The BBQ.

We provide you a BBQ station. Simple. Efficient.

The word “barbecue” comes from the Caribbean word “barbacoa.” It was actually the name of a wooden structure used by Taino Indians to smoke their food. In all probablity, the first barbecue consisted of food from the sea, that obviously being plentiful in the Caribbean. The wooden structure could also be used as an area for storage, shelter and sleeping.

The word appeared in print for the first time in 1526 in Spain which in all likelyhood when their explorers took the word ‘barbacoa’ back to Spain. After a while people started using it to refer to the process of cooking food in a barbacoa and the cooked food itself rather than for the structure.

The first known instance of barbecue appearing in English print was in A New Voyage Round the World by William Dampier, published in 1697. Here it referred to the structure as a place for sleeping: the spelling was starting to evolve, possibly to make it easier for the English tongue to pronounce. Very soon, around the 1730's, it had started to mean ‘a social gathering during which meat was grilled’, as evidenced in B. Lynde’s diary that year: “Fair and hot; Browne, barbacue; hack overset.” In 1755, the word “barbecue” entered Samuel Johnson’s The Dictionary of the English Language.

The entry read: “to ba’rbecue.” — A term used in the West-Indies for dressing a hog whole; which, being split to the backbone, is laid flat upon a large gridiron, raised about two foot above a charcoal fire, with which it is surrounded.

There are many spellings for barbecue today as there are meanings. People use barbeque, BBQ, Bar-B-Que, and other variations. That said, the “official” spelling is generally considered to be “barbecue” with a “c”, similar to the original. Debate over what should be the correct spelling or what exactly constitutes barbecue goes on, but there is one thing most agree on. A barbecue is definitely not a shelter or a sleeping structure.

Bonus Facts:

One fanciful etymology story about the word “barbecue” is that it comes from the French words for beard and tail, “barbe” and “queue.” Supposedly, the combination is meant to refer to roasting a pig, when you cook it from its top (beard) to its tail. While combining the words would give you something very similar to barbecue, it’s just not how the word came about.

• Another origin story is that barbecue is a contraction of the name of a popular US roadhouse that had pool tables: “Bar, Beer, and Cue.” There are no historical records to back this one up.
• Perhaps in an attempt to paint barbecues “as American as apple pie” (though apple pie isn’t really American), certain cookbooks from Texas have perpetuated the myth of a rancher named Bernard Quayle or Barnaby Quinn, depending on who you talk to. His favourite thing to do was cook up various types of meat over open pits and serve the food to his friends. On his ranch, his animals were branded with his initials — B.Q. Thus, his ranch became “Bar B.Q.” Sound a little farfetched to you? Yeah, us too. There’s about as much documented evidence backing this one up as there is that Mr. Rogers, who was in fact a pacifist and a Presbyterian minister, wore long sleeve sweaters to hide all the tattoos on his arms, one for each person he killed as a sniper in the military… Yep.
• For a while, early French explorers called barbecues “boucans,” which is where we get “buccaneer” from — they were the people who tended the boucans.
• The famous “Australian” phrase that Americans like to repeat — “throw a shrimp on the barbie” — isn’t actually Australian. The phrase originated in a series of tourism commercials starring Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame. What he actually said in the advertisement was “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you.” which evolved somewhat in popular vernacular. While Australians will use “barbie” as slang for “barbecue,” they are far more likely to say “prawn” than “shrimp.” To limit confusion in the American audience, though, the word was changed to “shrimp.”
• While barbecuing meat is stereo-typically portrayed as a “man’s job” these days, the first people tending the barbecue were probably women. The family structure of the tribes using the barbacoa usually meant that the men were the ‘fishermen-hunters’ while the women were the cooks.
• President George Washington himself was a big fan of barbecues. He wrote in his diary about going to a barbecue in 1769 (“Went in to Alexandria to a Barbecue and stayed all Night.”) and hosting one in 1773 (“a Barbicue of my own giving at Accatinck”). He is even thought to have taken 48 bottles of French claret to one. Sounds like a recipe for a good time.
• Barbecue competitions have been taking place since at least 1959. The first one seems to have taken place in Hawaii just a few months after it became a state, and was only for men. Twenty-five men entered the cook-off, competing for the grand prize of $10,000 (about $77,600 today). More recently, “Barbecue Pitmasters” aired on TLC, featuring people cooking up their best barbecue recipes to compete for a $100,000 grand prize.