a person · SCRobert F. Moss

A food writer and historian in Charleston — a Furman graduate with a doctorate in English from the University of South Carolina — who is contributing barbecue editor for Southern Living and was restaurant critic for the Post and Courier. Barbecue: The History of an American Institution (University of Alabama Press, 2010; revised and expanded 2020) is a documentary history of the subject built from newspapers, letters, diaries and travel narratives; Barbecue Lover's the Carolinas (2015) is his guide to both states. He counts South Carolina's sauces as two, mustard and vinegar, where the state's association counts four.

Moss's history reads the colonial and early-republic barbecue out of the record: whole hogs cooked as a ritual in the British colonies by the eighteenth century, the communal feast spreading from Virginia into the Carolinas in the mid-1700s, the political barbecue as an institution of the new republic, and the restaurants of the twentieth century. The second edition, published October 6, 2020, added colonial material, profiles of early restaurateurs and African American cooks, and a final chapter, 'The Second Golden Age of Barbecue', on the wood-cooked places that opened across the country in the 2010s. On South Carolina hash he went to the newspapers — 'rich hash' at a barbecue at Matthews' Spring, in the Abbeville Press and Banner of 1854 — and traced the name to haslet, the old word for the viscera: the head, liver and lights the whole hog left behind. When the Post and Courier reported in 2020 that hash was fading, he answered in Southern Living that new places were putting it on their menus, and used the recently closed Cannon's in Little Mountain as his example of the Midlands' mustard-yellow kind. He has tested Summerville's claim to sweet tea (2013) and told the story of hushpuppies (2023). When John Shelton Reed's campaign asked in 2014 for any regulation that forbade wood cooking in North Carolina, Moss looked in South Carolina and reported in the Columbia Free Times that there was none there either. He reviewed Rien Fertel's The One True Barbecue for Southern Living in 2016. His other books are Southern Spirits (2016), The Lost Southern Chefs (University of Georgia Press, 2022) and The Roffignac (LSU Press, 2024).

Based in Charleston; contributing barbecue editor for Southern Living and a frequent contributor to Charleston Magazine, Garden & Gun, Serious Eats and The Local Palate. His site, robertfmoss.com, carries his features on hash, hushpuppies and the revised history.