Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

If you make your way to St. Louis, Missouri, any time soon, ask a local to show you one of their barbecue specialties: snoots. In both editions of the classic guidebook Real Barbecue (1988 and 2007), authors Greg Johnson and Vince Staten put it this way: "First we'd better deal with 'snoots.' Snoots are part of the soul-food barbecue scene in St. Louis that will stare at you at the C & K, as well as any number of other places in town and across the river in East St. Louis. Snoots are deep-fried pig noses."

At Smoki O's, another St. Louis barbecue joint, they smoke their snoots for a couple of hours instead of frying them. Whether boiled, fried, or smoked, snoots get doused with barbecue sauce and are meant to be eaten right away.
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Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

Last week, I wrote about one chef’s favorite barbecue spots that managed to become a referendum on the best places to eat BBQ in the country. In came the comments, fast and furious.

I’ve learned a lot this week. For one thing, I now know that I need to take a serious barbecue tour around the United States, namely Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas. I also now know that getting a favorite barbecue list from just one person is not a good idea. One last thing I now know is how the NFL replacement officials were feeling.

Enough about me. Let’s hear from you. People shouted out their favorite places in the commentary. These five got the most love and some noteworthy sound bites.
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance delved deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

For years, the history of barbecue has been shrouded in misty myths and tall tales, from angels delivering sauce recipes in dreams to convoluted explanations for the origins of barbecue terminology. A few weeks ago my fellow blogger Daniel Vaughn dug into the spelling and origins of the word “barbecue” itself, including the oft-repeated claim that the word comes from the French phrase barbe a queue, meaning “beard to tail”, a shorthand for cooking a whole hog. The Oxford English Dictionary, in what ranks as one of the all-time gems of lexicographical disdain, sniffs this derivation away as “an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word.”
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

All barbecue fans have their favorite off-the-beaten-path barbecue restaurants, and there are plenty of legendary joints with a sufficient reputation for pilgrims to drive hundreds of miles to seek them out. But what about when you’re zipping down a lonely highway far from home and top a hill and spot an unfamiliar “BBQ” sign? Is it worth stopping and risking a precious meal, when you only have between three to five per day to spend? What if just ten miles down the road there’s an even more worthy contender? These sorts of decisions can drive a barbecue nut to acid stomach and night terrors.
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Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

It’s Week Three of the NFL season and Week Four of the NCAA football season, which means that everyone should be focused like a laser on their tailgate menus. And one thing most tailgaters will have learned somewhere along the road is that barbecuing is generally best not done hodgepodge in a parking lot - it should be left to the experts.

At Food & Wine, we don’t spend enough time on the barbecue trail (we also don’t spend enough time tailgating). We tapped a new BBQ authority, Tiffani Faison, the chef and owner of the terrific Sweet Cheeks in Boston, to give us a list of her go-to spots.

Faison, who’s of course a New England Patriots tailgaiter, gave us this list based on extensive research she did before she opened up Sweet Cheeks. It’s a list that’s handy whether you’re planning your next tailgate - a lot of these places have online stores - or now feeling hungry enough to plan your own barbecue road trip this fall.

Note: This list is in no particular order. Do not assume Faison thinks Lockhart, Texas, is home to the country’s number one barbecue spot.
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

A strange phenomenon pervades the signs of barbecue joints across the state of Texas: pigs acting like people. In my memory, nary a bovine graces a barbecue sign that’s not in the cooked or soon-to-be smoked form.

At Big John’s Feed Lot Bar-B-Q in Big Spring, Texas, a painting on the window shows the pitmaster wielding a cleaver in one hand while dragging a dazed steer with the other. This is how the poor cattle are portrayed, while the overt anthropomorphism is reserved for swine - in this, the land of beef barbecue.
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

Back in February 2011, when Charlotte, North Carolina, was selected to host this year's Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama found herself on the hot seat when she praised the city for its charm, hospitality, and "of course, great barbecue." The declaration drew a chorus of jeers from Carolina barbecue fans, who are passionate about their smoked pork but not so hot on offerings in the Queen City.
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Carlos Turner poured his pain and passion into cooking, and left a bittersweet legacy behind.

The 16-year-old cystic fibrosis patient spent the last few months of his too-brief life perfecting his barbecue sauce recipe - with a little bit of help from the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the form of a cookware shopping spree, and counsel from the Hearts and Hands Palliative Care program at Kosair Children's Hospital where he was treated. He kept the recipe in a locked box with the hope that he'd someday be able to produce, bottle and share his beloved sauce with other fish-allergic barbecue lovers (many sauces contain Worcestershire sauce, which has anchovies as an ingredient) - and share the proceeds with the hospital that had cared for him.
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

It’s political convention season, and the so-called Tea Party has been stirring up passions on both sides of the political fence. The group’s name, of course, is taken from the occasion in 1773 when a bunch of irate Bostonians donned Mohawk warrior garb and dumped three shiploads of tea into their harbor to protest British taxation.

A similar but less remembered event took place seven years earlier in North Carolina. At the time, tensions were high over the recently enacted Stamp Act, which levied taxes on legal documents, newspapers, and magazines. Carolinians weren’t particularly receptive to the measure, and in 1766, the militia companies from several counties expressed their discontent by marching to the town of Brunswick and refusing to let a cargo of stamped paper be brought ashore.
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Editor's note: All summer long, the Southern Foodways Alliance will be delving deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. Dig in.

There's been some big food and drink news on the campaign trail of late, from Paul Ryan's catfish-noodling hobby to President Obama's home-brewed "White House Honey Ale." They got me wondering if barbecue had ever taken center stage in a presidential campaign. (Well, since this one.)
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