written by Charles McNair *
Jim Auchmutey has cooked up some pretty good stories through the years.
In nearly three decades at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Auchmutey was twice named writer of the year for the Cox Newspapers chain and twice named best feature writer. He earned Pulitzer Prize nominations, and he claimed honors from the Associated Press, United Press International and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. He also won a James Beard Foundation writing award for best food journalism.
Auchmutey wrote books, too. “The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness,” written after he left the AJC in 2009 for freelance work, earned a Georgia Center for the Book designation as one of the 10 books all Georgians should read in 2016. Auchmutey also wrote cookbooks and co-edited a collection of essays on Southern culture, among other achievements.
Auchmutey’s distinguished career started in the humble offices of The Signal, Georgia State’s student newspaper. In 1975, still a young undergrad, he signed on as entertainment editor and bylined stories on shows by Billy Joel, Steve Martin and others.
“That was when I started forming this idea of myself as a writer,” Auchmutey says. “I decided journalism was a fine way to make a living telling stories and arranging words.”
His achievements since The Signal have brought widespread professional respect. But Auchmutey may simply have been warming up to his newest, and meatiest, subject.
“Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America” hit bookstores nationally in June. It’s a companion guide to the popular Barbecue Nation exhibit Auchmutey helped curate at the Atlanta History Center. His book captures from historical and personal perspectives why ‘cue has been essential fare at our nation’s public spaces and private tables for 250 years and counting.
“Barbecue,” Auchmutey explains, “is America in a mouthful.”
“Daddy Bob,” Auchmutey’s grandfather, (second from right) was a respected pitmaster from Bartow County, Ga. He was profiled with his “pit crew” (Auchmutey’s Uncle Earl is on the far left) in a 1954 Saturday Evening Post story about barbecue in the South.
“Daddy Bob,” Auchmutey’s grandfather, (second from right) was a respected pitmaster from Bartow County, Ga. He was profiled with his “pit crew” (Auchmutey’s Uncle Earl is on the far left) in a 1954 Saturday Evening Post story about barbecue in the South.B
Dawn of aBARBECUE NATION
Barbecue, or something like it, has been with us a very long time. Anthropologists generally agree that hominids cooked meat over flame some 400,000 years ago.
In “Smokelore,” Auchmutey duly notes the dawn of barbecue, but he quickly jumps ahead to the story of barbecue in the Americas.
In 1493, when Christopher Columbus waded ashore in the Caribbean on his second voyage to the New World, he found indigenous people grilling iguanas. The Spaniards heard the cooking apparatus called a “barbacoa,” or something like it. In time, that word became “barbecue,” which from that point on has richly flavored America’s culture.
Barbecue, in fact, had a distinguished presence at the very founding of the American republic.
On Sept. 18, 1793, with our republic barely a decade old, the roasting of a 500-pound ox highlighted a joyful celebration following the groundbreaking ceremony for the United States Capitol building.
George Washington himself placed the foundation stone for the Capitol that day, blessing it in a Masonic ritual while onlookers chanted Masonic phrases. Washington then sat down, false teeth and all, to disappear a plate of beef barbecue.
“The story of barbecue touches almost every aspect of our history,” Auchmutey writes. “It involves the age of discovery, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the great migration of blacks and whites from the South, the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles. It encompasses every region and demographic group. It is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations.”
Among hundreds of other barbecue books, only one previously tried to document the history of American barbecue: Robert Moss’s “Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.”
“It’s a valuable resource,” Auchmutey says, “but it doesn’t have that much art, and what it does have is in black and white.”
“Smokelore” isn’t a cookbook, a barbecue travelogue or an academic tome, although it has elements of all those. At 280 pages, it’s a lavishly illustrated popular history with 50,000 words of text, 26 recipes and 208 pieces of artwork — mostly vintage photos and amusingly retro magazine ads.
It’s fun. It’s also serious history.
And that’s only right. Because, for Auchmutey, barbecue is a burning thing.
Left: Pork butts and rib racks get seasoned for the smoker at Daddy D’z BBQ Joynt on Memorial Drive in Atlanta. Right: Auchmutey and longtime friend Howard Pousner (right), manager of media relations at the Atlanta History Center, talk ’cue at Auchmutey’s curated exhibit, Barbecue Nation.
