Barbecue: Born in the hands of cowboys
Do you know what a barbecue is? You sure do! Well, barbecue is not a type of food, rather, it’s a cooking method. It involves the process of grilling food, especially raw meat such as chicken, pork or beef over a fireplace or a pit that is traditionally placed outdoors and heated using hot charcoal. In fact, if you have ever come upon the saying ‘as long as there’s been fire, humans have been cooking over it’ is true majorly because of barbecue. But the idea of barbecue didn’t emerge until the 19th century.
Cowboys first came up with the idea of barbecue
In the 19th century, the cowboy culture was at its peak in the USA with more people joining the profession to mind cattle. The people who hired the cowboys and were in charge of the whole operation ensured that they didn’t get overweight as it could affect the job, they apprehended. As a result, they allotted less than perfect share of meat to the cowboys as part of their everyday ration. Additionally, the meat provided to them was also uncooked. This is when the cowboys found a way out. They set up a firepit and started smoking the meat over indirect heat from the high-smoke fuels. Their aim was to improve the quality of meat and make it ready-to-be-eaten. All it needed was five to seven hours of slow cooking in order to become tender. And the rest, as they say, is history. The method soon became popular all across USA and in turn the world.
Decoding the term ‘barbecue’
While the method of cooking was born in the USA, the term ‘barbecue’ should be credited to the Caribbean islanders. As it happened, around the same time that the American cowboys were busy inventing the technique, native tribes in the West Indian Island Hispaniola called Arawakan Indians were also cooking and drying meat over an apparatus they called ‘barbacoa.’ Can you guess where we are going with this? That’s right, it was just a matter of time that ‘barbacoa’ was Americanised into ‘barbecue.’
Wait, this isn’t where the tale ends. Can it happen that there’s discussion of food and the Frenchmen won’t get involved? No, right? This isn’t an exception either. Turns out, the French often claim that the word ‘barbecue’ dates back to medieval France and is a contraction of the expression ‘barbe-a-queue’ meaning ‘from the beard to the tail.’ It referred to the process of how an entire animal was first speared from top to bottom before being cooked over a fireplace.
From wood to charcoal
Today, the method of barbecue is identified with heating over charcoal fire. However, for centuries, wood was the fuel of choice, including the ones who often took part in barbecue contests across USA. Wood from trees such as mesquite, apply, cherry and hickory were preferred for their added flavours and aroma. However, just like everything else, wood too was replaced by the more modern charcoal towards the late 19th century. In fact, one of the original backyard barbecuers named Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer hailing from Pennsylvania patented a firepit equipped with charcoal briquettes in 1897. This became quite a rage by the early 20th century and during the World War I and special kinds of barbecues were being mass-produced using compacted squares of charcoal.