BBQ

Taken from The Week magazine 7/29/2005.

Now that summer is in full swing, the smell of burning charcoal once again is wafting across suburban neighborhoods. How did grilling become a national passion?

How popular is barbecuing?
There is a grill, and sometimes two or three, in 76 percent of the households in America. Americans prepare an estimated 3.1 billion backyard cookouts a year—about 39 for every household with a grill. In a country with great quantities of both livestock and space, it was perhaps inevitable that we'd become enamored of roasting great mounds of meat over open fires. "What's amazing about barbecue," says cookbook author Steven Raichlen, "is how deeply embedded it is in the American social fabric." After George Washington laid the cornerstone of the Capitol in 1793, the nation's leaders celebrated by feasting on a 500-pound barbecued ox.

How did the Founders barbecue?
Not over a Weber grill. For most of our history, meat was barbecued over slow-burning log fires, and it was grueling, sweaty work. In the 1920s, one of America's great innovators, Henry Ford, came up with the breakthrough that brought grilling to everyone's backyard. Ford was looking for a creative way to make use of scraps from the sawmill that produced wooden panels and other parts for his Model T's. At the suggestion of his cousin's husband, E.G. Kingsford, and with the help of Thomas Edison, Ford devised a cheap and easy way to burn the wood, compress the ashes, and glue it into charcoal briquets. Within a few years, Ford was selling 100 tons of Ford Charcoal Briquettes a year at Ford car dealerships. Armed with bagged briquettes from what would later be known as the Kingsford Charcoal Co., Americans started venturing into their yards to cook.

When did grilling become so popular?
After World War II. As millions of returning veterans married and started families, vast new subdivisions sprung up outside the cities, with backyards fit for lounging, neighborhood get-togethers—and grilling. Up to then, cooking was largely women's work. But in the 1950s, cookbooks began coaxing dads into aprons by assuring them that grilling meat was a manly act. The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook said that the suburban male flipping backyard burgers was the modern equivalent of a caveman charring a "saber-tooth tiger steak." Life magazine's Picture Cook Book , published in 1958, urged men to let their wives handle "a delicate dish or a fancy pie," but insisted, "Steak is a man's job." The clincher may have been the frequent pictures of then-President Dwight Eisenhower with barbecue fork in hand, grilling steaks.

Is grilling still a manly activity?
Not entirely, but that idea is fairly well entrenched in the male psyche. Today, 66 percent of barbecuers are men, and they buy most of the grills. But even the prehistoric urge to cook animal flesh over flames has proved no match for the allure of labor-saving, modern technology: Last year, 8.7 million of the 14.4 million grills sold in the U.S. were fueled by gas.

Why the change?
Gas grills are ready to cook with the turn of a dial, and leave no messy ashes to clean up. But to true aficionados the mere thought of cooking with propane is heresy. The very word "barbecue," according to one theory, comes from the Taíno Indian word barabicu, meaning a sacred fire pit. The Taínos, whom Christopher Columbus encountered on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, placed meats on a platform made of sticks, and burned logs on the ground underneath. According to a competing account, the word "barbecue" came from a technique devised by French buccaneers who cooked wild goats and hogs whole from beard to tail, or barbe à queue. No matter which etymology you buy, though, barbecuing meat is not the same as simply grilling it.

What's the difference?
Grilling involves cooking meat directly over high heat, requiring little skill or time. True barbecuing is a painstaking process. First, the cook rubs the meat with peppers and other spices. The smoldering coals go on one side of the grill, the meat on the other. Close the lid, and a chimney draws heat and smoke over the meat, cooking at temperatures between 175 and 225 degrees. The fire must be lovingly tended for hours, as the gentle heat slowly turns the meat tender. In the U.S., the tradition began in the South, where planters with contacts in the Caribbean imported the technique. In the South, barbecue was, and is, pork.

Why pork?
Southern colonists found it easy to raise pigs, which thrived rooting around for their own food. Before the Civil War, Southerners ate 5 pounds of pork for every pound of beef. As the barbecue tradition spread, distinct variations developed from region to region and state to state, depending on the availability of livestock and spices. "Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses," John Shelton Reed says in his essay Barbecue Sociology: The Meat of the Matter. "Drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes."

How different can barbecue be?
Be careful where you ask such questions. In South Carolina, barbecuing (the verb) produces barbecue (the noun), which is a mustard-laced pile of shredded pork. Order it across the state line in North Carolina and the mustard flavor will be missing, replaced by the unmistakable bite of pepper and vinegar. The pork in Kansas City—which is Mecca to one breed of barbecue lover—comes slathered in the local tangy, tomato-based sauce. Go to Memphis and the tomato flavor is tweaked with Worcestershire. In Texas, where cattle is king, barbecue is beef, usually brisket. In all these places, however, barbecuing is a sacred experience, not to be taken lightly. "Grilling, broiling, barbecuing—whatever you call it—is an art," author James Beard once wrote. It is not so much "a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach."