"The story of barbecue is the story of America. Settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent. Discover wondrous riches. Set them on fire and eat them." Vince Staten, Real Barbecue

Barbecue made human civilization possible.

Homo erectus probably first tasted cooked meat after a forest fire burned animals, and it was good. So good that it influenced human evolution. Traits that enhanced their ability to hunt and eat cooked meat were favored: Larger brains, better hand articulation, speed, communication skills, and smaller jaws. Eventually they learned to domesticate dogs to help with the hunt, and then they learned to husband animals that tasted best. The family circle and tribal structure evolved so that men became hunters and women became cooks. Ergo, the first pitmasters were probably women.

In 2007 Israeli scientists at University of Haifa uncovered evidence that early humans living in the area around Carmel, about 200,000 years ago were serious about barbecue. From bone and tool evidence, these early hunters preferred large mature animals and cuts of meat that had plenty of flesh on them. They left heads and hooves in the field. Three of their favorites were an ancestor of cattle, deer, and boars. From burn marks around the joints and scrape marks on the bones, there is evidence that these cave dwellers knew how to cook.

Early barbecue cooking implements will likely never be found because they were probably made of wood. The first meats were probably just tossed onto the campfire's embers. According to barbecue historian Dr. Howard L. Taylor, the first cooking implements were almost certainly "a wooden fork or spit to hold the meat over the fire.

Spit roasting is common around the world and for many years was the major barbecue cooking method. Baking an animal, vegetables, or bread in a hot pit in the ground was also an early development. Wooden frames were later used to hold meat over the fire, but they often held the meat well above the fire to keep the wood from burning, which resulted in the meat cooking slowly and absorbing smoke. The gridiron [similar to a grate on a modern grill] was developed soon after the Iron Age started, which led to grilling as we know it. Iliad, Book IX, Lines 205-235 and The Odyssey, Book III, lines 460-468 mention spits and five-pronged forks used to roast meat, basted with salt and wine at outdoor feasts in ancient Greece. Such feasts at the end of a battle or long march were common throughout history."

Early cooks figured out that cooked meats tasted better than raw, and smoked foods not only tasted swell, they kept longer. We now know this is because there are antimicrobial compounds in smoke and because slow smoking dried foods and bacteria need moisture to grow. In the days before refrigeration, smoking, drying, and salting meat were clever strategies for preserving perishable foods. This allowed hunting tribes to make a kill and, unlike other animals, they did not have to gorge themselves before the prey spoiled. If they were migratory, they could smoke, dry, and salt foods and take it on the road with them.

Barbecue and the Bible

The Hebrew Old Testament contains what may be the first detailed plans for the design of a barbecue. In Exodus, chapter 27, probably written somewhere between 1300 and 1500 years before Christ was born, after Moses brings down the 10 Commandments, he tells his flock that God wants them to construct a tabernacle with an ark for the Covenant and an altar for burnt offerings of animals.

It stood about 4 1/2 feet high about 7 1/2 feet long, contained fleshooks, firepans, ash pans, shovels, basins, a grate, and tie downs to attach the animal before the sacrifice. Like today's big rigs, it was portable. It did not have wheels, but poles on each side so it could be carried by hand.

In chapter 29 there are instructions of how to prepare the sacrifice of a young bull and two rams and describes the process as "a sweet savour, an offering made by fire unto the Lord." Apparently the scent was all the Lord wanted because Aaron, Moses' brother and the priest in charge, and his associates, were allowed to eat the sacrifice.

A model of the device and the tabernacle, based on the detailed description in Exodus 27, was built in Israel in Timna Park in the Negev Desert. A photo by someone named Ori229 is shown here under the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Old World influences

In Europe, artists have painted pictures of barbecues since pig hair bristles were first wrapped around a stick to make a brush. This ox roast in the painting above took place in Bologna, Italy in the 1531.

Early cooks learned quickly that flavor, tenderness, and juiciness were related to how foods were cooked and how long. Museums are full of clever gadgets built to improve palatability. Cooking in open fireplaces over wood and with plenty of smoke was commonplace, and all manner of clever iron grids, reflectors, and rotating devices were developed. Below is an elaborate rotisserie mechanism mounted in a fireplace that I photographed in a 13th century castle in Europe. The cook would turn a handle that would wind a weighted cable around an axle. The weight would slowly descend and the mechanism would slowly rotate the food above the coals.

