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America's Barbeculture: Who Owns It?


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Since we're talking definitions, could anyone explain where the "barbeque = outdoor grilled meat" heresy originated?

I know that it's very naughty to use the word barbeque to mean "food quickly cooked outside over gas or coal". Nevertheless, this is how 99.9% of people here in the UK use the word. If I invited people over for some 'grilling', they would assume either we'd be eating cheese sandwiches from the oven or that I'd tie them to a chair and ask them where they hid the diamonds.

So how is it that a word that US purists apply only to slow-cooked, smoky meat came to be applied to the no-less-honourable but very different tradition of the braai?

I can see this (d)evolve into a very interesting discussion on language and semantics. :laugh:

I'm from NY, and we used to go away for the summer months, and we always had a barbecue. It was before the days of the gas grill, mostly it was charcoal and lighter fluid, hamburgers and hot dogs and steaks (oh my!). I've never heard anybody call it a "cook out," that's an interesting regional difference between NY and Boston, I guess. But there seems to be a crucial difference between having "a barbecue" and having "barbecue."

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Growing up in Pennsylvania, a barbecue was an event where grilled meat was the feature. The food was never referred to as barbecue, except for chicken with barbecue sauce.

"Joe's having a barbecue on Saturday. He's grilling some steaks and chicken on his new Weber. I think he made some good sauce, and that's great, because I love barbecued chicken."

Dean McCord

VarmintBites

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I grew up in the Northeast (Boston) but have roots and spent much time in two major barbeque epicenters (Texas and NC).  According to my childhood memories (the 70s), whenever I heard the word "barbeque" in TX or NC, it meant the real thing.  In Boston, when someone was grilling in the back yard it was called a "cook out."  I never heard the word "barbeque" in Boston.

Right. And it's my contention that this change in the language really took place within the lifetime of most of us here--although maybe in different amounts depending on your region.

Somewhere in the marketing campaigns of Kingsford, perhaps, or in the early marketing campaigns of the gas grill people this crept in. I'm favoring the Kingsford people (although that probably means that it was being used as early as the 1950s and just didn't penetrate until the 1970s) because I see charcoal briquette use as the direct simulation of real barbecue, whereas the gas grills (mostly) just dumped the pretense.

And of course, "BBQ" is just a shortening--possibly for ad copy. I'm thinking that the alternate spelling of "barbeque" might have even followed "BBQ".

Jon Lurie, aka "jhlurie"

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I will say I've had plenty of whole hog barbecue with a prominent smoke flavor -- mine, for example! :smile:

Having never tasted yours -- my great loss! -- let me take a step back to look at the issue of smoke flavor. I find it to be a very difficult flavor to pinpoint and analyze, especially in foods that are "hot smoked" as most barbecue is. In "cold smoked" foods like lox and other fish examples in that style, you can taste a very specific smoke flavor that you probably wouldn't mistake for anything else. But when you get into, for example, a pork shoulder cooked over hardwood coals, a few things start to happen.

First, there are two types of smoke that seem to come up off the coals: one of them is from the wood itself, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of that because by the time you get down to coals your wood is relatively clean-burning; the other smoke source seems to be a mix of smoke and vaporized grease that rises up from the coals after it drips down from the meat. This occurs pretty much regardless of your heat source. It's the whole point of the Weber Gas Grill Flavorizer Bars, and it certainly occurs with charcoal as well. Of course there is some smoke component that comes up off charcoal too -- you will notice in the BABBP photos that there was plenty of charcoal in use, albeit mixed with some wood (though in moments of candor the pitmasters will tell you the wood probably doesn't make a difference).

Second, there is a fine line between the flavor of smoke and certain flavors that arise spontaneously from cooked flesh. Both caramelization and the Maillard reaction offer a bit of smokiness, and meat that actually gets burned tends to have its own smoky component. Beyond that, internally when you cook very large pieces of meat there are interactions going on among the skin, fat, and muscle that over time produce smoky notes.

