bar • be • cue
/ bärb kyoo / No matter how you spell it, it’s defined as smoked meats
Barbecue. Barbeque. Bar-B-Q. Bar-B-Que. BBQ. Bar-B-Cue.
There’s no shortage of different spellings for our favorite smoked-meat cuisine. This is particularly perplexing for a writer — I will occasionally visit a barbecue joint with different spellings on the sign outside and the menu inside (Bar-B-Q versus Bar-B-Que, for instance). My general rule is to go with what’s printed on the menu.
The conventional spelling is of course “barbecue,” with no dashes or abbreviations and a “c” instead of a “q” for the third-to-last letter. Google’s search engine confirms this — using its “Ngram Viewer” that tracks the use of words in print since 1800, “barbecue” is by far the most prevalent.
Like many things associated with barbecue, the origin (etymology) of the word is disputed. Its first use in English is from a book published in 1699 by the British explorer William Dampier. In “New Voyage Round the World,” Dampier describes a “Borbecu” during his Caribbean travels, which in this context was a framework of sticks used as a raised sleeping platform. Spanish explorers arriving to the same area also referred to a “barbacoa” — a raised platform of sticks upon which meat was placed and a fire built beneath to cook the meat.
The French, never to be outdone by the English, also claim ownership of the word by pointing to a derivation of the phrase
barbe à queue, translated as “from beard to tail,” referring to the technique of cooking every part of the animal from “nose to tail.” This theory has mostly been debunked, however.
In the United States, one of the earliest official references is in a dictionary from 1803 that defines barbecue as a “hog dressed whole.” This refers to the “whole hog” cooking traditions of the Southeast, in which a whole pig is butchered and splayed and then cooked over wood coals in a pit dug into the ground.
Certainly in the U.S., the original usage of the word barbecue referred to this whole-hog style of direct-heat cooking.
It was sometime later that the direct-heat-over-hot-coals style transformed into our contemporary definition of barbecue, in which smoke and indirectheat are used to cook and flavor meat. This evolution most likely traces back to Central Texas in the mid-1800s, when Czech and German immigrants brought techniques that used smoking as a way to preserve meat and fish in the days before refrigeration.
Australians, of course, love to “throw a shrimp on the barbie” and embrace barbecue as a direct-heat cooking method.
And the British still cling to the directheat philosophy, using the word “barbecue” interchangeably with the word “grilling.” They fire up the backyard grill to “have a barbecue,” eliciting groans from their American cousins.
As for the different spellings of “barbecue” that started to fragment in the early 1900s, food writer Robert Moss offers a fascinating theory that it originated with the rise of newspaper advertising. According to Moss, shorter derivations such as “BBQ” started to show up about the same time classified advertising became popular. By using “BBQ” instead of “barbecue,” enterprising pitmasters could save a few cents every time the ad was published.
Nowadays, barbecue joints aren’t limited in the number of characters they use because of classified ads, but more likely by the 140-character limit of Twitter. The exact spellings are now as diverse as the various barbecue styles found here. Houston pitmasters usually stick to the full “barbecue” spelling (Pinkerton’s Barbecue) or the shorter version (CorkScrew BBQ), although a few holdovers like Pizzitola’s Bar-B-Cue and Lenox Bar-B-Q still use the older spellings.