In stories, recipes, and photographs, James Beard Award–winning writer Robb Walsh and acclaimed documentary photographer O. Rufus Lovett take us on a barbecue odyssey from East Texas to the Carolinas and back. In Barbecue Crossroads, we meet the pitmasters who still use old-fashioned wood-fired pits, and we sample some of their succulent pork shoulders, whole hogs, savory beef, sausage, mutton, and even some barbecued baloney. Recipes for these and the side dishes, sauces, and desserts that come with them are painstakingly recorded and tested. But Barbecue Crossroads is more than a cookbook; it is a trip back to the roots of our oldest artisan food tradition and a look at how Southern culture is changing. Walsh and Lovett trace the lineage of Southern barbecue backwards through time as they travel across a part of the country where slow-cooked meat has long been part of everyday life. What they find is not one story, but many. They visit legendary joints that don’t live up to their reputations—and discover unknown places that deserve more attention. They tell us why the corporatizing of agriculture is making it difficult for pitmasters to afford hickory wood or find whole hogs that fit on a pit. Walsh and Lovett also remind us of myriad ways that race weaves in and out of the barbecue story, from African American cooking techniques and recipes to the tastes of migrant farmworkers who ate their barbecue in meat markets, gas stations, and convenience stores because they weren’t welcome in restaurants. The authors also expose the ways that barbecue competitions and TV shows are undermining traditional barbecue culture. And they predict that the revival of the community barbecue tradition may well be its salvation.

When award-winning Texas food writer Robb Walsh discovers that the local Galveston Bay oysters are being passed off as Blue Points and Chincoteagues in other parts of the country, he decides to look into the matter. Thus begins a five-year journey into the culture of one of the world's oldest delicacies. Walsh's through-the-looking-glass adventure takes him from oyster reefs to oyster bars and from corporate boardrooms to hotel bedrooms in a quest for the truth about the world's most profitable aphrodisiac. On the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf coasts of the U.S., as well as the Canadian Maritimes, Ireland, England, and France, the author ingests thousands of oysters--raw, roasted, barbecued, and baked--all for the sake of making a fair comparison. He also carefully considers the merits of a wide variety of accompanying libations, including tart white wines in Paris, Guinness in Galway, martinis in London, microbrews in the Pacific Northwest, and tequila in Texas. Along the way, he learns how to shuck, cook, and identify all five oyster species. And he manages to glean enough information from each region's scientists to debunk the myths and marketing malarkey dispensed as gospel in provincial oyster bars. Sex, Death & Oysters is a record of a gastronomic adventure--a fascinating collection of the most exciting, instructive, poignant, and just plain weird experiences on a five-year journey into the world of the most beloved and most feared of all seafoods.

With chapters on the history of hot sauce, tips and recipes for making your own at home, and more than 50 recipes, ranging from nuclear wings to Carolina sloppy joes to spicy bloody marys, this is the be-all and end-all cookbook for pepper sauce aficionados.

From the top of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica for the perfect cup of coffee to the jungles of Thailand for an encounter with the abominably smelly "stinkfruit," Robb Wals has traveled the globe, immersing himself in some of the world's most interesting culinary phenomena. In Are You Really Going to Eat That? Walsh offers a collection of his best essays over the past ten years, along with some of his favorite recipes.
For Walsh, food is a window on culture, and his essays brim with insights into our society and those around us. Whether he's discussing halal organic farming with Muslims, traversing the steep hills of Trinidad in search of hot-sauce makers, or savoring the disappearing art of black Southern cooking with a inmate-chef in a Texas penitentiary, Walsh has a unique talent for taking our understanding of food to a deeper level.