What is Barbecue? Where Did It Come From?

[00:00:02] [SPEAKER_00]: What You Want, When You Want It, Where You Want It. This is The MESH.

[00:00:35] [SPEAKER_01]: Look in the big book awards and the fun, the term Barbecue. Talk about the history and try

[00:00:41] [SPEAKER_01]: to determine just what constitutes this thing that we love so much called Barbecue.

[00:00:46] [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Chigar Willard, and in this 49th episode of The Low and Slow Barbecue Show,

[00:00:51] [SPEAKER_01]: I figured it was high time. We said a few ground rules for what we've been talking about.

[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Before we get there, here's an invitation. Visit LowSlowBeebeQShow.com to find all the episodes

[00:01:02] [SPEAKER_01]: and blogs we've created during the past two years of Oradventure here.

[00:01:06] [SPEAKER_01]: That's right, all 48 episodes are there from our first one with the one and only

[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_01]: man cave meals all the way back in May of 2022, right up to our latest episode Spotlighting

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[00:01:51] [SPEAKER_01]: get the good stuff sent to you. Now let's get to the lecture at hand, Barbecue. First

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_01]: of all, what is Barbecue? Well it turns out it depends on where you're in who you ask.

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_01]: And the Carolina's Barbecue's when you use law far and smoke to cook food. Generally,

[00:02:10] [SPEAKER_01]: it means cooking at low and slow and barbecue means meat. I guess you can apply Barbecue

[00:02:16] [SPEAKER_01]: to vegetables if you use the same law far method although I tend to think vegetables cooked

[00:02:21] [SPEAKER_01]: over open flame and smoke or grilled or smoked. That may just be my personal preference.

[00:02:27] [SPEAKER_01]: Speaking of personal preferences, it's come to my attention that there are a good many

[00:02:31] [SPEAKER_01]: people in the Carolina's who declare that beef is not Barbecue. And my humble opinion,

[00:02:37] [SPEAKER_01]: these people are incorrect. Beef is Barbecue, just like chicken and turkey or even

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_01]: seafood and a course pork. If you're doing the seafood like Matthew Register at Southern Smoke,

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_01]: Barbecue down, East, it's definitely Barbecue. All those things are Barbecue. Provided

[00:02:54] [SPEAKER_01]: a cook it over law far and smoke, low and slow. All across the south from Texas, Missouri,

[00:03:02] [SPEAKER_01]: Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia at definition holds true. Barbecue is meat cooked

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_01]: over law far and smoke even out west in California and the southwest. Barbecue's got a similar

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_01]: meaning in California. They've been barbecue in the Sanomaria Stals since the 19th century.

[00:03:19] [SPEAKER_01]: Moral in that barbecue history and just a few moments, but let's talk about what Barbecue is not

[00:03:26] [SPEAKER_01]: hamburgers hot dog, shishkobobbs, corn, fish. Anything else cooked on your grill over flames?

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_01]: This is not Barbecue. This is grilling. Sadly, there's plenty of people who classify

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_01]: grilling as Barbecue and it seems like many of those people live in or from the northern regions

[00:03:46] [SPEAKER_01]: of the United States. Sure, there's plenty of good Barbecue restaurants in New York,

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_01]: Boston, Chicago, you know, the so-so-call of North area, but they're just as many people who

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_01]: slap a bunch of burgers and dogs on the grill and call their party of Barbecue with all the

[00:04:03] [SPEAKER_01]: apologies to those misdirected people that event is a cookout, angered by grilling. It's not a

[00:04:16] [SPEAKER_01]: darn smoke low in slow. You can add sauce or not. You can chop it, pull it, slice it, pick it.

