Barbecue – A word that has become synonymous with smoky sauces, backyard pool parties, tail-gating and those quirky “Kiss The Chef” aprons. When most people hear the word Barbecue, they see an image of the suburbanite baby-boomer stacking Kingsford briquettes into his Weber, lighting it up and burning a pack of Ballparks… the typical nuclear family of the fifties.
Ask any good cook though, and they may tell you about the sweet vinegar based sauce that makes North Carolina pulled-pork so tasty. Or perhaps they’ll rave about the way you can cut a slow-smoked Texas brisket with a plastic spoon. Some will sing the praises of the dry-rubbed Memphis BBQ and extoll the virtues of adding the sauce (mopping) at the very end. Even more may brag about the mustardy tang of a traditional northeast deep-pit beef BBQ. Whatever the story may be, most people agree that barbecue means American.
And now for a pre-history lesson. Barbecue contains two key elements – meat and fire (something the cave-men were doing long before tail-fins on Cadillacs and the Donna Reed Show).
Because pre-modern man figured out early on that roasting meat over a fire not only reduced the likelihood of illness but actually made food taste better, rising civilizations throughout the globe developed essentially the same style of early cooking – take a piece of meat, subject it to fire and eat it once it gets darker.
The current method of barbecuing is thought to have derived from the Caribbean’s early version of cooking called barabicu, and the current spelling of the word is likely to have been picked up by the first Spanish settlers. Meanwhile, across the Gulf of Mexico, the early Meztesos and South American tribes had their own version of fire-cooking called barbacoa that involved burying a wrapped cut of meat (traditionally goat) in a hole and then building a fire over it to heat up and cook the buried meat. This same cooking style has been found in use everywhere from the Polynesian islands, New Zealand & Australia, parts of Africa, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, China and variations of early “deep-pit” barbecue can be found virtually anywhere meat is consumed.
So, if barbecue developed simultaneously throughout the world, who gets the credit? The correct answer is… there is no correct answer! The general concensus is that the latin-american barbacoa was the first recognized form of fire-cooking but, though they were historically the first culture to be recognized “q-ers”, cave drawings have proven otherwise.
Whatever the case may be, barbecue takes us back to our primal element – back to the time when our only fear was being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. I take comfort knowing that barbecue has lasted through the ages. It’s good to know that one day my great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be consuming meat that’s been cooked with fire. I’m just hoping someone will still be passing along my famous Smoked Peach & Chipotle BBQ Sauce recipe…
Chef Delaney's Cutting Board 
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