Peace, Love, & Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue [Paperback]

Mike Mills (Author), Amy Mills Tunnicliffe (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 28, 2005

A one-of-a-kind collection of recipes, photographs, and behind-the-scenes stories from legendary pitmaster Mike Mills.

In this unique combination of cookbook, memoir, and travelogue, Mike Mills, the unrivalled king of barbecue, shares his passion for America's favorite cuisine--its intense smoky flavors, its lore and traditions, and its wild cast of characters.

Through conversational anecdotes and black-and-white photographs, readers meet a diverse circle of colleagues and friends and join Mills in a behind-the-scenes tour of the barbecue contest circuit, with stops at some of the best "shrines, shacks, joints, and right-respectable restaurants."

Also included are prizewinning recipes that have earned Mills his fame and fortune as a barbecue maestro. These 100 recipes will enable anyone with a grill to achieve champion barbecue flavor right in their own backyard. The selection features Mills' own secret concoctions and treasured family recipes as well as choice contributions from his pitmaster friends, and it covers all manner of barbecued meat and fish, sauces and dry rubs, as well as the sides, soups, and down-home sweets that complete any great barbecue feast.

With its folksy, fun-loving tone and its unique insider's take on a hugely popular--and deeply American--subject, this volume will appeal to barbecue lovers, food mavens, and cooks of all stripes.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

PEACE, LOVE, and BARBECUE is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes journey into the world of barbecue with Grand World Champion pitmaster Mike Mills as your guide. Join Mike and his barbecue buddies--a veritable Who's Who of Barbecue--as they spin a few tales, spill their secrets, and reluctantly part with their prize-winning recipes.

About the Author

In the world of barbecue, champion pitmaster Mike Mills is affectionately knowon as "The Legend." He presides over the pits at his six nationally acclaimed 17th Street Bar & Grill restaurants in Southern Illinois and four Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas. In the early 1990s he was co-captain of the Apple City Barbecue team, one of the most celebrated teams ever on the circuit. He has the distinction of being the only three-time Grand World Champion at Memphis in May, otherwise known as the Super Bowl of Swine. He is also the barbecue guru and a partner at Blue Smoke restaurant in New York City.

Amy Mills Tunnicliffe, daughter of Mike, is a writer and sought-after professional speaker. She lives near Boston with her two children. She always wanted to be a glamorous heiress. Little did she dream her fortune would lie in barbecue.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books (April 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594861099
• ISBN-13: 978-1594861093
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > Essays
  • #67 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Outdoor Cooking > Barbecuing & Grilling

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great BBQ Book July 21, 2005

By Gerry Dawes

Format:Paperback

Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue

Mike Mills & Amy Mills Tunicliffe

A Book Report by Gerry Dawes (Appeared in Food Arts magazine.)

This is a book report, not a review. I wrote the June 2004 Food Arts Silver Spoon Award piece about Mike Mills, the Southern Illinois Barbecue Legend Mike Mills, who, with his Apple City Barbecue Team won the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest more times (three, four in ribs) than any team in history. Mills has long been a friend of mine and still is, despite the outright lies he told about me and a lot of other people to his daughter, Amy Mills Tunicliffe, who wrote her father's story's in the remarkable, but veracity-challenged Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue.

At least I am in good company. Bill Clinton, Calvin Trillin, Tom Viertel (producer of The Producers, Smokey Joe's Café, Driving Miss Daisy), the New York super-restaurateur Danny Meyer, Chef Michael Romano and star Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, along with most of the `cue superstars world are all in this book on down-home and championship circuit barbecue. In the foreword, Meyer, Mills's partner in New York's Blue Smoke Barbecue joint, wrote a pean to pig and to Mills. The exalted Vogue food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote the saucy introduction calling Mills "one of the greatest barbecue cooks of all time," once wrote an article claiming that Mills's Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas are his favorites, only after Nobu.

While this indispensable guide to American barbecue could have been just that, a guide, it is much more. It is a loving (the "Love" in the title is no tall tale or outright lie) look at the Who's Who of American Barbecue as seen through the eyes of this country's greatest barbecue hero, who, like some starry-eyed youngster (Mills is in his 60s), often refers to these barbecue legends, his peers, as "awesome."

