A PASSION, A PASTIME, AND A PARTY

LET’S JOIN THE PARTY

Today we use the term “barbecue” in a multitude of ways, but in the American past, it mainly meant a big, festive community gathering. An English visitor in the eighteenth century described the custom to friends back home, saying that Americans were “extremely fond of an entertainment they call a “Barbecue,” which was a large party” that “generally ended in intoxication.” George Washington probably even slept at one. In his diary, the first president noted that he once went to Alexandria, Virginia, for a “barbicue” that lasted three days.

When workers laid the cornerstone for the nation’s capitol in 1793, the leaders of the new republic celebrated with a huge barbecue. Right before the outbreak of the Civil War, Scarlett O’Hara met Rhett Butler at a barbecue in Gone With the Wind. Throughout American history, when churches wanted to lure the less devoted, when politicians needed to attract a crowd for a campaign speech, when folks had any cause for festivity, they held a barbecue and invited everyone.

The cooks didn’t grill hamburgers at those affairs. They dug a long, deep pit in the ground, filled this trench with logs, burned the wood down to low temperature coals, and then slowly roasted whole animals and fish suspended above the smoky fire. That was barbecue then, and it’s still the essence of the art. To get real with barbecue, you have to return to the roots, and that means celebrating a meal with friends and family by smoking food slow and low over smoldering wood.

That’s been a grand tradition in the United States from the beginning, but many Americans lost touch with the legacy about the time they discovered frozen vegetables and TV dinners. We were moving to cities and suburbs in droves then and couldn’t tear up our streets and backyards to build underground pits. Only the predominantly rural regions of the South, Southwest, and Midwest maintained the memory of real barbecue. The rest of us learned to make do with high-heat charcoal grilling and began calling it barbecue because it was done outdoors.

Grilling is a fine method of cooking, but it doesn’t produce food with the hearty, woodsy resonance of slow-cooked fare. Those who have tasted true barbecue know the difference and they are almost certain to be passionate about the distinction. For them, smoked ribs are as superior to a grilled pork chop as a lottery win is to taxes.

In the same vein, anyone who has spent an afternoon barbecuing with children or friends understands why Americans made that their traditional party of preference. It’s a national pastime older than baseball and just as spirited. When you add the fun to the flavor of the food, you don’t need a diploma to tell you that you’ve reached a new level of barbecue bliss.