Remember, barbecue has been grilled. It sits on a grill over heat. And as I mentioned in an earlier post it's not always cooked at particularly low temperatures. In Lockhart, where some of the meats are cooked in just a few hours over coals that are at what most everybody would agree are grilling temperatures, there can't possibly be much smoke flavor attributable to the actual wood. Ditto for whole hog barbecue, where the enterprise of penetrating and permeating that much flesh with smoke would surely take about a million years.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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I never heard the term "grilling" until recently. Back in the 50's and 60's when I was a wet river rat all summer, "barbecuing" was the manly term for building a big fire on the banks of the Newaukum River (western Washington state), hanging a steel grate over it with wires and old steel fence posts and cooking anything at hand--hot dogs, hamburgers, crawdads, trout, steelhead. Mom's idea of providing vegetables was a potato salad and a bowl of radishes. Dad also provided sweet corn ears. It was considered a hot, messy business, but served to not only feed us onsite but dry us off as well. Dad's prize homegrown, grass fed beef was never exposed to the flames, or as he put it, to "ashes and shit."

Looking back in my memory, I cannot imagine the muscular loggers, fishermen, cowboys and Indians of my youth calling this a "cookout" or "grilling." It cracks me up to imagine it! :laugh:

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Mary Baker

Solid Communications

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That's why I found Elie's remarks funny - because he's right that some people think the way he described. If any of you haven't seen footage of Bill Cosby's standup acts in the 60s, check it out some time. He cracked up audiences by making jokes about race relations. Those jokes were funny for much the same reasons - there was truth contained within the humor.

That's how I took his remarks as well--humor, parody, and a bit of potential audience-baiting to get things stirred up.

I can vouch for one thing--his being right on-target about white people crossing the tracks to get their barbecue from black people. When I was a kid in the late '60s-early '70s in Floral City, Florida, the railroad track ran parallel to U.S. 41, and white families, including mine, crossed to the west side of the tracks after Sunday church to go get barbecue from a woman named (appropriately enough) Ollie Spicer. If there were any white people selling barbecue around there, I don't remember them.

Ollie's ribs, as I remember them, were dry-rubbed smoked pork ribs with the sauce on the side, and are probably my barbecue taste touchstone. As she got the raw product from my grandparents' grocery store, I'm imagining there was some barter going on.

All this, as I realized later, is fraught with social significance. I'm going to have to get Elie's book--it sounds interesting.

:smile:

Jamie

See! Antony, that revels long o' nights,

Is notwithstanding up.

Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene ii

biowebsite

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I'll have to respectfully disagree, Fat Guy. First, Ed Mitchell's approach is to start his hogs at a much higher temperature than most recommend. If I recall correctly, he gets his cookers up to about 300F, which is at least 60-80 degrees too high in my book. Second, he cooks with a combination of charcoal and hickory chips.

The purists will cook with wood that has not been aged and dried -- "green" wood. Using green hickory or green oak or green pecan ensure a much smokier environment. The cooker is nothing but a glorified smoke chamber. This wood puts out a ton of smoke while not getting very hot, too.

I'm not claiming that the smoke flavor permeates the flesh to the core -- no barbecue every approaches that level of smokiness, and it might be inedible if it did. However, when done properly, you can get the true smokey flavor that is a measure of the wood itself.

Dean McCord

VarmintBites

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Very interesting information here on the etymology of "barbecue." Most interesting and most pertinent to this discussion was the following:

By 1733 the word was being used for an open-air, social gathering featuring the grilling of meat.

--

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Okay, a bit more. The guy on the previous page I posed links to another: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA95/dove/history.html

Here's the explantion of various naming theories there:

The etymology of the term is vague, but the most plausible theory states that the word "barbecue" is a derivative of the West Indian term "barbacoa," which denotes a method of slow-cooking meat over hot coals. Bon Appetit magazine blithely informs its readers that the word comes from an extinct tribe in Guyana who enjoyed "cheerfully spitroasting captured enemies." The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word back to Haiti, and others claim (somewhat implausibly) that "barbecue" actually comes from the French phrase "barbe a queue", meaning "from head to tail." Proponents of this theory point to the whole-hog cooking method espoused by some barbecue chefs. Tar Heel magazine posits that the word "barbecue" comes from a nineteenth century advertisement for a combination whiskey bar, beer hall, pool establishment and purveyor of roast pig, known as the BAR-BEER-CUE-PIG (Bass 313). The most convincing explanation is that the method of roasting meat over powdery coals was picked up from indigenous peoples in the colonial period, and that "barbacoa" became "barbecue" in the lexicon of early settlers.