The international gastronomic society, Chaîne des Rôtisseurs is based on the traditions and practices of the French corporation of roasters. Their written history has been traced back to 1248. King Louis XII awarded them an official coat of arms in 1610. It consists of two crossed turning spits and four larding needles, surrounded by flames of the hearth on a shield encircled by fleur-de-lis and a chain representing the mechanism used to turn the spit.

Somewhere along the way someone invented the smokehouse. I'm guessing it was an early cook trying to escape from the rain, so he hung some skins over the fireplace and huddled beneath. Eventually it evolved into an something like the ancient smokehouse found at the Ahtna Fish Camp on the Copper River in Alaska. It was a simple sapling frame building, four sapling posts for corners, a pitched roof of sticks covered in skins, with beams just under the peak of the roof to hang the salmon filets.

Grilled and smoked meats, especially pork and sausage, are deeply woven into German and Czech culinary traditions, and this influence is particularly strong in the Carolina and Texas barbecue traditions where their immigrants settled. Above is an excerpt from a painting from the 1600s by an unknown Flemish artist titled "Hier wird um wenig geld" ("Here, for little money"). It shows a women selling grilled vegetables outdoors. From the Academia Barilla Collection in Italy, it is one of the first representations of a grill I have seen.

A French explorer describes a cooking barbacoa here: "A Caribbee has been known, on returning home from fishing, fatigued and pressed with hunger, to have the patience to wait the roasting of a fish on a wooden grate fixed two feet above the ground over a fire so small as sometimes to require the whole day to dress it." That's low and slow cooking, folks.

According to Charles Hudson's 1998 book Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms, on March 25, 1540 a party of about 40 Spaniards led by de Soto invaded a village in what is now Georgia and found venison and turkey smoke roasting on a barbacoa-like device. Although the word had not been brought north by Indians yet, DeSoto called it a barbacoa because he had probably heard the word in Spain. Famished from a 35 hour ride, despite the fact that it was Holy Thursday, they feasted on the first barbacoa in recorded history.

On May 17, 1540, according to Hudson, they enjoyed another meal cooked on a barbacoa near present day Salisbury, NC: Corn and small dogs.

According to Sam Brookes, Heritage Program Manager of the National Forests in Mississippi, in December 1540, near what is now Tupelo, Mississippi, de Soto collaborated with the Chickasaw tribe on a feast featuring pork from Spain cooked on a barbacoa. The Chickasaws loved their pork barbecue (can you blame them?) and even stole hogs from DeSoto. The Spanish adopted the cooking method and refined it.

Eventually the method of cooking found its way north to the English colonies in Virginia and the Carolinas where they doused the meat with a favorite condiment from home, vinegar. Vinegar remains the major ingredient of most sauces in Eastern North Carolina and South Carolina to this day. German settlers were fond of mustard on their pork so the classic mustard based barbecue sauce of South Carolina evolved.

The first big barbecue in Texas, according to Taylor, "Was probably held on April 30, 1598, near San Elizario on the Rio Grande, about 30 miles Southeast of El Paso, TX. The leader of the later celebration was Juan de Onate." Natives were present, and it was a traditional, religious, outdoors feast that included spit roasted wild game and birds and native vegetables in addition to the usual salted pork, hard biscuits and red wine from Spain.

According to etymologist Michael Quinion, William Dampier, in his New Voyage Round the World of 1699, used the word in English for the first time to describe a raised wooden sleeping platform that protected Indians from snakes: "And lay there all night, upon our Borbecu’s, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground." One can assume there was no fire beneath. According to Quinion, the Dictionary of National Biography describes Dampier as a "buccaneer, pirate, circumnavigator, captain in the navy, and hydrographer." Ironic that the first to use the word in English should be described as a buccaneer since that occupation comes from the French word boucan, "which in turn comes from mukem, a word used by a group of Brazilian Indians, the Tupi, for a wooden framework on which meat was dried."

The evolution of barbecoa into barbecue

George Washington had a large smokehouse at his plantation at Mt. Vernon, VA (shwn at right). On May 27, 1769, the aristocrat, not yet our President or even a General, wrote in his diary (2:154) "Went in to Alexandria [VA] to a Barbecue and stayed all Night." So the tradition of partying all night with outdoor cooked meat can be traced back at least this far. Washington even hosted "a Barbicue of my own giving at Accatinck" in September 1773.

Alas the exact menus and cooking method are unknown, but pork and ox were popular at the time, and whiskey would have been served. Washington even built a distillery at Mt. Vernon in 1797.

The flavor of slowly smoke roasted meat with flavorful sauce grew in popularity, especially in the southern US. Many plantations had smokehouses, primarily for preserving meat, especially hams. Slaves did most of the cooking, maintained the smokehouses, and were given responsibility for preparing open pit barbecues for big celebrations such as weddings, holidays, and political gatherings.

