This Picture sure fires up my barbecue!

According to Webster's Dictionary barbecue means to roast or broil on a rack over hot coals or on a revolving spit before or over a source of cooking heat; to cook in a highly seasoned venegar sauce.

But for some people, a barbecue is a piece of equipment known as a barbecue grill. For others, a barbecue is a cookout. For some people, barbecue is grilling something on a barbecue grill and for others, it is roasting or smoking in a pit. As for what is being barbecued, it is pulled pork in the Carolinas, it is dry-rubbed ribs in Memphis, it is smothered in thick red sauce in Kansas City, it is beef brisket or clod in Texas and it is tri-tip in Santa Maria.

In 1526, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes was he first European to report on a method of cooking in the New World called barbacoas by the natives. Cooking by fire goes back probably to the discovery of fire, but we know that the early American colonists viewed barbecues as social gatherings at least in the 1600s because Virginia had laws banning the discharge of firearms at barbecues. George Washington love "barbicues". William Henry Harrison staged large barbecues during his succesful Presidential campaign in 1840.

By 1820, the first barbecue sauces began to appear and after the civil war barbecuing began to spread across the country. Around the turn of the century, entrepreneurs began to barbecue for profit by opening barbecue restaurants. The charcoal briquette first became commercially available when Henry Ford put his relative, E. G. Kingsford in charge of his charcoal briquitte manufacturing facility in 1921. Although modified steel barrels have been used down in the south and southwest for many years for barbecuing and smoking, it was in 1952 that metal worker George Stephen put legs on half of a nautical buoy to create the first Weber charcoal kettle grill.

Although the Weber kettle barbecue really popularized barbecuing, the vast array of types of barbecue grills now available to every household is a testament to the popularity and variety of barbecuing methods, sauces & barbecued meat, seafood, poultry, vegatables and combinations.