Indigenous Techniques

Most culinary techniques used in later-day America were imported with colonial and immigrant groups. One highly popular technique, barbecuing, is traceable to the earliest colonists’ encounters with indigenous, pre-metallurgical cultures. The term derives from barbacoa, the word used by the Taino of Haiti to describe an apparatus of sticks straddling a pit fire used to roast, grill, and smoke foods. Early colonists found this basic dry, indirect-heat method sufficiently distinctive to adopt the term “barbecue,” which appears in American sources by the mid-seventeenth century. Soon the term referred to outdoor social gatherings as well as to the specific cooking technique. Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife has an early barbecue recipe, distinguished from other slow-grilling techniques by a preparatory salt-and-molasses rub and finished with a squeeze of fresh lemon, melted butter, wine, and bread sauce. Barbecuing has cult status as America’s culinary pastime. Cooks are aided by implements such as kettle smokers and outdoor gas grills that make “barbecuing” a catchall term for most outdoor cookery.