Survey of the literature relating to the American barbecue
conjecture
By JOE O'CONNELL, cbbqa past President
As described in an accompanying
story, the American barbecue conjecture posits both that the word
barbecue can be traced to Native Americans in the Caribbean and that
the method known today as barbecue was lost in Europe by the
Renaissance and was re-discovered by the Spanish explorers, who
learned the technique from Native Americans in the Caribbean.
This will provide an overview and survey of major books and
websites which cover the origin of barbecue.
Introduction
This article is a work in progress. There are many books,
websites and other resources that claim to report on the origin of
barbecue. As additional significant resources are discovered,
this article will be updated to include them.
The following survey is organized by the author or the work.
Oxford University
Oxford University is often credited with being the ultimate
authority on the meaning and derivation of words in the English
language.
The word
The AskOxford
website, of the Oxford Press, shows the following four meanings
for the word "barbecue":
noun 1 meal cooked over charcoal etc. out of
doors. 2 party for this. 3 grill etc. used
for this. verb (-cues, -cued, -cuing)
cook on barbecue.
Id.
Smoky Hale
Smoky Hale claims that the word and technique originated with the
Taino tribe, and he cites Peter Guanikeyu Torres, President and
Council Chief of the Taino Indigenous Nation of the Caribbean and
Florida. <Smoky
Hale on the Taino language>.
The word
On the origin of the word "barbecue", Smoky Hale writes:
H.L Mencken in The American Language, 1919, said that the word,
barbecue, was in common usage in Virginia and the Carolinas by the
1660. He attributes the source as a Taino word "boucan" which
meant a rack of green wood. Taino were Arawakan Indians who
inhabited Puerto Rico, Hispanola and the eastern tip of Cuba and
were considered to have become extinct by about 1610. The
French used that word as the root of buccaneer - a pirate.
Authoritative Spanish dictionaries show the word "barbacoa" to be of
American origin. And give its meanings as "1. Barbecue, meat
roasted in a pit in the earth. 2. A framework suspended from forked
sticks."
Webster's defines barbecue as "meat broiled or roasted over an
open fire." (How many errors can you find in that sentence?)
He apparently followed the English (bless their pallid palates)
lead. Alexander Pope, in Second Satire of the Second Book of
Homer, ca 1735. wrote ".., send me, Gods! A whole pig barbecued!"
He later defined barbecue as "A West Indian term of gluttony, a hog
roasted whole, stuffed with spices and basted with Madeira wine."
Pope should have heeded his own advice: "A little learning is
a dangerous thing..."
As to the origin of the word, only Mencken is half right. I
recently had the good fortune to correspond with Peter Guanikeyu
Torres, President and Council Chief of the Taino Indigenous Nation
of the Caribbean and Florida. He not only assured me that the
Taino were alive and well, but also translated "barbecue" from Taino
language as follows: Ba from Baba (father) Ra from Yara
(place) Bi from Bibi (beginning) Cu from Guacu (the sacred fire).
Or "the beginning of the sacred fire father." He further
explained that "Taino barabicoa" means "the stick stand with four
legs and many sticks of wood on top to place the cooking meat."
He advised that "Taino Barabicu" means "the sacred fire pit."
According to Chief Peter the Timucua, Guacara and Calusa tribes of
the Southeastern United States were Taino who had migrated from the
Caribbean with their culture. Paintings by Jacques le Moyne,
in 1564-65, depicted Timucuans roasting game and fish on a rack of
wood illustrate, according to Chief Guanikeyu, the Taino barabicu.
The chief agrees with me that the meat was being roasted, rather
than barbecued.
The method
On the origin of the barbecue cooking method in the United States,
Smoky Hale writes:
Many years of research has convinced me that barbecue probably
began in North Carolina. An anonymous tract published in
London in 1666, entitled "A Brief Description of the Province of
Carolina" stated "hogs find so much mast and other food in the woods
that they want no other care than a swineherd to keep them from
running wild." William Byrd kept a daily journal during his
survey of the boundary of North Carolina and Virginia, 1728-29, and
published it as "History of the Dividing Line." In it he
observed regarding the inhabitants of the region, "The only business
here is raising of hogs, which is managed with the least of trouble
and affords the diet they are most fond of. The truth of it is, the
inhabitants of North Carolina devour so much of the swine's flesh
that it fills them full of gross humors." He further noted,
"For want, too, of a constant supply of salt, they are commonly
obliged to eat it fresh and that begets the highest taint of
scurvy.." <Smoky
Hale>
Robb Walsh
Robb Walsh echoes many of the same themes regarding the origin of
American barbecue in an article entitled
In Search of Smoke, which was written and published in the
June 14-20, 1996 issue of
The Austin Chronicle. A more scholarly version was published
in
Natural History Magazine (a publication of the
American
Museum of Natural History).
