Mojacarmagazine.com Issue 16 Page 13
Lets face it at some point in our lives we decide to have a barbeque, and take for granted the wondrous tastes of seared meat and vegetables cooking on an open flame, but where did it come from?
We all know the three little words that make a woman's heart beat faster (I Love you), but do you know that there are three little letters that will make most men's hearts palpitate? Yep! You guessed it. BBQ! (Tsk-tsk if you thought I meant the other three letter word!) How barbecue came to be identified with male cooking is a bit of a mystery but one assumes it has to do with camping and sports. However, the history of barbecue itself is even more elusive. Theories abound everywhere and almost every regional area has its own story of how barbecue, now called BBQ, evolved.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the history of the word, "barbecue" to the influence of French Haitians whose word for a method of open fire cooking was "barbe a queue. " Literally translated this means "from whiskers to tail", which is a pretty fair description of what part of a beast is barbecued.
However, many people evaluate the history of barbecue and think it comes from the Spanish word "Barbacoa" which suggests barbecue is a Spanish concept. There is even an interesting idea about how the letters BBQ came to represent this style of cooking. It supposedly stems from earlier days when roadhouses and beer joints with pool tables would advertise, 'Bar, Beer, and Cues', later shortened to BBCue, and somehow evolved into BBQ. I also read somewhere that it was originally 'Beer, Burgers, and Que,'which, somehow, seems more reasonable. Perhaps, as barbecue history continues to be written, a thousand years from now, people will give credit to Barbie dolls. Maybe by then people will have 'Barbie-cues?' Oh well, never mind.
Whatever the origin of the word, the practice is just as nebulous. It stands to reason that primitive cultures all over the world naturally gravitated to cooking over open flame because it was all they had. So, to say that the practice of barbecue, as we know it, definitely evolved from one culture, or one area, would be incorrect. More likely, as the world grew smaller and cultures mixed, we combined ideas and methods until, today, we have thousands of different ways to practice the art. And, make no mistake, barbecuing is as much art as science. All cooking is, for that matter. Today, we have diluted and convoluted the word until the term has come to mean various ways of cooking such as over an open fire, over coals, on a spit, in an oven with sauce, over a fire pit, on a gas grill or even in an electric rotisserie