Writers who take on the American pastime of barbecuing often fall back on the old cliché of comparing it to a religion.
If so, it’s possibly the only religion in which every believer gets to make up all his or her own commandments.
To some, barbecuing is grilling over flame. To others, it’s slow-roasting over smoldering coals. You can use sauce, or a spice rub, or just smoke. You can even fearlessly flirt with heresy by grilling vegetables instead of meat.
For that matter, you can go to a barbecue, chew on coleslaw and play with the kids and the dogs without giving the grill a second thought.
The one constant about the word is that when you say it to people, their faces light up.
Prod them gently, just a little, and even the shy ones start talking about their triumphs. Like when one woman’s friends came to a cookout on her boat, and were so blown away by the food that they went out and bought the exact same grill she uses, but it just wasn’t the same.
"Because of it's simplicity, barbecuing is the most democratic of all arts. Everyone has a chance to be a master."
Or the couple who’s well-off enough to winter at an outdoor resort in Southern California – but grills the rest of the year on a homemade tripod over an open bed of wood coals.
Because of its simplicity, barbecuing is the most democratic of all arts. Everyone has a chance to be a master. And because applying flame to flesh is sustenance at its most primal, it’s a way to pay our respects to where we came from without, you know, having to get all maudlin about it.
If barbecue is a religion, the High Mass is celebrated one weekend a year in cities across the country, when the town square clogs with people, and the air thickens with the sweet, greasy smell of cooked animal.
The big cookout contests are Zen-like blends of baroque exactitude and beer-swilling cheerfulness, where groups of ordinary guys stay up all night maintaining a perfect balance of heat and spice to make a chunk of meat taste just a little bit better than chunks of meat cooked by 100 other groups of ordinary guys.
Maybe it’s the nature of the species. Cooking over fire is as uncomplicated as it gets.
Leave it to humans to make it as complicated as possible – and, in America, to make it the cornerstone of one of our most beloved community rituals.
What is it?
So what the heck does the word “barbecue” mean, anyway?
RVers barbecue. They host barbecues, and they cook on barbecue grills. But technically, grilling and barbecuing are two completely different styles of cooking. As Grilling for Dummies states: “Barbecuing is the technique of indirectly and slowly cooking large cuts of meat for a long period of time, over low heat and with lots of hot smoke. Compare this to direct grilling, which cooks small, tender pieces of food at higher temperatures for shorter grilling times. You may say that the two techniques are almost opposites.”
Another conundrum: How do you spell “barbecue”? Webster’s New World College Dictionary is clear that the most accepted spelling is the one you just read. But the dictionary has done little to stem the torrent of different spellings on thousands of restaurant signs and bottle labels across the country, from “barbeque” to “BBQ.” “Bar-B-Que” even made it into the dictionary. So did “Bar-B-Q.”
Most sources agree that the word “barbecue” comes from the Caribbean. Consult old Webster’s again, and you’ll find that the word comes from the American-Spanish term “barbacoa,” which is derived from an Arawak word meaning, literally, “framework of sticks.”
The Spanish learned the word, and the practice of slow-roasting with smoke, from Carib Indians after explorers landed in the West Indies.
There’s more. In a 1996 piece for Natural History magazine, food writer Robb Walsh says that the French used the word “boucan” as a synonym for the Carib word “babracot.” Certain English and French outlaws in the mid-1600s garnered fame as barbecue experts before moving on to shadier pursuits. Thus, they were called “boucaniers”… or, in English, “buccaneers.” (So the next time the Tampa Bay professional football team roasts someone on the gridiron, you have a great opportunity to impress your friends with an obscure pun.)
Even that isn’t quite the last word. One theory holds that “barbecue” is descended, somehow, from the French phrase “barbe à queue,” or “beard to tail.” Because the animal is roasted whole, get it? But barbecue scholars pooh-pooh this idea, asserts Walsh. Which leaves us with only one more question: Exactly what university degrees do you need to earn to become a “barbecue scholar”?