[00:04:23] [SPEAKER_01]: However, you want to serve it, big cow, chicken, turkey, lamb, whatever. I just want to see that

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_01]: smoke ring. I will that flavor packed bark. I will the melt in your mouth tenderness. Just like butter.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_01]: By the way, if you've heard our podcast wrap up in an episode of the low in slow showdown,

[00:04:41] [SPEAKER_01]: the closing questions always about whether Barbecue is a verb or is it a noun? Just so you know,

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of lifted that from a couple of Carolina guys name, retinlink. Also known as rabbit lightning

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_01]: or good mythical morning. There are big stores out in LA today, but once upon a time,

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_01]: they were here in North Carolina paying tribute to Barbecue in song. If you haven't heard the

[00:05:03] [SPEAKER_01]: Barbecue song, check it out. It's on YouTube. Find it there. They're on a WRAL episode of

[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_01]: great performance of the Barbecue song. And it kind of explores all the different types of

[00:05:13] [SPEAKER_01]: Barbecue across the south. Of course, they announced that Barbecue is not a verb. However,

[00:05:20] [SPEAKER_01]: they don't necessarily proclaim it as a noun either for the record. Miriam Webster dictionary

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_01]: defines Barbecue as both a noun and a transitive and intransitive verb. Now I'm not going to

[00:05:32] [SPEAKER_01]: wait into the specifics of grammar or verb forms, but I will say Miriam Webster is pretty much

[00:05:37] [SPEAKER_01]: on the money with both their parts of speech explanations. Except for the part where they say that

[00:05:43] [SPEAKER_01]: a Barbecue is a portable fireplace ever which meat and fish are roasted. That is a grill.

[00:05:50] [SPEAKER_01]: It probably comes as no surprise that there's some debate over the origin of the word Barbecue.

[00:05:55] [SPEAKER_01]: Some say it derives from the French words, bar bay, which means beard and QU, which means

[00:06:00] [SPEAKER_01]: tail because the method cooked everything from the animal's beard to its tail. Now plenty of

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_01]: language say that beard to tail explanation is all washed. Understand why? They tie the term

[00:06:12] [SPEAKER_01]: more closely to the word from the Spanish term Barbacoa or the South American and Caribbean

[00:06:18] [SPEAKER_01]: indigenous peoples language of Errolwach. They probably pronounce that wrong, but whatever,

[00:06:24] [SPEAKER_01]: they call Barbacoa, which meant wooden frames on post. We'll get to Barbecue a more in just a couple

[00:06:30] [SPEAKER_01]: minutes, but while we're talking about parts of speech and word origins, I just think it's

[00:06:35] [SPEAKER_01]: important to pour out that since I've asked that Barbecue verb or now in question, do a lot of

[00:06:39] [SPEAKER_01]: pit master guests on the low-less low barbeque show? I've heard some really good answers.

[00:06:44] [SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorites and probably the most accurate is that Barbecue is not a verb. It's not

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_01]: a noun. It is a lifestyle. It's a way of life. And for the record, that makes Barbecue an adjective.

[00:06:56] [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I think you include Barbecue in the part of speech that you prefer just don't call

[00:07:01] [SPEAKER_01]: grilled hamburgers in hot dogs, Barbecue. Now, onto the history, people in North Carolina have

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_01]: been eating pork for nearly 300 years according to the NC Heritage Center. But before that,

[00:07:13] [SPEAKER_01]: the Smithsonian magazine reports that when Christopher Columbus landed on his penola,

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_01]: he found indigenous people cook and meet over indirect flame using green wood that smoked a

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_01]: lot and kept the food and wood from burning too fast. That's the barbacoa, smoking it over a wooden

[00:07:29] [SPEAKER_01]: frame. The Spanish called that barbacoa term and the Spanish explorers moved into North America.

[00:07:36] [SPEAKER_01]: They brought the cooking technique with them. By 1540 near modern day,

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_01]: two-polyme, Mississippi, the Chickasalt tribe of Indians cooked a feast to pork over the barbacoa

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_01]: for her nando de Soto. And from there, the practice began to spread into the colonies as far

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_01]: north as Virginia. There and in the Carolinas, British colonists also saw indigenous people

[00:07:57] [SPEAKER_01]: trying meat on a grill of those green sticks over smoking fire again. The barbacoa emerges

[00:08:04] [SPEAKER_01]: amongst the indigenous peoples of North America. All the people that saw it, all those colonists

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_01]: decided to use that method and introduce their own practices of basting meat with butter or

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_01]: vinegar while it cooked all according to southern food ways. And its oral history of the southern

[00:08:20] [SPEAKER_01]: barbecue trail, meanwhile as enslaved people from Africa brought along a taste for new

[00:08:26] [SPEAKER_01]: people, the people who were old peppers when they came from the Caribbean or Africa.