Andrew Jackson, our seventh President from 1829 to 1837, had a large smokehouse behind his manor at the Hermitage near Nashville, TN. It was built between 1819 and 1821 and has been brought back to its original condition. At right is the restored smokehouse showing how hams were brined in dugout log tubs and then hung from the rafters while smoke was introduced.

In 1913, Martha McCullogh-Williams wrote Dishes And Beverages Of The Old South. Born in 1848, she was a teenager through the Civil War, and her family had slaves. The book has many recepies taught to her by her black Mammy. She describes a barbecue that is similar to other accounts from the era: "The animals, butchered at sundown, and cooled of animal heat, after washing down well, are laid upon clean split sticks of green wood over a trench two feet deep, and a little wider, and as long as need be, in which green wood has previously been burned to coals. There the meat stays twelve hours -- from midnight to noon the next day, usually. It is basted steadily with salt water, applied with a clean mop, and turned over once only. Live coals are added as needed from the log fire kept burning a little way off. All this sounds simple, dead-easy. Try it -- it really is an art. The plantation barbecuer was a person of consequence -- moreover, few plantations could show a master of the art. Such an one could give himself lordly airs -- the loan of him was an act of special friendship -- profitable always to the personage lent. Then as now there were free barbecuers, mostly white -- but somehow their handiwork lacked a little of perfection." The picture at right is a public barbecue in Texas in the 1960s using pretty much the same method.

Barbecues were not common in the 1800s. They were for special occasions and events. Slaves and poor whites ate mostly pork and chicken, but sometimes there was beef, mutton, or fish, depending on where they lived. Corn meal was also a staple, as were greens, especially collards, and beans. Corn, oats, and wheat were often stored in an open air crib on some farms. Some even had potatoes. Molasses from the Caribbean was occasionally available. Liquor and coffee were not uncommon. Peanuts were readily available in Georgia and a faux coffee was made from roasted peanuts and corn. Most of the dairy products, butter, milk, cream, and cheese, went to the big house. Just about everything was fried in the plentiful pork lard.

This was not haute cuisine. The Tallahassee Sentinel on April 23, 1867 published "Observations in Tropical Florida (from a report made in the Spring of 1866 to Col. T.W. Osborn, by Col. Geo. F. Thompson, and never published before)". Thompson, sounding like a modern restaurant critic, wrote "The principal food is pork, corn bread, hominy and Hayti potatoes, and what these articles naturally lack in repulsiveness to a refined taste, is fully made up in the abominable manner in which they are cooked and served. To cook a piece of meat, with them, means to fry it to the consistency of a piece of dry hide, and made about as palatable and digestible as live oak chips. The corn bread is usually made (the process I have never learned) so as to be about as delicious and gratifying to the taste as an equal quantity of baked saw-dust."

He continued: "Grease is used excessively as food; indeed, so repulsive is the manner of cooking, that to a person of refined habits and taste, nothing but the direst necessity and a deep sense of moral obligation to preserve his own life, could induce him to undergo such a diet. People living on the Gulf coast live much better, the art of cooking receiving much ore attention, and the articles of food being more numerous; in the interior, if we judge of the civilization of the inhabitants by the proficiency in the art of cooking and living generally, I fear the would take rank but little above the savages. I have frequently sat down to the table when my olfactories and stomach have joined in a united protest against the task before them, and have only quieted them by the plea of necessity."

Eventually the saplings used to hold the meat over the open pits in the ground were replaced by metal gridirons, and before long the pits were built with stones or bricks above ground. The photo at right is a stone barbecue in a Long Island park in 1936. Magazines like Sunset in California ran plans for building stone and brick barbecues in your back yard and barbecue was something Dad could do in the suburbs on weekends and after a long day of work.

In 1897 Ellsworth Zwoyer patented the charcoal briquet. The briquet really took off when, in the 1920s, Henry Ford, in collaboration with Thomas Edison and EB Kingsford, began commercial manufacturing by making them from sawdust and wood scraps from Ford's auto plants in Detroit. The Kingsford Company then built the town Kingsford, MI. The company was later sold, and today Kingsford converts more than one million tons of wood scrap into briquets a year. So Ford not only brought the world affordable cars, he created an industry that made backyard barbecue easy. Click here to read about the Zen of Charcoal.

