The Color Granite

Before I get too far afield: Pictured here is a close-up of the dry rub on one of our soul food kitchen’s bbq briskets prior to slow-cooking. One of my old roommate’s from college, Moose (yes, he was actually called Moose), often liked to say that “my father and I are inordinately fond of bourbon.” I loved that: inordinately fond. Well, I’m inordinately fond of the color of our bbq brisket rub. And it’s only in the process of sitting down and writing about this right now have I figured out why: It reminds me of granite.

This is a recurring theme of so many of my mini-essays, the ways in which likes and dislikes, smells and sounds, and textures, etc. get embedded into us unconsciously at an early age. Why? How? To what end? All questions above my pay grade. What I do know are the following “factoids.”

At a fairly early age, I started a rock collection. Nothing fancy. A bit of quartz. Gypsum. Sandstone. Feldspar. Weird. Until the typing of these words right now, I probably haven’t draw upon that vocabulary since I was 8. Goes to show you how embedded this stuff can get. Anyway, one of the rocks in my rock collection was granite.

I loved granite as a kid. First of all, it was unmistakable. No way to miss it, with its gaudy mix of blacks, greys, reds, and whites. Secondly, granite in Georgia was everywhere. Kinda like a Coke machine. You saw it everywhere. The pater familia of the local geology, as it were. Finally, it was local and hence everyman’s stone. Every once in a blue moon, you might visit a school friend in his new house, and the house would be decked out in some Italian marble or whatever. Tacky as hell. Granite was good enough for me. A democratic stone. Local. A stone for the everyman.

So here I am, decades later, trying to make sense out of the particular bbq rub our soul food kitchen uses to grill our briskets. I tried dozens of things, eventually settling on a combination of salt (white and grey), pepper (black and grey), and paprika (red), which when combined really do evoke my childhood affinity for granite.

Chance? A decision based entirely on the taste of the rub? I’m not so sure. Weird, hunh? At least it is to me.