Left: Pork butts and rib racks get seasoned for the smoker at Daddy D’z BBQ Joynt on Memorial Drive in Atlanta. Right: Auchmutey and longtime friend Howard Pousner (right), manager of media relations at the Atlanta History Center, talk ’cue at Auchmutey’s curated exhibit, Barbecue Nation.
Left: Pork butts and rib racks get seasoned for the smoker at Daddy D’z BBQ Joynt on Memorial Drive in Atlanta. Right: Auchmutey and longtime friend Harold Pousner (right), manager of media relations at the Atlanta History Center, talk ’cue at Auchmutey’s curated exhibit, Barbecue Nation.
Barbecue DNA“I’ve been researching this book since I was about 5 years old,” Auchmutey says, recalling family trips to a drive-in restaurant in his hometown of Decatur, Ga.
“We’d sit in our green ’53 Chevy and order curb service, the windows down because the car lacked air conditioning,” he says. “As we waited, we could smell the pork cooking over hickory smoke. I could have taken a bite out of the backseat.”
The craving could be genetic. Auchmutey’s grandfather, “Daddy Bob,” was a pitmaster from Bartow County who cooked hogs, goats and sheep for sheriff’s barbecues, church gatherings and all sorts of civic affairs in the Etowah River valley of North Georgia. Daddy Bob gained a measure of fame in 1954 when the Saturday Evening Post profiled him in a story on barbecue in the South.
And Auchmutey’s dad, Charles, a World War II Navy veteran who spent his civilian career as an auditor at a General Motors plant in south Atlanta, mastered the fine art of simmering up Brunswick stew. For more than a decade, he hosted an annual barbecue in Decatur where he would make the family’s secret recipe for more than 200 hungry guests.
“Barbecue is more than a food to me,” Auchmutey says. “It’s personal. It’s about where we came from and who we are.”
Auchmutey came to writing about ‘cue in a roundabout way. Early on at the AJC, he only occasionally scribbled a food feature.
His focus sharpened in 1990 when Susan Puckett joined the AJC as food editor and they became friends.
“Like me, Susan can talk the paint off a barn,” Auchmutey says. “As we became friends and talked about stories, she helped me understand that food was a good vehicle for exploring a lot of the things I’m interested in, history and American anthropology. After that, I wrote a lot more about the table.”
In 1995, Auchmutey and Puckett co-wrote “The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook: Your Guide to the Best Sauces, Rubs, Sops, Mops, and Marinades.”
The next year, Auchmutey’s feature “Cast in Iron,” a piece on cast-iron cookware, won a James Beard Award for food writing, and his second cookbook, “The South: The Beautiful Cookbook,” co-written with Puckett and Mara Reid Rogers, was published.
From 1997 through 2000, he wrote a monthly feature in the Sunday AJC called “Tasting the South,” a travelogue about iconic foods and traditions. His food writing went to full boil after that.
“I wrote about the crawfish festival in Louisiana, an orange juice processing plant in Florida, the sweet potato ladies of Tuskegee, the duck hunting country of Arkansas,” Auchmutey says. “It was a blast and so very educational for me.”
Now in his sweet spot, he contributed to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture and the food volume of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
He also became a co-founder of the influential Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. John T. Edge, director of that organization, sings the praises of “Smokelore.”
“Jim Auchmutey has a great eye and a great ear for his native region,” Edge says. “His latest book arrives just in time, as interest in barbecue intensifies and everyone looks about for an approachable and definitive history. Jim has written just that.”
Barbecue DNA“I’ve been researching this book since I was about 5 years old,” Auchmutey says, recalling family trips to a drive-in restaurant in his hometown of Decatur, Ga.
“We’d sit in our green ’53 Chevy and order curb service, the windows down because the car lacked air conditioning,” he says. “As we waited, we could smell the pork cooking over hickory smoke. I could have taken a bite out of the backseat.”