The word
In the article, Walsh says:
The Spanish word barbacoa is a variation of the
Arawak-Carib word brabacot and the root of the English word
barbecue. A brabacot was a grill of green sticks which
the Caribs would place at a good distance above a slow fire.
They would then arrange their meats on the grill and cover them with
leaves to retain the smoke.
Walsh traces the word through French and English:
Other languages have a variety of words that shed a little light
on barbecue history. The Spanish word charqui means dried
meat and is the root of the words jerk and jerky. The word jerk ties
the barbecue traditions to its Caribbean roots. Of all the barbecue
techniques I've seen, the one that comes the closest to the
historical descriptions of the Caribs' methodology is Jamaican jerk
barbecue.
The French word boucan is also used to describe early
Caribbean barbecue. It comes from a Brazilian Amerindian language
and appears to be a synonym for the Carib word brabacot. A
derivative of the word entered the English language in the form of
"buccaneer." The buccaneers (or boucaniers) were an all-male
crew composed mostly of French and English outlaws who lived on the
island of Tortuga off the coast of Hispaniola in the mid-1600s.
Although they would later be known for their seafaring exploits,
their original fame -- hence their name -- was in the barbecue
business.
The method
In the same article, Walsh writes about the cooking method.
It is also something of a mystery why the early European settlers
who came to the New World had to learn this ancient technique from
the natives. Perhaps the invention of the indoor kitchen
caused European cultures to give up smoking because the technique
was better suited to the outdoors. Whatever the reason, the
early Spanish settlers on the island of Hispaniola regarded the
Caribs barbecue unique enough to borrow the name.
Walsh provides an interesting description of the buccaneers in the
16th Century Caribbean:
The buccaneers hunted the wild cows and pigs which were the sole
survivors of failed Spanish settlements on the island of Hispaniola.
Then they smoke-cured the meat and sold it to passing ships.
Hunted themselves by the Spanish, the buccaneers banded together for
their own protection. Eventually they gave up on the meat
business and went to sea, discovering quickly that capturing Spanish
vessels by surprise attack was a lot more lucrative than chasing
wild pigs. Before long, the buccaneers came to be remembered
more as fearless seamen than as barbecue aficionados. But, in
my opinion, it was in their first occupation that they made their
most significant contributions to humanity.
Bruce Cook
Bruce Cook is a barbecue pitmaster who has recently created a
website to explore the origin, history and evolution of barbecue.
The word
According to Cook, Columbus discovered the Taino barbecuing fish
and game and:
. . . the word "barbecue" . . . derived from "barbacoa", the
Spanish pronunciation of the Taino word for the framework of sticks.
Id.
This is the common explanation, but there is no citation to
authoritative sources.
The method
According to Cook,
It appears that the method of cooking and/or smoking and/or
drying meat and fish on a raised platform over a wood fire was
widely if not universally practiced by native Americans. First
contact descriptions of the practice were similar from Brazil,
through the Caribbean and in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.
Just as with barbecue now, there were regional differences in the
particulars: How much smoke; how much heat; what spices if any;
height of rack; kind and cut of meat and how prepared.
Id.
Dave Lineback
Dave Lineback is a very well-known barbecue traditionalist who
recounted the history of barbecue on his
website:
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they found the Taino
Indians of the West Indies cooking meat and fish over a pit of coals
on a framework of green wooden sticks. The Spanish spelling of
the Indian name for that framework was "barbacoa". Both the
name and method of cooking found their way to North America, where
George Washington noted in his diary of 1769 that he "went up to
Alexandria to a "barbicue."
Id.
LIneback summarizes the American barbecue conjecture in these three
sentences, but he provides no citations or references.
Related resources:
"Peopling the Antilles" by Samuel M. Wilson, in "Archaeology"
(September/October 1990, pp. 52-57)
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