Styles
The Founding Fathers needed a constitution to unite 13 colonies. Lincoln called out the Union Army to keep the Deep South under the Stars and Stripes.
No power on this earth could force 50 states to agree on one style of barbecue cooking. It’s somehow appropriate that this distinctly American style of cuisine, in the best democratic tradition, has inspired such diversity.
For many Carolinians, barbecue is slow-cooked pork shoulder pulled off the bone after cooking, topped with spicy sauce, and served in a sandwich.
"It's... appropriate that this distinctly American style of cuisine, in the best democratic tradition, has inspired such diversity."
The beef brisket is associated with Texas, pork ribs with Memphis, mutton with Colorado and northwestern Kentucky, burnt brisket ends with “Kansauce” City, and pork with the South.
Tastes in sauce are just as distinctive. It can be vinegar-based, like in North Carolina, or yellow-mustard, like in South Carolina, or white, like at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Alabama. Memphis residents like their ribs wet with a tomato-based sauce or dry with a spice rub.
Texas is big enough, and barbecue-crazy enough, to embody its own divisions. North Texans like their sauce sweet; southerners like it spicier. In central Texas, the “Barbecue Belt,” they often don’t use sauce at all.
Barbecue sauces in recipe books and at the more intense cookout contests can incorporate just about every flavor imaginable, from apricot to shrimp.
Steven Raichlen, author of The Barbecue Bible, declares Kansas City the barbecue capital of the nation. In a 1996 story published in National Geographic Traveler, he uses local legends to trace the history of K.C. barbecue back to the late 1920s, when Henry Perry, an African-American man living in a streetcar barn, sold cooked meat wrapped in newspaper. Barbecue stayed in urban and black neighborhoods of Kansas City until the 1960s, he says.
Other researchers say American barbecue originated in Southern “slave culture,” where people were often forced to make do with throwaway pieces of meat like jowls and ribs.
Even today, when Midwesterners and West Coasters reminisce fondly about their first or best taste of real barbecue, it often came from an African-American neighborhood.
Barbecue-style cuisine can be found all over the globe. Charcoal grills in the yakitori parlors of Japan cook up mushrooms and quail eggs; Brazilians dine on fire-cooked meat at churrascarias.
The Cookoff
Mostly, barbecue is a humble enterprise conducted in backyards and campgrounds. But there is another extreme, where teams with wild names and wilder sauces duke it out on smoky campgrounds in big regional cookouts.
No barbecue in the country is bigger than Houston’s own Mardi Gras, the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest, held every February at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo in the shadow of the Astrodome.
How big is big? The barbecue can be smelled for miles. “You smell like barbecue for about three weeks afterward,” says Skip Wagner, who oversees the Bar-B-Que as assistant general manager of operations for the Livestock Show. “If you like it, it’s great.”
Last year, 176,290 people came to the three-day event, which includes carnival rides, stage shows, and food booths. The barbecuers are the stars of the show. About 350 teams competed last year, with names like “Metro 3 Poke-In-Da-Eye” and “DDS Bandits and Desperados.”
And they get as creative with their pits as they do with their recipes. A team sponsored by Continental Airlines had a pit gussied up like an airplane. Other pits are decked out as Old West buildings, fire engines, covered wagons, and even waste disposal trucks (presumably not a commentary on the meat inside).
“It’s sort of the same things that make Mardi Gras appealing,” Wagner says. “There’s a lot of beer being drunk, a lot of barbecue being eaten.”
The beer is cheap, too, he adds: only two bucks a can.
Ironically, the event is so big that you can’t expect to sample a lot of the contestants’ barbecue. Each teamdecides whether to share its meat with the public. Some do, and some don’t. You do get a free brisket sandwich, but from meat that isn’t in the contest.
The 28th annual event is scheduled for Feb. 8-10, 2001. There is no RV parking on the grounds, so be prepared to settle in elsewhere. |
