How Barbecue Works

Part of the mythology and mystique of barbecue is that it's an American culinary invention. But barbecue's roots go back much further, to the ancient humans who discovered that cooking pieces of meat with a wood fire made it tastier and easier to eat. In 2007, Israeli archaeologists found what might be the world's oldest barbecue joint, a cave near Carmel where people butchered carcasses of wild cattle, deer and gazelle, and cooked their meat over wood fires 200,000 years ago [sources: Goldwyn, Shapira].

The ancient Greeks developed more sophisticated techniques, roasting meat basted with salt and wine on wooden spits high above the fire. This prevented the meat from burning, and allowed it to cook slowly and absorb smoke. As barbecue writer "Meathead" Goldwyn has noted, smoked meat not only tasted good, but it contained antimicrobial compounds and dehydrated the meat, making it last longer without spoiling. These latter qualities were extremely important in the days before refrigeration.

Modern American barbecuing's most direct roots go back to the Native American cooking techniques that Spanish explorers and conquerors encountered in the Western Hemisphere. The indigenous people that Christopher Columbus found on the island of Hispanola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1492 slow-cooked meat on wooden frames over an indirect fire.

In 1540, Hernando de Soto was a guest at a native feast of succulent barbecued pork [source: Geiling]. The explorer came back to Europe describing the delights of something he called barbacoa, which seems to have been a Spanish version of a word from the language of the Taino tribe of Native Americans. No one is exactly sure what Taino word the Spanish mistranslated [source: Goldwyn].

Native people on the southeastern coast of North America also had barbecues, and English colonists from the Carolinas all the way up to New England imitated their techniques [source: Moss]. The first mention of a barbecue feast was a 1706 narrative about a banquet involving English colonists in Jamaica roasting three pigs "in the West Indian manner." By the 1700s, cooking barbecue was such a popular pastime that George Washington noted attending six barbecues in his diary [sources: Moss, Collins].

Although barbecue was popular throughout colonial America, it became a particularly big deal in the South, where a lot of farmers raised hogs. Hogs were low-maintenance animals that could be set loose to forage in the woods. Those hogs had leaner, tougher meat, and barbecue's long, slow cooking was a good way to tenderize it. Further, the white people who lived in the South tended to hail from the south and west of England, which had a culture of roasting and broiling meat. Other parts of the U.S. preferred baking or broiling.

Working a barbecue pit requires long hot hours over a smoky fire. In the antebellum South, in the 1800s, the job was often given to an enslaved African to prepare barbecue for the whole plantation, both white and black. Africans too, had the tradition of spit-roasting meat in their native countries and contributed a lot to the cooking styles of the traditional Southern American barbecue [sources: Moss, Geiling].

Over the centuries, ingenious folks improved on barbecue technology. The Native Americans laid their meat on wooden frames over an open-pit fire. Later settlers replaced the wood frames with metal gridirons, and the pits themselves with masonry structures. In 1897, an inventor named Ellsworth Zwoyer patented the charcoal briquette, which was first mass-produced in the 1920s [source: Goldwyn].

In the early 1950s, a metalworker named George Stephen got the idea of attaching legs to half of a spherical nautical buoy, and using the other half as a lid over a grill. The Weber Kettle Grill, as his invention was called, made it possible for Americans to set up moveable barbecues in their backyards [source: Raichen].

Though the tools have improved, barbecuing remains more of an art than a science, one in which master cooks can use an array of techniques and ingredients to create a distinctive eating experience. Since the smoke imparts flavor to the meat, for example, one important choice is which type of wood briquette to use in the fire.

The choice of briquette was traditionally based on the wood found in a particular area. For classic Southern barbecue, the wood of choice is hickory, which adds a rich, slightly sweet taste that works particularly well with pork ribs, shoulder, ham and chops. Mesquite, a prolific but scraggly tree that Texas ranchers saw as a nuisance, adds a stronger flavor to beef [source: Vaughn]. Fruitwood such as apple, cherry and peach adds a lighter, fruitier taste that enhances the taste of poultry and seafood [source: Kingsford].

Preparing the meat for cooking is even more nuanced. Barbecue cooks typically start with a dry rub — a mix of spices, sugar, herbs and other ingredients rubbed into the meat to add a range of flavors. As Goldwyn explains, a rub "is like a good orchestra," with precise combinations of the four S's: sweetness (sugar or honey), savory (like garlic), spices and herbs, and spicy sensations, like hot pepper or ginger.

A wet rub will have these ingredients, plus vinegar or oil. Cooks often swear by one or the other type of rub. Rubs — wet or dry — shouldn't be confused with barbecue sauce, which should always be applied at the very end of cooking.

