Barbecue
Source of Recipe
Cape Cod Online
Quoth Romeo in Shakespeare's tragic classic Romeo and Juliet, "What's in a name?" In the case of barbecue, a whole lot of confusion, misconceptions and some very complicated grammar.For starters, the origin of the word 'barbecue' is densely shrouded in mystery.
It is thought that barbecue comes from the French word "barbe a queue" meaning, "from whiskers to tail" indicating the practice of cooking animals whole. Another source cites a garbled short hand for a drinking establishment that has pool tables.
Get it, BAR-BEER-CUE? I'm still trying to work this one out. Most agree that the word that graces condiment bottles and restaurant signs nationwide was coined by the Taino people of the West Indies.
In Taino, a "barbacoa" was an apparatus designed specifically for slow cooking meat.
Barbecue is one of the few words that can be used as a noun, a verb and an adjective. As in "Pass me the barbecue sauce, honey. I'm going to barbecue us some steaks for the Fourth of July barbecue."
The term itself is widely misused by most spatula-toting backyard chefs, however. When you cook up a bunch of burgers and dogs over the coals, you are actually grilling, not barbecuing. Technically speaking, barbecuing is cooking meat slowly over a low, usually indirect heat source. Real barbecuing takes hours and results in drippingly tender meat sans grill burns.
Barbecue, with all its grammatical vagaries, has been an American favorite since the English landed at what was to become Jamestown. Slow-cooking has been around for ages as a means of tenderizing tough meat. It was the Native American residents who reminded the British colonists that you can make a mighty fine meal out of the stringiest game if you bury it in the ground over a mess of coals and let it cook awhile.
While barbecue is popular across the nation, it is in the regions south of the Mason-Dixon and west of the Mississippi where barbecue reigns king. Good Southern barbecue has its roots in the colonial period when farmers used slow cooking to render tough range-fed pigs edible.
As farmers learned to fatten pigs on grain, improving the quality of the meat, barbecue went from necessity to a pillar of Southern culture.
Barbecue didn't become popular in the west until the great cattle drives of the 1800s when the cattle bosses relegated the worst cuts of meat, beef brisket, to their dusty cowpokes. In a mere seven or eight hours, barbecuing transformed the saddle-like beef to a toothsome delicacy, winning the hearts of westerners.
While barbecue isn't an American original, our enthusiasm for good eats has made barbecue an American classic replete with regional preferences and specialties. Southerners prefer pork cooked with a thin, vinegary sauce while Texans dry rub their beloved beef with salt and herbs before applying a fiery topping.
Chicago barbecue is accompanied by a thick, sweet sauce heavy on the pepper. West coast barbecue fans prefer marinated chicken and fish.
Around the turn of the century, New Yorkers were known to barbecue turtles from time to time.
Some argue that the traditional New England clambake is a type of barbecue. Sadly, real barbecue - the time-consuming, culinary labor of love kind - is fast becoming a thing of food legend.
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