Life of Fire

“Cinder blocks, pits, split logs, and hot coals are the roots of barbecue and the lifeblood of Pat Martin. He’s a true friend with an old-school soul, and has barbecue knowledge second to none. Do you have a pit big enough to handle his barbecue inspiration? You soon will.”—Chris Lilly

“Life of Fire is quite simply the most practical and profound barbecue bible to date. As Pat Martin walks us through the differences between spit, block pit, smokehouse, hog-in-the-ground and open-pit preparations, the connection between West Tennessee barbecue joints and our earliest ancestors who controlled fire seasons the journey.”—Alice Randall

“Life of Fire will change how you feel about barbecue forever. I can smell and taste the history on these pages and can’t wait to fire up the spits and dig even deeper into this love letter to proper barbecue.”—Michael Symon

“When true legends share their lives with us you stop, listen, you tend to the fire and coals like God is watching. Pat Martin is my higher power for hog cookery.”—Matty Matheson

“I’ve eaten at as many barbecue joints as anyone across the nation and I can get down with anybody when it comes to cookin’ meat low and slow, hot and fast, you name it.  But DDD O.G. Pat Martin is an old-school pitmaster whose West Tennessee style is at the very foundation of what it means to cook over coals. Life of Fire is about as close as most of us will get to the true soul and tradition of pit barbecue.”—Guy Fieri

“Pat Martin’s passion for his craft and the legend he has become in the barbecue world is inspiring. He’s a magician who can coax flavor out of the simplest ingredients.”—Maneet Chauhan

Auteur

Pat Martin is a leader in American barbecue. He is the owner of Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint and Hugh-Baby’s and lives with his wife, Martha, and their three children in Nashville.

Texte du rabat

“The most important book on cooking over live fire in decades. Life of Fire illuminates it all, from coal beds, to home-built pits (in minutes!) to simple, delicious, recipes and enough whole hog know-how to impress the weekend warriors without intimidating newcomers.”—Andrew Zimmern

ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Saveur

One of the few pitmasters still carrying the torch of West Tennessee whole-hog barbecue, Nashville’s Pat Martin has studied and taught this craft for years. Now he reveals all he knows about the art of barbecue and live fire cooking. 

Through beautiful photography and detailed instruction, the lessons start with how to prepare and feed a fire—what wood to use, how to build a pit or a grill, how to position it to account for the weather—then move into cooking through all the stages of that fire’s life. You’ll sear tomatoes for sandwiches and infuse creamed corn with the flavor of char from the temperamental, adolescent fire. Next, you’ll grill chicken with Alabama white sauce over the grown-up fire, and, of course, you’ll master pit-cooked whole hog, barbecue ribs, turkey, pork belly, and pork shoulder over the smoldering heat of mature coals. Finally, you’ll roast vegetables buried in white ash, and you’ll smoke bacon and country hams in the dying embers of the winter fire. 

For Pat Martin, grilling, barbecuing, and smoking is a whole lifetime’s worth of practice and pleasure—a life of fire that will transform the way you cook.

Échantillon de lecture
MY STORY

This book is a guide, pretty much everything I know, about the craft of barbecue and cooking with fire. Now, with barbecue, people are beyond opinionated. Folks love to talk about regional styles—the differences in vinegar versus tomato versus mustard based-sauces, the cuts and types of meat used in this corner of the world versus that one. The style I’m most connected to is the old, and dwindling, greatly overlooked but beautiful art of West Tennessee whole hog. I love cooking—and showing people how to cook—ribs, chicken, shoulders, hams, vegetables, sides, and more, but the art of pit cooking whole hog is not just the summit for me; it’s my roots.

But I didn’t learn all this from being born into some barbecue family, the stereotypical story of a boy knee-high to his daddy and following him around a pit house all of his life only to take the reins one day. Instead, I learned to cook barbecue through a few twists of fate, some epiphanies, a pitmaster mentor, a lot of experimentation and even more stubbornness, and more hours than I can count of staring at, listening to, smelling, feeling, and handling fire. This path started for me in high school, thirty-five years ago, and I’m still on it. And in my world, whether you want to go all-out and cook a whole hog (and I hope you do one day), or just grill up some supper, it’s all about learning how to work with fire. I feel like it’s my responsibility to share what I’ve learned about how to cook all through the life cycle of a fire—from what to char over a fresh, young fire; to open pit cooking with the powerful but controlled heat of a more mature fire; all the way to cold-smoking hams, bacon, and sausage with the fading embers of the winter fire. And in there, in the middle of that life of fire, is what I do with all my heart: barbecue.

My story begins as most do, with my family and its roots. You can’t know me without knowing that backstory. Both sides of my family are from the same small town in northeast Mississippi: Corinth, sixtyfive miles east of Memphis, Tennessee. I was born in Memphis, at the old Baptist hospital—the one Elvis was pronounced dead in.

My mom grew up in town. Her dad, my Pa-King, was a grocery rep for all of the little country stores in and around northeast Mississippi, and her mom, my Mi-Mi, worked for the railroad in Corinth. My dad had grown up dirt poor on a farm in Corinth, in a typical farming family growing or raising most of the food my grandmother cooked. His dad, my Paw-Paw, was a small farmer his whole life and his mom, my Maw-Maw, worked as a bank teller at the old Bank of Mississippi. Dad attended Mississippi State on a basketball scholarship, majored in economics and business finance, and eventually moved us up north, becoming a legendary trader on The Street, which is what they all called Wall Street. He was literally the poor country boy who made it in the big city.

Early on, our move to Connecticut was great. There was a seemingly endless supply of woods and waters to swim in, with no cottonmouths to have to check the pond banks for before you jumped in like we’d have to do in Mississippi. Our church was a mainstay for our family, and most of the folks who went to church with us were also from the South, so it was both a place of worship and a cultural center. A lot of Sundays, Mom and several other women would preside over a table of fried chicken, cornbread, purple hull peas, creamed corn, and so on and so forth.

But as I started getting on up in school, life changed. Because of my ADHD, I was always making bad grades. And I started getting in trouble, a lot of trouble, and got suspended from—or kicked out of—one school after another. I remember, around fourth grade, being made fun of by some boys who were pretty big bastards for grade school. They came at me with all of the typical clichés about folks from the South: Can your parents read and write? Is there even running water in Mississippi or do you use outhouses? I’d get mad and fight back, end up getting roughed up, only to do it all again a …