The craving could be genetic. Auchmutey’s grandfather, “Daddy Bob,” was a pitmaster from Bartow County who cooked hogs, goats and sheep for sheriff’s barbecues, church gatherings and all sorts of civic affairs in the Etowah River valley of North Georgia. Daddy Bob gained a measure of fame in 1954 when the Saturday Evening Post profiled him in a story on barbecue in the South.
And Auchmutey’s dad, Charles, a World War II Navy veteran who spent his civilian career as an auditor at a General Motors plant in south Atlanta, mastered the fine art of simmering up Brunswick stew. For more than a decade, he hosted an annual barbecue in Decatur where he would make the family’s secret recipe for more than 200 hungry guests.
“Barbecue is more than a food to me,” Auchmutey says. “It’s personal. It’s about where we came from and who we are.”
Auchmutey came to writing about ‘cue in a roundabout way. Early on at the AJC, he only occasionally scribbled a food feature.
His focus sharpened in 1990 when Susan Puckett joined the AJC as food editor and they became friends.
“Like me, Susan can talk the paint off a barn,” Auchmutey says. “As we became friends and talked about stories, she helped me understand that food was a good vehicle for exploring a lot of the things I’m interested in, history and American anthropology. After that, I wrote a lot more about the table.”
In 1995, Auchmutey and Puckett co-wrote “The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook: Your Guide to the Best Sauces, Rubs, Sops, Mops, and Marinades.”
The next year, Auchmutey’s feature “Cast in Iron,” a piece on cast-iron cookware, won a James Beard Award for food writing, and his second cookbook, “The South: The Beautiful Cookbook,” co-written with Puckett and Mara Reid Rogers, was published.
From 1997 through 2000, he wrote a monthly feature in the Sunday AJC called “Tasting the South,” a travelogue about iconic foods and traditions. His food writing went to full boil after that.
“I wrote about the crawfish festival in Louisiana, an orange juice processing plant in Florida, the sweet potato ladies of Tuskegee, the duck hunting country of Arkansas,” Auchmutey says. “It was a blast and so very educational for me.”
Now in his sweet spot, he contributed to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture and the food volume of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
He also became a co-founder of the influential Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. John T. Edge, director of that organization, sings the praises of “Smokelore.”
“Jim Auchmutey has a great eye and a great ear for his native region,” Edge says. “His latest book arrives just in time, as interest in barbecue intensifies and everyone looks about for an approachable and definitive history. Jim has written just that.”
Barbecue DNA“I’ve been researching this book since I was about 5 years old,” Auchmutey says, recalling family trips to a drive-in restaurant in his hometown of Decatur, Ga.
“We’d sit in our green ’53 Chevy and order curb service, the windows down because the car lacked air conditioning,” he says. “As we waited, we could smell the pork cooking over hickory smoke. I could have taken a bite out of the backseat.”
The craving could be genetic. Auchmutey’s grandfather, “Daddy Bob,” was a pitmaster from Bartow County who cooked hogs, goats and sheep for sheriff’s barbecues, church gatherings and all sorts of civic affairs in the Etowah River valley of North Georgia. Daddy Bob gained a measure of fame in 1954 when the Saturday Evening Post profiled him in a story on barbecue in the South.
And Auchmutey’s dad, Charles, a World War II Navy veteran who spent his civilian career as an auditor at a General Motors plant in south Atlanta, mastered the fine art of simmering up Brunswick stew. For more than a decade, he hosted an annual barbecue in Decatur where he would make the family’s secret recipe for more than 200 hungry guests.
“Barbecue is more than a food to me,” Auchmutey says. “It’s personal. It’s about where we came from and who we are.”
Auchmutey came to writing about ‘cue in a roundabout way. Early on at the AJC, he only occasionally scribbled a food feature.
His focus sharpened in 1990 when Susan Puckett joined the AJC as food editor and they became friends.
“Like me, Susan can talk the paint off a barn,” Auchmutey says. “As we became friends and talked about stories, she helped me understand that food was a good vehicle for exploring a lot of the things I’m interested in, history and American anthropology. After that, I wrote a lot more about the table.”
In 1995, Auchmutey and Puckett co-wrote “The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook: Your Guide to the Best Sauces, Rubs, Sops, Mops, and Marinades.”