Mills takes us on visits to all the great barbecue legends of the south (and a few in the north as well), eating their barbecue,"visiting" with them, letting them tell their stories, and then trying to pry cooking and recipe "secrets" out of them, which is no easy task since they will sometimes tell him the ingredients (usually minus the "secret"), but they often won't give him the recipe quantities. (Mills plays this game himself; he told Steingarten that he would give him the recipe for Mills's celebrated 17th St. Bar & Grill `Magic Dust' Dry Rub, but then he said, "I would have to kill you.")

Besides picking pork, Mills picks the brains of such American Barbecue superstars as Don McLemore and Chris Lilly at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q (Decatur, Alabama); Desiree Robinson at Cozy Corner (Memphis); Billy Bones Wall (Midland, Michigan); Vencil Mares, The Taylor Café (Taylor, Texas); Paul Kirk, The Baron of Barbecue (Kansas City, Missouri); Wayne Monk, Lexington Barbecue (Lexington, North Carolina); the legendary El Mitchell, Mitchell's Ribs, Chicken & BBQ (Wilson, North Carolina) and many others. The story about Rick Schmidt, the owner of Kreuz ("Krites," Lockhart, Texas), ceremoniously moving-along a road thronged with his loyal barbecue customers-the hot coals, which have never been allowed to got out, from the old family establishment to his new place after a family feud with his sister is alone worth the price of this paperback book.

There are "secret' barbecue recipes galore-Mama Faye's Home Style Potato Salad, 17th Street's Tangy Pit Beans, Big Bob Gibson's White Sauce, Wilber Shirley's Hush Puppies, Eades Family Banana Pudding and Strip and Go Naked Punch (don't ask!)-enough to open the world's greatest barbecue joint. However, if you did, several somebodies would have to kill you and, besides, you would be too disabled by the hernia you would get from lugging in the 100-pound sack of sugar it would take to make all these sauces, potato salad, salad dressings and iced tea, many of which call for a minimum of two cups of sugar, refined white sugar, by long-standing habit.

The last chapter is devoted to a good nuts-and-bolts barbecue tips and a terrific list of this country's greatest real barbecue joints, but he whole book is full of Mike Mills's indispensable barbecue (and life) wisdom, practical tips, recipes and, indeed, secrets like my Gerry's World's Finest Barbecue-Friendly Margaritas. It seems that one day down at Mike's 17th Street Bar & Grill in Murphysboro, Southern Illinois, he induced me to give him my Andalucian Sangria Recipes, then after we drank two pitchers of white and red sangria, he wormed the margarita recipe out of me. However, I didn't give him the "secret" twist that I put in them, otherwise I would have had to kill him.

But, on second thought, I couldn't kill him. He might have another great book like Peace, Love and Barbecue in him. And I certainly wouldn't want to deprive the world of that.

The book is awesome.

- The End -

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book! October 22, 2005

By Bradley D. Horton

Format:Paperback

I really enjoyed this book...I own a smoker and have used the Apple City Ribs recipe and the Chile recipe (non-healthy version) and both were tasty...my only question is whether the author listed the true ingredients for his "magic dust"...after all, his mother didn't want him to give away the family secret...hmmmm....

***UPDATE!! (6/11/06): Ok, on a discussion board someone said they actually got an answer to my question from the author...he DID give us the dust recipe his mother said to protect BUT his feeling is that it will be hard to duplicate his quality because of the unique QUALITIES of each dust ingredient he uses.

A great book for any barbecue (not grilling) fan!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars not the real magic dust recipe April 6, 2009

By N.R.

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is pretty good, the best of the two books I ordered. The main reason I ordered this book was to get the recipe for "magic dust" that Mills is famous for. So I put some together and put the rub on some ribs I then smoked the next day... Not great. Then I turn on food network and what do I see? Food Network is proclaiming Mills as having the best ribs in the country due to his magic dust that has 16 different spices in it. The "magic dust" in this book only has 8. It is orange due to the extremely large amount of paprika where the real magic dust was a yellowish color. The book is okay, but dont believe the hype that he gives away any secrete recipes, most of the recipes you could think of yourself (put pulled pork in a baked potato or a stuffed pepper)