Food - Bee Wilson on the joys - and perils - of other people's barbecues
Hell isn't other people, it's other people's barbecues. The most enticing as well as the most disgusting smells of the summer emanate from other people's charcoal burners. Sometimes, the smoky scent of marinated meat cooking in a neighbouring garden is so terribly inviting that it consumes you with a desire to eat it, to leap over the fence and offer to swap your own, dull, supper of salade nicoise for just a little corner of that burnished animal. But at other times, just as you're settling down outside with a book or a trowel and fork, the acrid odour of cooking oil and burnt flesh is so intrusive that you have to retire indoors, harrumphing slightly.
In the summer months, we become a nation of garden centres, reality TV and barbecues. At the barest hint of hot weather, barbecues become a universal talking point, a sport whose success is measured in quantity rather than quality. Monday morning disc jockeys are forever boasting about how many barbecues they had at the weekend, as if this were a badge of popularity and even honour. You hear people on the way to work, singing the glories of the Tesco disposable barbecue kit, or telling their friends about some particularly cheap greying pack of pork chops and spare ribs on sale at Safeway, with the same enthusiasm that the French might reserve for a truly spectacular and out-of-the-way, artisan-made piece of saucisson.
Barbecues are a way of lessening our discomfort with the whole business of cooking. Can't cook? No problem! Have a barbecue. Blackening meat outside has also provided a convenient way for men to engage in cooking without needing to learn any skills and, most importantly, without losing face. The food writer Jeremy Round describes this very well. "Men who wouldn't dream of letting delice de volaille grillee aux crudites de saison anywhere near their lips nevertheless don hilarious pinnies to toss salads and watch over blackened drumsticks that sullenly spit with each application of their own special barbecue sauce, which always has a 'secret ingredient', which always turns out to be Tabasco."
The British man feels so happy messing around with his char-grilled steak (with the emphasis on the "char"), it seems almost churlish to point out that the original barbecue was done not by men but by women, on the islands now called Martinique and Guadeloupe. David Burton charts this history in his deeply informative book French Colonial Cookery (Faber and Faber, £16.99). Three thousand years ago, these islands were populated by Arawak Indians. But in the tenth century, "a ghastly holocaust befell the Arawak" when they were conquered by the bellicose Caribs. The Arawak men were wiped out, the women enslaved. "Since they now became cooks, this aspect of Arawak culture was saved, but unfortunately it does not seem to have been the strongest point." Arawak women knew only one way of cooking - grilling food, mainly fish, on a frame of green sticks covered with animal hide over hot embers. "It was as much a means of smoking as it was of cooking," writes Burton. Known as a brabacot, this frame of green twigs was adopted by the first Spanish colonists, who called it barbacoa - hence "barbecue".
They no longer used green twigs, but in the 20th century, in the southern states of the US, the barbecue became a way of life. In its purest form, American barbecue means roasting a whole hog in the ground. The singer and actor Isaac Hayes describes a hog picnic in Tennessee: "Elaborate preparations began the night before, when men all worked together to dig a huge pit in the ground. Into the pit, they'd lower a whole hog that had been cleaned, spiced and stuffed in the cavity with onions and aromatic vegetables . . . The hog would roast, smouldering overnight in the earthen oven. The next day, the men would dig the pig out and put it on a spit, where it would keep turning all day . . . By about two in the afternoon, you could smell the sweet pork for miles around. When the pig was done, we'd stand there with our plates held out, waiting for just the pieces we wanted." Now that's a real barbecue.
But, increasingly, "barbecue" has ceased to be a method of cooking and has become a rather desultory kind of flavouring. Americans are proud of their personalised recipes for barbecue sauce, which usually involve pulling down every jar in the cupboard and adding sugar, maple syrup and bourbon. If that's too much effort, buy ready-made. Even Isaac Hayes now markets his own "Memphis Magic" sauces, to raise money for youth scholarships. Once you have one of these sauces, there's no need to bother with all the smoky effort of a barbecue at all. Just open a jar and add to spaghetti, or try Elvis's favourite: meat-encrusted, bubbling barbecue pizza.
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