Weber's Real Grilling by Jamie Purviance

This beautiful book has 305 large pages with more than 200 recipes and perhaps 300 superb color photos. Purviance begins with managing the grill, and although Weber's grills are featured, the advice is broad enough to cover most charcoal and gas grills. Shockingly, there is nary a mention of the Weber Smokey Mountain, considered by many to be the best bullet smoker on the market, and winner of a Meathead's Hot Stuff Award. So, although there are several smoked meat recipes, they are all cooked on the Weber Kettle or a gas grill. You can cook barbecue on grills and braziers, but a specialty smoker is a better tool for the job.

Then it's off to describing tools and accessories, ingredients, and a chapter on rubs, marinades, and sauces. Despite the omission of a real smoker in the book, if you want some superb, contemporary as well as traditional outdoor meal recipes, this is the book to buy. Purviance is a witty fellow, and his text is fun reading. Not surprising, his cooking instructions are precise and easy to follow. He knows his food.

As good as the text is, I must spend a minute praising the photographer, Tim Turner. His work has made this the most beautiful book on barbecue and grilling on the market. The lighting, the composition, color, are all superb. You really get a sense of what the dish could look like (but of course we both know it never looks as good as the photos).

The Cook's Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue, A Practical Guide For the Outdoor Cook

A superb hardbound, 420 page book with more than 450 recipes. The limited illustrations are mostly high quality black and white pen drawings with a handful of beautiful large color plates scattered throughout. As I have exclaimed perhaps too often and too breathlessly elsewhere on this site, Cook's Illustrated, the magazine, the website, the book publisher, and producer of America's Test Kitchen on PBS, is my favorite source for no-nonsense, thoroughly tested info. The editors take little for granted and they are constantly questioning and testing accepted wisdom and wives' tales. And these folks really understand barbecue.

Here's a sampling: "Ounce for ounce, hardwood lump charcoal burns much hotter than briquettes. However, the differences are less dramatic when the coals are measured by volume. (Because of their shape, briquettes compact more easily so you can fit more coals into the same amount of space.) For all practical purposes, a heaping chimney of charcoal briquettes will make a fire that is as hot as a level chimney of hardwood lump charcoal. So if you need to substitute briquettes for hardwood, use slightly more briquettes to achieve the same heat level." They then show a chart of equivalent volumes.

Barbecue Secrets, Unbeatable Recipes, Tips & Tricks From a Barbecue Champion by Ron Shewchuk

Shewchuk is a Vancouver based competitor who really knows his stuff. This is a good beginner's guide to serious barbecue with many of his competition recipes. Unfortunately there are only two recipes for ribs. One is called "Cheater ribs" for people in a hurry, and it involves boiling water. This oversight is balanced by the quality of the other recipe for ribs and his great advice on everything from brisket to smoked duck salad. Ingredients are measured in both standard English measurements (pounds, cups, tablespoons, Fahrenheit) as well as metric (kilograms, liters, Centigrade).

From a section called "All I ever needed to know, I learned from barbecue" here's a quote: "Think of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had barbecue and peach daiquiris about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down for a nap with a bag of charcoal for a pillow." Check out his podcast on iTunes or click here.

BBQ USA by Steven Raichlen

This is my favorite of Raichlen's books. Published in 2003, it is a whopping 774 pages with 425 recipes. He begins with a history of barbecue that is fun and enlightening. Then there is a primer on grilling and barbecue with lots of great tips. Most of the recipes come from restaurants, from joints to white tablecloth temples of food. There are more useful tips and fun facts in the sidebars. I love the sepia toned photos of pitmasters and plain folk cooking, but I'd love to see some color photos of the finished products.

The Barbecue! Bible by Steven Raichlen

Nobody knows more about barbecue than Steven Raichlen. This book and this author have had a greater influence on the meteoric growth in popularity of barbecue in the US than anything since the Weber kettle grill was invented in 1951 by George Stephen. With several other books on barbecue and grilling, Raichlen has had the kind of influence on men who cook, that Julia Child had on women who cook and has probably vastly improved the way we eat in the summer. In fact, this book has been given a Julia Child Cookbook Award.

Peace, Love, and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue by Mike Mills, Amy Mills Tunnicliffe

Mike "The Legend" Mills has earned his nickname with achievements as a restaurateur (17th Street Bar and Grill in Southern Illinois and four Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas), an award-winning chef (three-rime Grand World Champion at Memphis in May), president of the National Barbecue Association (2004-2005), and now, with the help of his daughter (herself an accomplished chef, writer, and photographer), he has created a classic in the pantheon of barbecue literature. Peace, Love, and Barbecue, published in 2005, not only contains the expected count of excellent recipes and cooking tips, but includes interviews with the legends of barbecue, and visits to the "shrines, shacks, joints, and right respectable restaurants." This is a first rate reference and a fun read.

Here's a quote: "I never told either of my wives the recipe [for our secret family barbecue sauce]. Let me tell you, this didn't set well with either one of them. I have had it in my head, so it isn't written down anywhere. It's not as thou they could've found it in the recipe box.

"My first marriage lasted only seven years, so keeping a secret wasn't too much of a problem, although Wife #1 wasn't amused. Marriage to Wife #2 lasted for only 27 years, so she didn't make the cut either. Now if we'd made it to 30 years, I might've broken down and spilled my guts. But she would've had to change her ways."

