whom he chose as his barbecue guru for his always-packed Blue Smoke barbecue joint in New York City.<br><br> Steingarten, who has claimed in print that Mills 9s Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas are his favorites (second only to Nobu ), wrote the saucy introduction, calling Mills cone of the greatest barbecue cooks of all time. d While this indispensable guide to American barbecue could have been just that, it 9s much more. M ills takes us on visits to all the great barbecue legends of the South (and a few in the North as well), eating their barbecue, cvisiting d with them, letting them tell their stories, referring to them as cawesome d like some starry-eyed youngster (Mills is in his 60s), and then trying to pry cooking and recipe csecrets d out of them, which is no easy task. Sometimes they tell him the ingredients (usually minus the secret), but they often won 9t give him the recipe quantities.<br><br> (Mills plays this game himself; he told Steingarten that he would give him the recipe for Mills 9s celebrated 17 th Street Bar & Grill cMagic Dust d Dry Rub, but then he said, cI would have to kill you. d) 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, AL), Billy Bones Wall (Midland, MI), and Ed Mitchell at Mitchell 9s Ribs, Chicken & BBQ (Wilson, NC). The story about Rick Schmidt , the owner of Kreuz (pronounced Krites) Market in Lockhart, Texas, ceremoniously moving the hot coals, which have never been allowed to go out, from the old family establishment to his new place after a family feud with his sister, along a road thronged with his loyal barbecue customers is alone worth the price of this paperback. Home-Style Potato Salad, 17 th street 9s Tangy Pit Beans, Big Bob Gibson 9s White Sauce, Wilber Shirley 9s Hush Puppies, and the Eades Family Banana Pudding, and Strip and Go Naked Punch (don 9t ask!).<br><br> There are enough good recipes to open the world 9s 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 of these sauces, potato salads, salad dressings, and iced tea, many of which call for a minimum of two cups of good old granulated white sugar. The last chapter is devoted to good nuts-and-bolts barbecue tips and a terriB c list of this country 9s greatest real barbecue joints, but the whole books is full of Mills 9s indispensable barbecue (and life) wisdom, practical tips, recipes, and indeed, secrets like my Gerry 9s World 9s Finest Barbecue-Friendly Margaritas.<br><br> It seems that one down at Mike 9s 17 th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Illinois, he induced me to give him my Andalucian sangria recipes, then after we drank two pitchers of red and white sangria, he wormed the Margarita recipe out of me. However, I didn 9t give him the secret twist that I put in them; otherwise I would have had to kill him. But, on second thought, I couldn 9t kill him.<br><br> He and Amy might have another great book like Peace, Love, and Barbecue in them. 4Gerry Dawes

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