A man brushing meats with BBQ Sauce in the kitchen of the Salt Lick restaurant, Driftwood Texas, 2011
17 May 2020
Barbecue is a style of cooking, usually meat and usually outdoors, and it is also the grill on which it is cooked. There are various styles and methods of barbecue and fierce debate over which style is superior. My expertise is linguistics, not cookery, so I’m not going to try to describe the various styles or opine on whether, for instance, East Texas barbecue is better than West Texas style or whether either of these is superior to North Carolina’s.
The word barbecue comes to us from Taíno, an Arawakan language of the Caribbean, via American Spanish. The form barbacoa appears in Spanish by 1555 in The Commentaries of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. From an 1891 translation of the Spanish:
Every eighth day they came laden with venison and wild boar, roasted on barbacoas.* These barbacoas are like gridirons, standing two palms high above the ground and made of light sticks. The flesh is cut into steaks and then laid upon them and roasted.
* barbacoa, i.e. parrillas.
The word appears in English by 1625, but in the sense of a raised corn crib or granary. From Samuel Purchas’s Purchas His Pilgrimes of that year:
They haue barbacoas wherein they keepe their Maiz; which is an house set vp in the aire vpon foure stakes, boorded about like a chamber, and the floore of it is of cane hurdles.
William Dampier uses the word in the form we’re familiar with it today to refer to a raised sleeping platform in his 1697 A New Voyage Round the World:
We built Hutts upon its Banks and lay there all night, upon our Barbecu's, or frames of Sticks, raised about 3 foot from the ground.
And he uses it describe a platform for drying fish in his 1699 supplement to his earlier book in a description of the area around Campeche in what is now southern Mexico:
A little to the East of this River is a Fish-Range, and a small Indian Hutt or two within the Woods; where the Indian Fishers, who are subject to the Spaniards, lye in the Fishing-Seasons, their Habitations and Familes being farther up in the Country. Here are Poles to hang their Nets on, and Barbecues to dry their Fish.
From these uses, it seems likely that barbacoa or barbecue originally referred to any raised platform, and only later specialized to mean a grill for cooking meat.
In several seventeenth-century works, barbacoa is also used as a toponym, or place name. For example, Alexandre Exquemelin’s 1684 History of the Bucaniers uses it to refer to a location in what is now Panama:
The fifth day they marched to a place called Barbacoa, but as empty as any of the former, yet having ranged along, they found two sacks of Meal, with two Jars of Wine, and some fruits called Platanos this treasure Captain Morgan caused to be equally distributed amongst them who were in greatest necessity, which refreshed them, so that they marched now with greater courage than ever, till night.
It’s not clear whether Barbacoa was an actual native place name, or whether the Europeans mistook a reference to a raised platform as the name of the location.
The verb meaning to cook on a barbecue appears in English by 1661. From a description of the alleged cannibalistic practices of the natives of Guiana and Surinam in Edmund Hickergill’s Jamaica:
But usually their Slaves, when captive ta'ne,
Are to the English sold; and some are slain,
And their Flesh forthwith Barbacu'd and eat
By them, their Wives and Children as choice meat.
I said I wouldn’t opine on the cookery, but I must say that I would prefer any of the present-day barbecue styles to this one.
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020, s.v. barbecue.
“The Commentaries of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca” (1555). The Conquest of the River Plate (1535–1555). London: Hakluyt Society, 1891, 154–55. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dampier, William. A New Voyage Round the World, London: James Knapton, 1697, 20. Early English Books Online.
Dampier, William. Voyages and Descriptions. London: James Knapton, 1699, 12. Early English Books Online.
Exquemelin, Alexandre O. History of the Bucaniers, London: Thomas Malthus, 1684, 123. Early English Books Online.
Hickeringill, Edmund. Jamaica, London: John Williams, 1661, 59. Early English Books Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. barbecue, n., barbecue, v.
Popik, Barry. “Barbecue.” The Big Apple, 31 December 2006.
Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 4, London: William Stansby, 1625, 1536. Early English Books Online.
Photo credit: vxla, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license.