4B’s Bash Saturday at Lake Sinclair

EATONTON, Ga. — The late, great food critic Anthony Bourdain once said, “Barbecue may not be the road to world peace, but it’s a start.” 

Georgia foodies are lucky to have one of the country’s leading experts on barbecue —Jim Auchmutey.

Georgia Writers Museum will host its “4B’s Bash — Barbecue, Beer, Books and Band,” a “Meet the Author” event featuring Auchmutey, to be held on Saturday, May 7^, at 6 p.m. at The Edgewater on Lake Sinclair, the newest addition to Oconee Springs Park, located at 109 S. Spring Road, Eatonton. 

Barbecue will be furnished by Fresh Air Barbecue in Jackson, named the all-time best barbecue in Georgia by WSB Channel 2 television in Atlanta in a statewide search. Established in 1928, Fresh Air has served millions of patrons from around the country. Esquire Magazine named it one of the “Best heritage barbecue joints in America.”  

Music will be provided by The Tom Hill Trio, featuring bass player Annette Harris Shakespeare, the great-great-granddaughter of Joel Chandler Harris.

The cost of the event will be $25 per person, which includes a barbecue plate, one drink ticket, two hours of great dance music, and book talk by Auchmutey on his book, Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America. 

Copies of the book will be at the event for sale. Email Georgia Writers Museum at www.georgiawritersmuseum.org to register for this fun event.

Auchmutey is the author of two books that were named “Books All Georgians Should Read” by the Georgia Center for the Book: “The Class of ’65: A Student, a Divided Town and the Long Road to Forgiveness” and “Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America.” He wrote for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for almost 30 years and was twice named the Cox Newspaper chain’s Writer of the Year. He is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, and has won awards for his food writing. He was a guest curator for the Atlanta History Center’s Barbecue Nation exhibition, which inspired his latest book, “Smokelore.”

“Smokelore” follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking of the U.S. Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost 200 years later. The book includes 26 recipes and 205 images, many of them rarely seen before. It is a spicy story with cameo appearances by notable people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King Jr.