There is a queue at six in the morning outside a barbecue restaurant in Austin, Texas, that runs for five hours, and the people in it are waiting for a brisket with the fat left on, cooked for eighteen hours over oak by a man who has said the fat is the whole point. Aaron Franklin opened in a trailer in 2009 and has been named the best barbecue in America by everyone who hands out that title. The food is Texas, which means beef, and the beef is the brisket: the whole chest muscle of a steer, twelve to fifteen pounds, with a cap of white fat an inch thick across the top, which most of the country would trim off and throw away. Franklin trims it to a quarter inch and leaves it, and as the brisket sits in the smoke the fat renders down through the meat for most of a day, until the lean is soaked and the cap is a soft dark bark. He has written that the fat is what carries the smoke and the salt, and that a lean brisket is a waste of a cow. He went on television in a cap and a T-shirt and taught the technique to a nation that had been told for forty years to buy the lean cut, and the nation drove to Austin. People fly in. They bring chairs. They sell out by one in the afternoon, every day, and he has never once sold a turkey breast as a substitute. The thing on the chopping block, sliced thick, glistening, with the fat the colour of amber and the crust black, is the oldest food in Texas: a cheap tough cut of the animal, made glorious by heat and time and nothing else. There is white bread on the side and a pickle, and that is the meal. The leaflet says to trim the visible fat. Five hundred people a day stand in the Texas sun for the man who ignores it.