Since it is now officially Summer, many of us find nothing more relaxing than having our friends round and firing up the barbecue. And why not? Maybe it is the atmosphere of cooking something outdoors over a fire that ignites a primal instinct in us, maybe it’s the social aspect, or maybe it’s just because the food tastes so good.
Regardless of whether you are just having burgers and frankfurters or roasting a whole hog, this time of year, virtually everyone is in the mood to barbecue. While everyone knows this word, few know what it actually means or how it came into our language.
Our word “barbecue” originally comes from the Arawak Indians of Haiti, where barbacoa was initially defined as a wooden framework on posts designed for sleeping or for curing meats over a fire. Since the Spanish were the first in this era to visit the Americas, they borrowed both the word and concept from the Arawak to bring us the word barbecue.
The word Barbecue
Though the definition has varied over time, and almost every culture has its own variety of meat cooked over an open fire, barbecue seems to have become an all-inclusive word for us. Barbecue can include kebabs, pulled pork, any type of sausage, fruits, some vegetables, even pizza. As a nation, we tend to prefer gas over charcoal, and our barbecues can be as elaborate as a custom-built permanent model, as plain as an open pit, or as cheap as the disposable units sold everywhere.
After entering the English language in the mid-17th century, for a while the word barbecue maintained its more utilitarian meaning. In William Dampier’s A New Voyage around the World (1697) he writes, “And lay there all night, upon our Barbecues, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the Ground,” and “His Couch or Barbecue of sticks.” Little more than half a century later, however, the meaning of the word deviated somewhat from its meaning of a method of cooking to become the name of a social event which involved outdoor cooking. The American President George Washington wrote in his Diaries in 1769 that he “Went up to Alexandria to a Barbecue and stayed all Night.” By the 1930’s, barbecue came to define the cooking device itself, as Jamaican Claude McKay wrote in his novel Banana Bottom, “Her husband..had been the best barbecue-builder of Banana Bottom.”
