Barbecue

• 1. Introduction

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  Barbecue first shows up as a noun in 1697, and it was a place to sleep. The English buccaneer William Dampier wrote that his party lay down for a night upon their "Borbecu's, or frames of Sticks". Three centuries later, the word names a cooking method, the equipment, a whole family of cuisines, and the gathering where the food is eaten. Australians and New Zealanders shorten it to barbie or barby, and much of the world writes it BBQ. How did a word for a frame of sticks come to mean all of this? Why did European writers once attach the idea of savagery to it? And what, exactly, separates barbecuing from grilling, when a cook in Memphis, a cook in Kansas City and a cook in Britain would each answer differently?

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• 2. Word Roots

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  The English word barbecue, along with its cousins in other languages, descends from the Spanish barbacoa, and that word was borrowed from the Taíno. Etymologists believe it traces back to barabicu, found in the language of the Arawak people of the Caribbean and the Timucua people of Florida. The Oxford English Dictionary follows it to Hispaniola and renders it as a "framework of sticks set upon posts". Linguists think the word travelled from Spanish into Portuguese, then French, and finally English.

  A tidier explanation circulates in kitchens. It claims the word comes from the French phrase barbe à queue, meaning "from beard to tail", supposedly describing a whole animal turning on a spit. Academic etymology does not support this origin.

  Spelling has become its own quarrel. Most countries write barbecue, while barbeque turns up now and then in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Merriam-Webster lists barbeque as a variant. The Oxford Dictionaries, by contrast, call it a misspelling that is not accepted in standard English and is best avoided.

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• 3. Paper Trail

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  In 1492 Columbus landed in the Americas, and the Spaniards who followed apparently found the Taíno roasting meat on a wooden framework set over a fire. The same structure kept food stored off the ground. Flames and smoke rose around the meat and gave it a particular flavor. The Spaniards called the framework a barbacoa.

  The explorer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés is credited with the first printed use of barbacoa in Spain, in 1526.

  English took the word up in 1648, in the form barbacado. A tract on the province of New Albion, written under the name of the supposed Beauchamp Plantagenet, reported that "the Indians in stead of salt doe barbecado or dry and smoak fish".

  The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1661 as the first recorded use in the modern form, in Edmund Hickeringill's Jamaica Viewed. The word surfaces again in 1672 in the writings of John Lederer, who had travelled the North American southeast in 1669-1670.

  By the 1730s it had reached New England, where Puritans knew the term. On the 4th of November 1731, Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut, wrote in his diary: "I was at Madm Winthrops at an Entertainment, or Treat of Colln Colonel or Samll Brownes a Barbaqued."

  Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary pinned the word to one animal. It defined the verb as "a term for dressing a whole hog" and the noun as "a hog dressed whole".

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• 4. Earth Ovens

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  A hole in the ground, filled with burning logs and lined with stones, marks a second kind of barbacoa. The stones soak up heat and hold it. Large cuts of meat, often a whole goat or lamb and often wrapped in leaves, are set above a pot so the juices collect for a broth.

  The cook then covers the meat with maguey leaves and coal and sets the pile alight. The process takes a few hours.

  The African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano described this method in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. On his journeys to Cabo Gracias a Dios on the Mosquito Coast, he watched the Miskito people, whom he called the "Mosquito people", roast alligators this way.

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• 5. Savage Associations

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  The phrase "savage connotations" captures what happened when Europeans met a word that came from native groups. They linked barbecue with barbarians. Hickeringill's Jamaica Viewed strengthened the link with its descriptions of cannibalism, including the line "Some are slain, And their flesh forthwith Barbacu'd and eat".

  According to the scholar Andrew Warnes, there is very little proof that Hickeringill's tale of cannibalism in the Caribbean is even remotely true.

  Theodor de Bry's Great Voyages offers another false picture of cannibal barbecues. Warnes argues that such images "present smoke cookery as a custom quintessential to an underlying savagery", one that carries a potential for "cannibalistic violence".

  The reputation has since turned almost completely around. Today, people in the United States associate barbecue with "classic Americana".

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• 6. Heat and Smoke

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  Somewhere between 240 and 280 F lies the original barbecue technique. Cooking with smoke at those low temperatures takes several hours, and it is known as smoking. Smoking means flavoring, cooking or preserving food with smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood. Meat and fish are the usual choices. Cheeses, vegetables, nuts and even ingredients for beer, including smoked beer, are smoked too.

  Grilling sits at the other extreme, with a hot fire above 500 F and a cooking time of a few minutes. Dry heat reaches the food from above or below. Outside the United States, this is the most common way to cook classic barbecue foods. Both techniques can run on wood, charcoal, gas, electricity or pellets.

  The vocabulary flips from country to country. In American usage, grilling is fast and hot. A typical American home grill sets food on a grate directly over hot charcoal. In an American barbecue, the coals are spread to the sides or sit well away from the grate.

  British usage reverses the terms. There, barbecuing means fast cooking directly over high heat, while grilling means cooking under a source of moderate-to-high heat, which Americans call broiling. South America has its own versions in the southern Brazilian churrasco and the Southern Cone asado.

  Some argue that barbecue is simply a kind of grilling, done slowly over low heat. In practice, the lines blur. Nobody agrees where low heat ends and high heat begins. Many champion cooks now cook beef brisket hotter than was traditional.

  The word has even left the cookout entirely. It now names a flavor, most prominently on potato chips.

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• 7. Sauce Map

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  In the Southeastern United States, the word barbecue is used mostly as a noun for roast pork. In the Southwestern states, cuts of beef are often what goes on the fire. The sauces differ even more sharply across the South.

  South Carolina is the only state that traditionally offers all four recognized sauces. They are mustard-based, vinegar-based, and light and heavy tomato-based.

  North Carolina divides itself by region. The east uses a vinegar sauce. The center of the state favors Lexington-style barbecue, built on ketchup and vinegar. The west uses a heavier ketchup base.

  Memphis is best known for tomato-based and vinegar-based sauces. In some Memphis establishments, and in Kentucky, the meat is rubbed with dry seasoning and smoked over hickory wood without sauce. The finished barbecue arrives with sauce on the side.

  Kansas City barbecue originated in Kansas City, Missouri, in the early 20th century. It covers slow-smoked pork, beef, chicken, turkey, lamb, sausage and sometimes fish, seasoned with a dry rub. The sauce is thick and sweet, made from brown sugar, molasses and tomatoes.

  St. Louis-style barbecue means spare ribs. They are usually grilled, not slow-cooked in smoke. The hallmark is a rectangular, meaty cut with excess cartilage trimmed away for a uniform look. It carries more meat than baby back ribs.

  In recent years, restaurants and diners have experimented with styles from other regions, and the old regional boundaries have blurred.

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• 8. The Braai

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  In South Africa, a braai is an informal gathering around an open fire and a grill, held for any occasion and at any location. The warm weather there encourages outdoor gatherings. People link the braai to earlier generations who gathered around open fires after a hunt, which is part of why it carries such weight as tradition.

  Fuel matters. Gas grills are frowned upon and charcoal is accepted, but wood is seen as the best way to cook the meat. Steel grill grates and campfires are common.

  Guests are expected to bring snacks, drinks and extra meat to eat while the main meal cooks. This potluck habit is called "bring and braai". Cooking over the fire is a bonding experience for fathers and sons, while women prepare salads and other side dishes away from the grill.

  The meat itself can be lamb, steaks, spare ribs, sausages, chicken or fish. A common side dish is mielie pap, also called "Krummel pap", a crumbled cornmeal.

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