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Saturday 18 February 2012

Barbecue

The first barbecuers may well have been prehistoric cavemen. Anthropologists say they may have started roasting meat some 1.4 million years ago.

In classical Greece, meat rarely was eaten, except during ritual feasts, when it was prepared as simply as a steak at a modern backyard barbecue. 

The word “barbecue” first appeared in print in 1653. It comes from a word Arawak Indians in Haiti used, who smoked strips of meat over an open fire on a grating of wood called a “berbekot”.

The word barbecue took on in America the meaning of meat cooked on an apparatus in the open air over a fire and the social gathering incorporating such cooking by the 1730s.

The abbreviation BBQ was first recorded in Los Angeles in 1938.


Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, hosted the first barbecue at the White House that featured Texas-style barbecued ribs.

The abbreviation “barbie” was first recorded in Australia in 1976.

Lexington, North Carolina is known as the Barbecue Capital of the World. October is Barbecue Month there, with a month-long Annual Barbecue Festival.

Texas A&M University offers a class on Texas Barbecue that teaches the history of barbecue, cooking methodology, flavorings and seasonings, and different types of barbecue. The class is offered in the fall and is held on Friday afternoons. 

The most popular foods for cooking on the grill are, in order: burgers (85 percent), steak (80 percent), hot dogs (79 percent) and chicken (73 percent).

The average barbecue grill has 124 % more germs on it than a toilet seat and is cleaned only twice a year.

Three out of four American households own a grill and they use it on average of five times per month.

Sources Daily Express, Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, Grilling Facts and Trivia, Food For Thought; Extraordinary Little Chronicles of the World by Ed Pearce, Hpba.org

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