People tend to use the words interchangeably but the two mean very different things:

To barbecue means to cook a meat over a low temperature of 225 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit (107 to 121 Celsius) for several hours (you might hear this referred to as "low and slow"). This method creates a tender meat that falls off the bone. It's mainly used for tough cuts like pork shoulder and brisket that require long cooking times to break down the collagen and melt the fat. Smoking and barbecuing are technically the same thing, though we tend to use the term "smoking" for chicken and fish more than for pork.

Grilling, on the other hand, is hot and fast. It's best for lean cuts of meat like steaks and chicken breasts. These don't require long cook times and should be grilled very quickly at a temperature of 350 degrees F (177 C) or hotter [sources: Southern Living, Raichlen].

There are two kinds of grilling, direct and indirect:

Direct grilling means cooking the meat at a very high heat over the fire — 600 degrees F (315 C). The high heat sears the meat and seal in the juices. It's used for small cuts of meat (steak, shrimp or kebabs) and the fire is usually left uncovered.

Indirect grilling is a hybrid between barbecuing and grilling. The temperature is high — around 350 degrees F — and the meat is cooked off to the side of the coals or heat source, as opposed to directly over it. This method allows your grill to function more like an oven and get some of that barbecue tenderness but in less time. It is best for whole chickens, rib roasts and other large fatty meats. Not every grill allows you to do indirect grilling [source: Raichlen].

As barbecue spread across America, different regions developed distinctly different styles of 'cue that were influenced by their environments and the people who settled in those places [sources: Geiling, Suddath]:

Barbecue's linkage with politics dates to before the Declaration of Independence, when candidates for Virginia's colonial legislature held events where they plied potential voters with ribs and liquor. Eventually, some communities also began holding holiday barbecues of their own, and candidates came as guests.

The custom of political barbecues spread throughout the South. In a time when mass media didn't yet exist, barbecues filled the information void, becoming the places where people could gather to hear speeches and engage in spirited debates about issues [source: Moss]. Barbecue was a food that people of different races and economic levels — from the poor to the wealthy — all seemed to love, so it was a convenient unifying tool. Fourth of July events generally featured a barbecue, along with parades, speeches and a reading of the Declaration of Independence.

By the 1830s, these barbecues had proven to be such an effective tool for reaching voters that they spread beyond the South, and grew larger in size. In 1836, for example, U.S. Sen. Daniel Webster, a Whig politician who represented Massachusetts, gave a two-hour speech to 5,000 people at a barbecue in St. Louis. In the presidential campaign of 1840, Whig candidate William Henry Harrison relied heavily on barbecues as an organizing tool, and even gave out aprons decorated with the log cabin in which he'd been born [source: Moss].

Holding barbecues gradually became an established presidential custom that continued into the modern era. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson threw barbecue parties on this Texas ranch where he often invited important people to conduct official business — a practice that one journalist of the time called barbecue diplomacy. George H.W. Bush hosted an annual barbecue on the White House's South Lawn, to which he invited all the members of Congress and their families, and his son George W. Bush resurrected that tradition when he was president [source: Shahin].

Barbecue was also intertwined with racial issues in the U.S. "Slaveowners used barbecues as a means of control, giving Fourth of July and Christmas barbecues to their slaves as a supposed reward for their labor," wrote historian Moss. However, slaves also held barbecues at other times often using them as a cover to plan uprisings. Even the Nat Turner rebellion took place after a barbecue.

After the abolition of slavery, many blacks went on to open their own barbecue joints. In an ironic twist, during the Jim Crow era, many whites would stealthily visit black-owned joints to get some take out barbecue [source: University of Virginia].

Barbecue also played an important part in the Civil Rights movement. During the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s, for example, a barbecue joint called Brenda's in Montgomery, Alabama, became the place where organizers printed flyers and held meetings to plan their protests. In Atlanta, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. met with his lieutenants at a small establishment called Aleck's Barbecue Heaven [source: Shahin].

Many white-owned barbecue restaurants were the scenes of desegregation battles. In the 1968 case "Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises," the Supreme Court ruled that Maurice Bessinger's chain of four barbecue restaurants had unlawfully discriminated against African-American patrons by refusing to serve them and that he had to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Bessinger claimed serving black people was against his religious beliefs) [sources: University of Virginia, Collins].

There are many people who cook barbecue but ones who become truly adept are known as pitmasters. While there have been many such virtuosos over the decades, here's a list of some current barbecuing stars who've won acclaim for their skills and contributions to the art of barbecue.

While American barbecue purists like to think their cooking style is something distinctly American, at the most basic level, the idea of cooking meat over a fire is pretty much universal. Other countries across the globe have cooking styles that are similar in some ways to American barbecue, though they have significant differences too.

Here are some of the many international versions of barbecue [sources: Elie, Zamora].