Barbecue
To be sure, these are valuable discussions, but neither exactly belongs here. Instead, I'll focus on what the word means and how it's been used, both in general and in my life. The Oxford English Dictionary traces barbecue back to the Spanish barbacoa, which in turn came from the Haitian word barbacòa. All three terms—barbecue, barbacoa, barbacòa—originally referred, not to the food we today call barbecue, but rather to the cooking structure assembled for the purpose of barbecuing: a "framework of sticks set upon posts" above a fire ("Barbecue"). The first English usage in print seems to have happened around 1697. From there, the word evolved to refer to the social function that sprang up around cooking on a barbecue. George Washington talks about going to barbecues as early as 1769—he even mentions staying all night at one and throwing his own. Some years later, Washington Irving called the barbecue "a kind of festivity or carouse much practised in Merryland"—plus ça change, Irving, plus ça change. Today, of course, the word mostly refers to the food cooked at or on a barbecue. This conflation doesn't seem to have occurred (convincingly, anyway) until the early 1800s when, serendipitously, a Philadelphia company makes reference to a "fine barbacue with spiced sauce"—likely the last time "fine barbacue" has ever been associated so directly with Philly ("Barbecue").
In the early-to-mid parts of the twentieth century, a further conflation occurred between that "spiced sauce" and both the food and its method, such that barbecue came to mean any meat slathered in a "barbecue sauce." Recipes for ground meat, enriched with a spiced tomato sauce and served on hamburger buns, began to crop up in popular cookbooks of the Depression, and thus the sloppy joe, the barbecue with which I grew up, was born.
The recipe box offers a ton of barbecue recipes, including meatballs weirdly identified as Swedish. A few are by me, one is a rare instance of a recipe from my mom, and one is hastily scrawled on the back of one of those sheets of coupons that come in overstuffed, neon envelopes. I've added my bourbon barbecue sauce, as well.
This collection of barbecue recipes requires us to consider the word at—to use Melville's term—a little lower layer. Here barbecue refers neither to the method of cooking, the social function of barbecuing, or even the sauce. Instead, it's a referent to any time that ketchup (or the seemingly inhumane catsup) meets brown sugar in the presence of vinegar. This is barbecue. Full stop.
[This page still under construction]
