Barbecue history
began when early man learned to control fire, about 500,000 BC. Having
discovered the heat treatment made food
more nourishing and digesting, people begin to use fire for cooking.
Barbecue can be recognized by right the first dish people cooked.
According to archaeological evidence, barbecue pits existed 25,000 BC,
and the first record of barbecue dates back to 1600. In the 8th century
Homer described open-pit
barbecue at Achilles, where the guests were served cooked
pig, sheep and goat. The barbecue
technique
was passed from the Greeks to the Romans, and later to the Saxons.
However, the technique of barbecuing isn't a unique European invention:
the Native Americans barbecued lamb, game and fish
long before Columbus' discovery. Here barbecue basic ingredients
– tomatoes and chile – were originated. Though pig
was
brought to America for the first time by the Spaniards, these were the
American Indians of today's South Carolina who taught them how to smoke
meat.
In American legal documents the term “barbecue”
appeared in
early 1600s, when the government imposed restrictions on shooting
firearms during barbecue gatherings. Experts claim that there are at
least four types of barbecue sauce in the USA, the recipes
of which are closely associated with history. Thus, the first and the
simplest one is the mix of vinegar and pepper, found in North and South
Carolina,Georgia and Virginia. The second – mustard sauce
–
derived from the first German settlers. The third one – Light
Tomato sauce – gained ground around 1900, when tomato
ketchup,
seasoned with vinegar and pepper, became available. And finally, the
fourth type of American barbecue sauces is Heavy tomato sauce, appeared
only about sixty years ago and considered a typical seasoning for
barbecue cooking.
The term barbecue – or barbeque – derives
from a
Spanish and Haitian word meaning “a latticework of
strokes”. Unfortunately, due to its incorrect use on
television
and in magazines, barbecue is often confused with other types of
cooking, without knowing that a grill and a barbeque are not the same
thing. Another common mistake lies in the erroneous usage of the
transitive verb “to barbeque/barbecue”. As commonly
thought, various meats can be barbequed, and such word-combinations as
“barbequed beef”, “barbequed
shrimp” or
“barbequed chicken” are rather widespread.
Nevertheless,
some experts think that a real barbecue can be made only of
pork – not “roasted”,
“fried” or
“grilled”, but only “barbequed”.
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