EDIT - Sam's linked site seems to be a lot more succinct, and has some detail this one doesn't about the Caribbean connection.

It's still not clear where and when the "que" spelling and "BBQ" shortening developed (especially since these sources all call the French "barbe a queue" explanation bullshit). I briefly thought I found some evidence that linked it back to at least the 1940s, but it turned out to be bogus. Again, I'm thinking it could really be a recent development--and maybe tied to the gradual de-barbecueization of barbecue, so to speak.

Edited by jhlurie (log)

Jon Lurie, aka "jhlurie"

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Do many of us remember "barbeque" having the meaning "backyard grilling" back in the 70s?

I do. And, in agreement with cakewalk's post, it was always "having a barbecue," never "having barbecue."

Another memory that goes way back into my childhood in the early 70s is the shop on the southeast corner of 86 St. and Broadway that I believe still has a big sign up saying "Bar-B-Q Rotisserie Chicken" or some very similar formulation of words.

Michael aka "Pan"

 

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Given the source I found above, I think it seems fairly clear that "having a barbeque" is something that goes back several hundred years in the US.

It's still not clear where and when the "que" spelling and "BBQ" shortening developed (especially since these sources all call the French "barbe a queue" explanation bullshit).

I think it's probably a regional thing. I think they've been writing "BBQ" in Texas for a long, long time. Since it is fairly easy to understand how "BBQ" came from "barbecue" (with the "Q" representing the last syllable") my guess is that "barbeque" came from "BBQ."

--

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It predates the 1970s. James Beard's barbecue book came out in the 1950s, and as the Beard Foundation's notes describe it:

These were the barbecue years, when presidents like Ike were photographed at the barbecue grill. Beard’s definition of barbecue and rotisserie cookery was elastic—he included recipes and suggestions for picnic food such as sandwiches, oil-and-garlic sauce for spaghetti (in a chapter on “Serving Sauces”), and “clam chowder for a big party.” This slim volume was an early example of a cookbook genre that remains popular today.

If you run a search in the New York Times archive you will find thousands of pre-1960 uses of the term "barbecue," most of which I think refer to the grilling/cookout concept. For example, from 1941, the headline "New Things in the City Shops: Barbecue Grills and Fittings." From 1931, "Roosevelt to Speak at Barbecue Today." 1928, "NYU Holds Barbecue." All the way back to 1876, "The Great Brooklyn Barbecue."

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Do many of us remember "barbeque" having the meaning "backyard grilling" back in the 70s?

I do. And, in agreement with cakewalk's post, it was always "having a barbecue," never "having barbecue."

Another memory that goes way back into my childhood in the early 70s is the shop on the southeast corner of 86 St. and Broadway that I believe still has a big sign up saying "Bar-B-Q Rotisserie Chicken" or some very similar formulation of words.

Agreed. In our li'l suburb of Phoenix, "having a barbecue" meant having friends over and cooking stuff (marinated flank steak being my favorite) on the grill in the back yard and eating on the patio, most notably on the fourth of July.

A "cookout," however, was done out in the desert or on the beach (after the five-hour drive to San Diego) and involved hot dogs, hamburgers, and marshmallows cooked on sticks over a camp fire.

However, "having barbeque" meant, yanno, bbq beef on a bun doused in sauce in the school cafeteria or something. I don't think I tasted REAL, good bbq until I moved to Kansas City. :blink: Unless the rotisserie-esque chicken at El Pollo Loco counts. Does it?

K

Edited by bergerka (log)

Basil endive parmesan shrimp live

Lobster hamster worchester muenster

Caviar radicchio snow pea scampi

Roquefort meat squirt blue beef red alert

Pork hocs side flank cantaloupe sheep shanks

Provolone flatbread goat's head soup

Gruyere cheese angelhair please

And a vichyssoise and a cabbage and a crawfish claws.

