat of a buckshot thinker. The layout of a Workman book lets you do that."
Raichlen came up with the concept for Barbecue Biblein 1994. "The idea was that nobody had ever followed the world's barbecue trail, to see what barbecue said about the culture." Workman bought the book, and Raichlen set off on his three-year odyssey. Traveling to such disparate places as Tennessee, Argentina and Vietnam, he gleaned tips on equipment, ingredients, marinades and rubs. With the charts, sidebars and inviting look that are hallmarks of Workman books, Barbecue Bibleis a trove of barbecuing information. Itsold 800,000 copies, but perhaps even more impressive, launched what would become a cottage industry.
Raichlen published a succession of bestselling grilling books with Workman: after Barbecue Biblecame Barbecue Bible Sauces, Rubs and Marinades (2000); followed by the IACP Award—winning How to Grill (2001), which sold one million copies; Beer-Can Chicken(2002); the 800-page whopper BBQ USA (2003); and Raichlen's Indoor! Grilling (2004). Raichlen has more than 3.5 million copies of his barbecuing books in print.
Finding himself firmly—and happily—entrenched in the barbecuing niche, Raichlen began exploring barbecue-related roads outside book publishing. First came a cooking school, Barbecue University, a three-day program that began in 2000 at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and continues to sell out (Raichlen teaches four sessions a year; the cost per person is about $2,500). He then created a TV show based on the school, Barbecue University with Steven Raichlen, which debuted on Public Television in 2003 and airs on more than 200 stations nationwide. The next logical step was a line of products called "Best of Barbecue"; it includes barbecue sauces and rubs as well as utensils like skewers and a clip-on grill headlight. The products are sold at retailers like Bed, Bath & Beyond, in gourmet shops and online. Future plans include a Steven Raichlen grill and even a Steven Raichlen restaurant chain. Raichlen's not shy when it comes to talking about financial possibilities. "I started thinking about the writing as a business," he says, "not only as a sort of intellectual pursuit, but about what other business opportunities it could lead to."
But books are where it all started, and where Raichlen's heart lies. His cookbooks, Ribs included, are more than just collections of recipes. "They're really a cultural exploration of a particular aspect of cooking," Raichlen says An anecdote from Ribs explains how, in the 16th and 17th centuries, a band of pirates took refuge on the uninhabited coasts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where local Indians taught them a technique called boucan—"seasoning and preserving meats with fiery chiles and spices and smoke-roasting them over smoldering fruitwoods." These "first European pit masters in the New World" eventually became known as "buccaneers."
Raichlen, who splits his time between Miami and Martha's Vineyard, says he's not yet finished writing books on barbecuing (though he won't divulge the subject of his next book). But for all his ideas about where the world of grilling can take him, there may be limits. When I ask him about toasting marshmallows, the man determined to find his "inner caveman" has a surprisingly short answer: "I set 'em on fire."