[00:08:29] [SPEAKER_01]: Especially like having that red pepper in there, you can see where all this is going.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_01]: As a result, along the Atlantic Seaboard, vinegar, butter, spices like red pepper started

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_01]: getting applied to the British low and slow smoke pigs. Barbacoa sauce was born.

[00:08:46] [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, German and French immigrants settling along the brawl river valley of South

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_01]: apparently helped repel those mosquitoes that carry malaria. In according to southern food ways,

[00:09:01] [SPEAKER_01]: of course that mustard found its way into the colonial recipes for cooking meat and they're still

[00:09:06] [SPEAKER_01]: using it in South Carolina today. And in the southern colonies, according to North Carolina

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_01]: barbecue, purists like Jim Villas, the meat was exclusively pork. This may be where the idea

[00:09:17] [SPEAKER_01]: of no beef barbecue comes from. Many people in the South depended on the cheap, low maintenance

[00:09:22] [SPEAKER_01]: nature of big farming. While cows require a lot of feed and enclosed spaces with pigs,

[00:09:29] [SPEAKER_01]: you can just turn them out in the woods to forge on their own when the food supplies ran low.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_01]: They love acorns out there in the wasma buddy, tank Johnson to tell you there from the Holy

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_01]: City Pigs farm down in South Carolina. And of course when those pigs did go out and forge

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_01]: around the world for their food, they were much later than they were at the slaughter.

[00:09:49] [SPEAKER_01]: And we're later when they came in there to the slaughter. And of course, that led folks in South

[00:09:53] [SPEAKER_01]: to cook it low and slow to tenderize the meat. Without all that fat to cook in there, you got

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_01]: to do it slow to cook it nice and tender. During the civil war according to the Smithsonian,

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_01]: southerners ate an average of five pounds of pork for every one pound a cattle at the age.

[00:10:10] [SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about those cows for just a minute. Once the barbecue trends of the Carolina

[00:10:14] [SPEAKER_01]: started spreading west, German immigrants and Texas have plenty of land to cultivate cattle.

[00:10:20] [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of range to drive those cows around a feed them all. Soon enough, the Carolina low

[00:10:25] [SPEAKER_01]: and slow technique started to get used to cook beef. And as a result, beef barbecue was born.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_01]: Now one thing I haven't mentioned in this barbecue history lesson is Robert F. Moss. He's a food

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_01]: historian and contributing barbecue editor southern living. And you probably know he produced a

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_01]: authoritative work on the history of barbecue. And Moss has produced a couple of additions of

[00:10:47] [SPEAKER_01]: barbecue, the history of an American institution. A first in 2010. He revised it and sent out another

[00:10:53] [SPEAKER_01]: addition in 2021 at new addition includes research from other writers like Texas Monthly

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_01]: Barbecue Editor Daniel Vaughn also known as the barbecue snob. Houston Chronicles J.C. Reed

[00:11:04] [SPEAKER_01]: contributes to it. Virginia Barbecue historian J.C. Haines is in there as well. It just pick

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_01]: all up for all the details you need to know about the history of barbecue. And for a more

[00:11:14] [SPEAKER_01]: fact based approach, you'll find that in his book compared to what I've provided in this short

[00:11:20] [SPEAKER_01]: 4A down the barbecue trail. With that we're going to wrap up this exercise in barbecue history

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_01]: and linguistics with a thank you for listening to the low and slow barbecue show. You happen

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[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_01]: if you're a visual person, the low and slow barbecue show is now on YouTube. Check out our channel.

[00:11:54] [SPEAKER_01]: You'll see some of our recent interviews like our talk with Kran for Brothers BBQ Chef Ben Sullivan.

[00:11:59] [SPEAKER_01]: I'll buddy Ron Simmons is up there. We've got some other stuff there featuring Dylan Cook from

[00:12:05] [SPEAKER_01]: Grove Barbecue as well as our blue sway barbecue guest and more is coming there. It's all at the

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_01]: YouTube channel for the low and slow barbecue show. You'll even see some footage I captured at

[00:12:15] [SPEAKER_01]: the Carolina Barbecue Festival and at some of the barbecue joints I've visited on my summer

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