The next year, Auchmutey’s feature “Cast in Iron,” a piece on cast-iron cookware, won a James Beard Award for food writing, and his second cookbook, “The South: The Beautiful Cookbook,” co-written with Puckett and Mara Reid Rogers, was published.
From 1997 through 2000, he wrote a monthly feature in the Sunday AJC called “Tasting the South,” a travelogue about iconic foods and traditions. His food writing went to full boil after that.
“I wrote about the crawfish festival in Louisiana, an orange juice processing plant in Florida, the sweet potato ladies of Tuskegee, the duck hunting country of Arkansas,” Auchmutey says. “It was a blast and so very educational for me.”
Now in his sweet spot, he contributed to Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture and the food volume of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
He also became a co-founder of the influential Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. John T. Edge, director of that organization, sings the praises of “Smokelore.”
“Jim Auchmutey has a great eye and a great ear for his native region,” Edge says. “His latest book arrives just in time, as interest in barbecue intensifies and everyone looks about for an approachable and definitive history. Jim has written just that.”
A Signal MOMENTAfter high school, Auchmutey enrolled at Georgia State with the intention of transferring in a year or two to finish college at a more conventional campus where people lived in dorms and lazed on quads between classes. But something funny happened as he stayed longer at Georgia State.
“I started liking it,” Auchmutey confesses. “I liked being in downtown Atlanta and taking long walks to explore the city. I liked many of my professors, such as Barton Palmer and Eugene Hollahan in English, and Harold Davis and George Greiff and Betsy Graham in journalism.”
He soon found another good reason to stay. At The Signal, he met Pamela Brown (B.A. ’76), the sports editor. They worked together. They became friends.
“We became smitten with each other,” she says. “We started dating, and then in 1976, I was on the verge of graduating and moving down to Macon to work with the newspaper. That’s when we had the conversation, sitting in his daddy’s car.”
Pam remembers it something like this:
She: I know we’re supposed to see other people when I move away. But I really don’t want to.
He: I don’t either.
She: Well, I sort of think you’re supposed to ask me to marry you.
He: Will you marry me?
The couple exchanged vows in 1978, threw themselves into their careers and found happiness. That was 41 years ago and counting.
The Auchmuteys eventually settled in the Morningside neighborhood of Atlanta, where they shared space through the years with a succession of fine cats (including Bill, Hillary, Charlie and Peep). They love their work. Pam recently retired after a distinguished career at Emory University where she wrote for and edited several of the school’s publications and worked at the Carter Center.
The two serve on the Board of Advocates for the University Library, a group of alumni and community members who promote the important work of the Georgia State library.
“A lot of Georgians don’t know that this is one of the best libraries in the state and is open to the public,” he says.
It’s a natural fit for a couple of bibliophiles.
“We love to read – Pam has been in the same book club forever,” Jim says. “We love to travel, take long walks, dine out and garden. We love bourbon. We’ve been part of a poker group that’s been playing cards together since the late ’80s. We take yoga together twice a week. We love old houses and buildings and go on Georgia Trust rambles to historic towns. I love baseball — my older brother was a professional pitcher in the Chicago White Sox chain. Pam tolerates baseball — she goes to Braves games for the hot dogs and people-watching — but she would rather read a mystery or poke through an antique shop.”
After 29 years at the AJC, when Jim wanted to take on bigger, longer writing projects, Pam kept her job at Emory so he could leave the paper and focus on his work.
“That’s love,” he says.
The WRITE STUFFAuchmutey’s writerly pride and joy is “The Class of ’65,” a story about racial conflict and reconciliation that revolves around of the heroism of Greg Wittkamper, a white boy who was bullied and ostracized for supporting the African-American students desegregating Americus High School in south Georgia. Wittkamper was from Koinonia, the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity and a Christian community that promoted the Civil Rights Movement and harbored civil rights workers.
“Telling that story is the single thing I’m proudest of,” Auchmutey says.
He could consider other moments of accomplishment.
