A word from the Caribbean
When Spanish explorers reached the Caribbean in the late 1400s and early 1500s, they found the Taíno people cooking and drying food on a frame of green sticks raised over a fire. The Spanish wrote the word down as barbacoa, and it travelled to English as barbecue. Cooking over a flame is as old as humans, but the name came from those islands. So did another word: French hunters on the island of Hispaniola smoked meat on a similar wooden grill called a boucan, and became known as boucaniers. In English they turned into buccaneers, the pirates of the Caribbean.
Low and slow
A BRISKET is a tough cut from the chest of a cow, full of the connective tissue a working muscle needs. Grilled quickly it would be like chewing a shoe. Barbecue pitmasters cook it for twelve hours or more at little more than 100°C, surrounded by SMOKE from smouldering wood. Slowly, the tough tissue melts into gelatine, and the meat becomes soft enough to pull apart. A pink band just under the crust, called the smoke ring, forms where gases from the burning wood react with the meat.
American barbecue changes from region to region. Texas is famous for beef and brisket, Kansas City for thick, sweet, tomato SAUCE, the Carolinas for pork with a sharp vinegar sauce, and Memphis for RIBS rubbed with dry spices before they cook.
Why grilled food tastes different
The brown crust on a STEAK or a BURGER PATTY comes from the Maillard reaction, named after the French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, who described it in 1912. Above about 140°C, sugars and proteins in the food react to make hundreds of new flavour and smell chemicals, the same reaction that browns toast and roasts coffee. Boiled meat never gets hot enough, so it stays grey. The stripes on GRILLED food are the places where it touched the hottest bars of the GRILL.
CHARCOAL is wood that has been heated with very little air, which drives off the water and gases and leaves almost pure carbon. It burns hotter and cleaner than wood. The lumps called briquettes were popularised in the 1920s by Henry Ford, who wanted a use for the wood scraps from his car factories and sold bags of charcoal through his car dealers. Our cars page covers his factories.
A barbecue by any other name
South Africans call a barbecue a braai, and many celebrate National Braai Day on 24 September. In Argentina, the asado cooks whole racks of beef over embers for hours, and Korean barbecue is cooked by the diners themselves on a grill set into the table. In Japan, yakitori is CHICKEN grilled on a bamboo SKEWER. Australians barbecue prawns, not shrimp: the famous line about throwing another shrimp on the barbie came from a 1984 advert made for American viewers.
COLESLAW comes from Dutch words for cabbage salad, and a MARINADE takes its name from the Latin for the sea, because the first marinades were salty brine. A barbecue also needs TONGS, BUNS, a HOTDOG, a SAUSAGE, WINGS, a KEBAB, CORN on the cob and a steady FLAME.