--"Johnny Saucep'n," by Moxy Früvous

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Really one's choice is between inclusive and exclusive definitions of the barbecue culture and its ownership. To me, any group that makes a good faith effort over a period of time to call something having to do with meat and fire "barbecue" is entitled to shares in the barbecue enterprise. Clearly the Southerners own an outsize number of shares because they devote more energy and seriousness to the craft and have the richest traditions, but, sorry, they don't get to define it for Australians.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Given the source I found above, I think it seems fairly clear that "having a barbeque" is something that goes back several hundred years in the US.
It's still not clear where and when the "que" spelling and "BBQ" shortening developed (especially since these sources all call the French "barbe a queue" explanation bullshit).

I think it's probably a regional thing. I think they've been writing "BBQ" in Texas for a long, long time. Since it is fairly easy to understand how "BBQ" came from "barbecue" (with the "Q" representing the last syllable") my guess is that "barbeque" came from "BBQ."

So your theory isn't that different from one I discussed earlier.

Barbecue-->BBQ-->Barbeque

Then again our impression that "I think they've been writing 'BBQ' in Texas for a long, long time" may in fact just be our impression. It may be smoke and mirrors, just like the good old Ranch BQ explanation. Do we really know how long that story has existed? Because the use of "BBQ" might not predate it by all that much--it only takes about a generation or so for people to completely mythologize ANYTHING.

Jon Lurie, aka "jhlurie"

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In many cases, I think that people can mythologize stuff immediately, for that matter, but I'm thinking of non-food examples, so I won't elaborate on them.

Michael aka "Pan"

 

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Paging Will McKinney. Paging Will McKinney.

Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food, defines barbecue as:

meat (or other food) cooked in the open air on a framework over an open fire; or an event incorporating such cooking; or the framework and accompanying apparatus required for this.

    The word comes from the Spanish barbacoa, which in turn had probablecome from a similar word in the Arawak language, denoting a structure on which meat could be dried or roasted. When the word first entered the English language, in the 17th century, it meant a wooden framework such as could be used for storage or sleeping on, without a culinary context. However, by the 18th century it took on the first of its present meanings, and -- at least in the USA -- the second one, too. The third meaning, like the apparatus itself, bacame commonplace in the latter part of the 20th century.

. . . Rivalry between different kinds of barbecue sauce is intense. The whole barbecue scene and the atmospherics surrounding it are considerably affected by a cultural circumstance, to witthe general practice of having men rather than women do the barbecuing.

Which brings up yet another question: why so few women??? Those of you who met all the pitmasters and workers: were there any other women beside the one from Smoki O's?

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Clearly the Southerners own an outsize number of shares because they devote more energy and seriousness to the craft and have the richest traditions, but, sorry, they don't get to define it for Australians.

I understand the French are trying to have the EU classify barbe a queue as an AOC and that from now on Texas BBQ will have to be know as sparkling grilled meats. :smile:

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especially since these sources all call the French "barbe a queue" explanation bullshit

The barbe à queue etymology might have sounded a little more plausible - especially given the Haitian origin - if it had referred to goat rather than pig. ('Course, even then you'd want to remove the barbe before cooking!)

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Every state in the South, and certainly particular regions of some states, have distinct ideas about what real barbecue is. Although the Methods of Cooking -- slow, long, and smoky-- are common, pieces and parts or which meat is acceptable, and yes what sauce is acceptable vary greatly. To someone from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Carolinas beef is not a bbq option. People in TX and in Kansas don't know how to bbq because they think that beef can be bbq'd -- that was made clear during many a bbq discussion with fellow grad students while in AL. We were all from different states in the South with me from TX and another woman from Kansas. And when can't you get your mouth around actual food then the next best thing is to talk about it. I think all our hunger discussions were over bbq, we never tired of it for two years. :laugh:

Around here, Central TX, we have the tomato based sauces, spicy or sweet, and the great "purist" vinegar sauces. I've never seen a mustard based sauce here -- that's for baked beans! :wink:

Judith Love

North of the 30th parallel

One woman very courteously approached me in a grocery store, saying, "Excuse me, but I must ask why you've brought your dog into the store." I told her that Grace is a service dog.... "Excuse me, but you told me that your dog is allowed in the store because she's a service dog. Is she Army or Navy?" Terry Thistlewaite

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Interesting that Paul Kirk's forthcoming barbecue place in New York will, according to the New York Post, offer, in addition to the expected Southern barbecue items, pastrami and Asian-style smoked duck. To a working pitmaster, perhaps these items seem more like barbecue than they do to the writers.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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