What I’m most afraid of, besides the conjunction of the terms “comeback” and “Michael Bolton,” is that after travelling hundreds of miles just to eat at a barbecue, I will somehow get the order wrong. When I enter Abe’s Bar-B-Q in Clarksdale, Miss., slightly weak in the knees from the in­tense waft of hickory, I look up at the menu and sense that I should just order the Big Abe Sandwich, and, if that goes well, I’ll just have another. I try to listen to how the locals queued up before me do it, but they’re all speaking a barbecue shorthand, drawling out phrases like “gimme a brown plate,” which I think I understand, but I don’t want to embarrass myself when my turn comes.

Unfortunately, my ability to embarrass myself, and the company I’m in, is a much stronger force than the customs of local cuisine and the friendly people who serve it. Let me just say that at my table, excited for the blessings I am about to receive, I directly cause a loud incident that involves sweet tea, and we’ll leave it at that.

The Big Abe, of course, satisfies me in ways that you’d think used to involve an exchange of cash in Times Square. But, as is the case for me in so many smokehouse parlours in the “pork triangle” of the Deep South, happiness of the first order is fleeting. I’m so hungry, I dispense with that Big Abe Sandwich in a way that has me counting my fingers afterwards. But, the first order being so successful, maybe with a second try, I can approximate the concept of “savouring” and, for once, confidently elucidate on what professional foodies call “flavour melding.”

Of course, such sophistication may seem far off when I’m busy at my little table and all I can manage to say is “barbecue – good!” But I am a man of a refined ambition that goes well beyond finding a tractor cap that extols the virtues of the Second Amendment. After all, I’ve successfully faked being knowledgeable about wine with the use of just three words: plummy, leathery and hot. You can’t fake the important things in life – like knowing the happy place where the wine goes to or where to find good ’q, for that matter.

Abe’s is the kind of place where locals still go and where, it seems to me, they all know each other. Everybody talks congenially about the weather and about what’s going on at work. “You finished with that job up to Hushpuckena, Bill?” That kind of thing. Nobody mentions flavour melding. It’s the Deep South, so people tend not to be stuck up. They’ll leave you alone if you want, and by that I mean people will always just talk to you. “What part of New York you from?” they’ll ask when they hear my accent, and I always gladly say, “You know, the upstate part – the more Canadian part of New York.” Abe’s is not some reformed tourist trap but an ordinary-looking diner with wood-panelled walls and the obligatory pinned-up testimonials from travelling musicians who, I like to believe, are all aware of the sublime joy of ribs for breakfast.