#4: Barbecue
What exactly does barbecue mean?
In some parts of the country, such as Texas and Tennessee, your answer probably involves a method of slow-cooking with indirect heat. If you're a Northerner, you might just point to your backyard grill.
The word has different meanings, but a single origin.
When 17th-century Spanish explorers landed in the West Indies, they saw native people – the Arawakan – drying meat over a frame. The Arawakan called the wooden rack a barbacoa. The explorers borrowed the term.
Barbacoa soon came to name not only the frame but the process of cooking (not drying) meat. Now, of course, barbecue can name the cooking structure, the food, the cooking method, or the social occasion.
1 comment:
Now in the South, a barbecue isn't a barbecue. That is, a barbecue is one type of a cookout. And cookouts are Southern barbecues. My hoity-toity husband taught me this and banned me from the word "barbeque". I am also banned from allowing the traditional burgers and franks because a true cookout has only pork and chicken and steak. And southern slaw with vinegar, no mayonnaise. I bow to his command because, after all, he is a master barb . . . cookout-er-person-guy.
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