Championship Barbecue Sauces by Paul Kirk

Paul Kirk is known as the Baron of Barbecue. He teaches classes in barbecue and, as a competition cook, has won more awards than can be counted. This book has 175 sauces, marinades, dry rubs, wet rubs, mops, and salsas. Nothing fancy, no long-winded tales and stories, just tried and true recipes, mostly from his buddies on the competition circuit. He's not the best writer, but he has a lot to teach.

Here's a quote: "People ask me what is the most important aspect of barbecue: the rub, cooker, smoker, fire, wood, charcoal, meat, what? All things being equal, my answer is without a doubt the rub or barbecue seasoning! If you have good rub, your chances of being the neighborhood Barbecue King, or this year's big winner in barbecue competitions, are very good. The next thing people usually want to know is what's in my rub and whether I'll give out my recipe. My answer is, sure, you can have what's in my rub, but I won't give you the proportions. My rub consists of sugar, salt, paprika, chili powder, pepper, and other spices."

Steak Lover's Cookbook by William Rice

A former columnist for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and editor of Food & Wine magazine, Bill Rice is one of the great food writers of our time. In this 246 page book he teaches us how to come close to great steakhouse porterhouse steaks with the classic accompaniments like creamed spinach and steak fries. He teaches us how to buy steaks, store them, prep them, carve them, cook them outdoors, cook them indoors, how to season them, garnish them, and what to serve with them. The beef recipes range from stewed to stuffed, fajitas, curry, orange beef, and even pot roast. The sides include mango guacamole, chicken liver pate, gazpacho, fried zucchini, cowboy beans, apple Stilton cole slaw; and the desserts include a grilled dessert pizza, cobbler, mud pie, and bread pudding.

A quote: "Do not try to dry-age steak in your home. Only large primal and sub-primal cuts are suitable to the process. The bacteria that will collect on a single steak could cause illness. Keep fresh steak in the refrigerator, well wrapped, for no more than four days. If you choose to freeze uncooked steak, do it under the coldest temperature possible because the faster it freezes the less fluid loss there will be when you thaw it."

The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin

The Tummy Trilogy is actually three books in one, all long out of print, but occasionally available used. Trillin is witty, urbane, observant, and ironic, and he has written intelligently on everything from politics to barbecue. These three books, American Fried (1974), Alice, Let's Eat (1978), and Third Helpings (1983), are insightful recountings of meals, eateries, and eaters. Although so much has changed on the culinary scene since then, Trillin is a great storyteller, and his wisdom paved the way for people like us to openly admire "common" food like ribs, hotdogs, and burgers.

The American Fried, the first in the trilogy, speaks directly to rib eaters with its first sentence: "The best restaurants in the world are, of course, in Kansas City. Not all of them; only the top four or five. Anyone who has visited Kansas City and still doubts that statement has my sympathy: He never made it to the right places." A few pages later he drives home his point: "It has long been acknowledged that the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant's Barbecue at Eighteenth and Brooklyn in Kansas City." There are a lot of folks I know who agree with this statement to this day.

Legends of Texas Barbecue by Robb Walsh

This book is a wonderful piece of scholarly research that is also a great read. Walsh has delved into the history and lore of Texas barbecue, it origins, its ingredients, its personalities, and its tall tales. He recommends the best places to eat when in the Lone Star State, what to eat, and provides recipes from pitmasters to help you replicate the real thing at home. Even the photos are fascinating.

Magazines and periodicals

Cook's Illustrated

This is a great cooking magazine. The authors have grown from a really good magazine that people in the know swore by, to a great website, to a TV show, and have recently added another magazine.

The outstanding feature of their approach is that they test every assumption and often dispel myths. Their specialty is rethinking old recipes, and developing new techniques that work better than the tried and maybe no longer true. They will do things like cook a sauce at five different temperatures to determine what is the optimum. They also often develop techniques for shortening the preparation or cooking time for a dish. Or lower the fat. Or make it more flavorful.

In addition, they test equipment in a rigorous fashion similar to Consumer Reports. What is the best saucepan? They test nine of them by steaming rice, scalding cream, browning onions, and making pastry cream. They also have lots of little tips and tricks from their staff and their readers. There are no ads, and the painting on the front cover is elegant and mouth-watering. The back cover usually is a painted poster showing, for example, 12 different kind of peaches. The main body of the magazine is illustrated in realistic black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, and small color photos appear on the inside back cover.

Here's how staffer Sean Lawrence approached the problem of developing a recipe for the ultimate Pepper-Crusted Filet Mignon: "I recalled the test kitchen's prior frustrations with peppercorn crusts. Peppercorns fall off in the pan, interfere with the meat's browning, and - used in sufficient quantity to create a real crust - delivering punishing pungency." He solved the problems by crushing the peppercorns by rocking a skillet on them; defanged them by simmering them in olive oil; improved adherence by pressing them into the filets and then covering them with plastic wrap and letting them rest for an hour; then sautéd the meat in a well-oiled skillet until the meat browned beneath the peppercorns; and finished them off by roasting them in the oven to complete the cooking and brown the sides. Clever, no?