In 1998, Auchmutey went to Vietnam to follow two Georgians back to My Lai, where 30 years before they had saved lives during the infamous massacre of Vietnamese civilians in their village by American GIs.
“It was a powerful experience for me,” Auchmutey says. “I remember writing the story in my hotel room and crying several times.”
In 2005 and 2006, he profiled Georgia families with National Guardsmen who had been deployed to Iraq. Getting to know these families and writing their stories was moving enough, but what happened next tested Auchmutey as a writer … and a person.
“Right in the middle of the reporting,” he says, “a dozen or so Georgians died of roadside bombs in about that many days. I bounced all over the state writing reaction stories in towns like Thomson and Americus, standing in living rooms with widows, trying to keep my composure and then file something on deadline.”
As his editor at the AJC, Hank Klibanoff — a Pulitzer Prize–winning author himself — knows how well Auchmutey balances fact with emotion.
“Jim is a very thoughtful writer,” he says. “He thinks with his head and writes with his heart, pulling his ever-eager reader along.”
Such powerful professional experiences convince Auchmutey that journalism matters more than ever in a digital age of fake news and diminishing subscribership to traditional publications.
“Yes, I would still recommend studying journalism,” he says. “We’re always going to need people who specialize in figuring out what’s going on and telling stories that make sense of it.
“When I came along, the dominant venue for telling those stories was newspapers. The venues have changed and will continue to do so. But we’re always going to need the stories, the reporting, the truth-telling.”
That’s it. That’s Jim Auchmutey’s secret sauce — powerful, good-hearted truth-telling — whether he’s writing about the smoke of war or the smokelore of a nation.
The WRITE STUFFAuchmutey’s writerly pride and joy is “The Class of ’65,” a story about racial conflict and reconciliation that revolves around of the heroism of Greg Wittkamper, a white boy who was bullied and ostracized for supporting the African-American students desegregating Americus High School in south Georgia. Wittkamper was from Koinonia, the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity and a Christian community that promoted the Civil Rights Movement and harbored civil rights workers.
“Telling that story is the single thing I’m proudest of,” Auchmutey says.
He could consider other moments of accomplishment.
In 1998, Auchmutey went to Vietnam to follow two Georgians back to My Lai, where 30 years before they had saved lives during the infamous massacre of Vietnamese civilians in their village by American GIs.
“It was a powerful experience for me,” Auchmutey says. “I remember writing the story in my hotel room and crying several times.”
In 2005 and 2006, he profiled Georgia families with National Guardsmen who had been deployed to Iraq. Getting to know these families and writing their stories was moving enough, but what happened next tested Auchmutey as a writer … and a person.
“Right in the middle of the reporting,” he says, “a dozen or so Georgians died of roadside bombs in about that many days. I bounced all over the state writing reaction stories in towns like Thomson and Americus, standing in living rooms with widows, trying to keep my composure and then file something on deadline.”
As his editor at the AJC, Hank Klibanoff — a Pulitzer Prize–winning author himself — knows how well Auchmutey balances fact with emotion.
“Jim is a very thoughtful writer,” he says. “He thinks with his head and writes with his heart, pulling his ever-eager reader along.”
Such powerful professional experiences convince Auchmutey that journalism matters more than ever in a digital age of fake news and diminishing subscribership to traditional publications.
“Yes, I would still recommend studying journalism,” he says. “We’re always going to need people who specialize in figuring out what’s going on and telling stories that make sense of it.
“When I came along, the dominant venue for telling those stories was newspapers. The venues have changed and will continue to do so. But we’re always going to need the stories, the reporting, the truth-telling.”
That’s it. That’s Jim Auchmutey’s secret sauce — powerful, good-hearted truth-telling — whether he’s writing about the smoke of war or the smokelore of a nation.
From carving a linoleum plate by hand to rolling the paper through a press, watch how illustrator Reid Schulz (B.F.A. ’18) and art director Matt McCullin printed the art for this story.
Charles McNair publishes nationally and internationally. The author of two novels, “Pickett’s Charge” and “Land O’ Goshen,” McNair was books editor at Paste Magazine between 2005 and 2015. He lives in Bogota, Colombia.
Photos by Steven Thackston