Meanwhile, there was a migration going on as freed slaves and sharecroppers started moving north to the industrial centers, among them Kansas City. The flow peaked between 1879 and 1881. Among the migrants was young Henry Perry, born in 1875 in Shelby County, TN, not far from Memphis on the banks of the Mississippi River. At age 15 he got a job on steamboat as a cook. His new job took him to Minneapolis, Chicago, and finally Kansas City where he got a job in a saloon, according to Doug Worgul superb book, The Grand Barbecue: A Celebration of the History, Places, Personalities and Techniques of Kansas City Barbecue .

In 1907 Perry started a barbecue stand and eventually moved it indoors, plying a skill he probably learned in Shelby County. Commercial barbecue stands had been around for decades in cities and under shade trees in the country, but Perry's was probably the first commercial restaurant in the nation. It was certainly the first commercial barbecue stand in what is now the nation's most important barbecue center. According to Worgul "In February 1932, 25 years after Henry Perry first opened his barbecue business, The Call, Kansas City's leading black newspaper, published an interview with Perry. The article notes that there were in Kansas City at that time 'more than a thousand barbecue stands.'"

Perry was "The Barbecue King" not just because he was first, not just because he eventually had 3 restaurants, but because, as he explained to The Call, "the special way I prepare my meats. Cooking only over a fire made from hickory and oak woods the meat gets that delicious flavor which is the cause of the tremendous popularity of barbecued meats."

Among Perry's and disciples were Arthur and Charlie Bryant who opened Arthur Bryant's in 1930. The KC landmark was called the nation's best restaurant by New Yorker columnist Calvin Trillin. It still considered a required pilgramage to barbecue lovers around the world. Perry died in 1940, but today KC has more barbecue restaurants per capita than any city in the world. It is, in the words of Kansas City Barbecue Society Founder Carolyn Wells, "The Constantinople of Barbecue".

Modern barbecue becomes portable

Masonry barbecues were a pain to build. Somewhere somebody cut the trop off a steel drum, dumped charcoal into the bottom, and put an expanded metal grate on the top. His neighbor had a better idea. He cut a steel drum in half lengthwise, hinged the two parts together like a clamshell, and attached four legs. Next thing you know, Popular Mechanics is running plans for making a barbecue from an oil barrel.

Then, in 1948, H.J. Heinz introduced the first nationally distributed barbecue sauce. Since then there have been a gazillion brought onto the market. Click here for more about the history of barbecue sauces and their regional styles. Every neighborhood BBQ joint has their sauce in bottle and the grocery store shelves are bulging with them. Click here for some of my faves.

Also in 1948 Grant "Hasty" Hastings introduced the Hasty-Bake oven with a hood, and an adjustable height charcoal tray. They are still made today, and the modern version is one of my all-time favorite grills.

Three years later, in 1951, George Stephen, Sr., frustrated by his inability to control the heat in his backyard grill, had the welders at the Weber Brothers Metal Works where he worked, cut up a buoy that was to be used for Lake Michigan boating. The Weber Kettle was born and introduced in 1952 (shown at right). Among its innovations was a tight-fitting lid and much of the early marketing involved touting the merits of "covered barbecuing". Today it is by far the most popular backyard grill in the world with the basic unit selling for under $100.

Before long the Japanese Hibachi, a small portable charcoal grill without a top migrated to the US and next thing you know they had lids and handles, perfect for President Eisenhower shown here do his guy thing on a porch at the white house, and perfect for Gidget's beach parties.

Meanwhile hungry Texas oil rig welders began building heavy duty steel cookers from oil barrels, huge pipes, and large propane tanks creating tubular "pits" that could be mounted on boat trailers and towed from jobsite to jobsite. Some were fitted with boxes on the side to hold logs and allow the cook to smoke meats with indirect heat, low and slow. Nowadays they have gotten complex and expensive.

On Chirstmas Eve 1963, just a month after President John Kennedy was murdered, President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Ladybird, frazzled from, as Ladybird described it, the "tornado of activity that has surrounded us" retreated to their Texas ranch on Christmas Eve. West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard was scheduled to visit Kennedy to discuss the Soviet threat, the Berlin Wall, and other important matters. Rather than return to Washington for a formal State Dinner, LBJ invited Erhard and his entourage on down to what historians claim was the first official Presidential barbecue in history. Yes, Johnson's first state dinner was a barbecue for 300 in Texas on December 29, 1963. Click here for more about how LBJ used barbecue to advance his policies.

In the 1960s gas grills appeared on the scene, and soon became more popular than charcoal because they are easier to start and stop and there is minimal cleanup.

This page was revised 2/5/2012