How the backyard barbecue became an American tradition
Like many Americans, I’ve spent the past few weeks catching up on home-repair projects and brushing up on my backyard grilling skills. Indeed, my yard has never looked so good, and my friends and family have had their fill of burgers and hot dogs.
Standing in front of a kettletype grill filled with glowing charcoal and flipping burgers in between sips of cold beer is as American as it gets.
As is often the case when I have free time, I ask myself,
“How did this get here?” Specifically, how did cooking meat on a simple backyard appliance over burning chunks of compressed wood become an American pastime?
The story begins in 1919 in Michigan. By then, the Ford Motor Co. was producing up to a million cars a year thanks to the introduction of the assembly-line process. Each car included wood parts, so Henry Ford asked a relative, E.G. Kingsford, to help with sourcing enough wood. Kingsford acquired timberland in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and Ford built a saw mill there.
Ford eventually faced a problem common to all saw mills: what to do with all the scrap and waste material like sawdust. Specifically, how could he make extra profit from it? At the same time in Oregon — home to a huge timber industry — a chemist named Orin Stafford invented a way to bind sawdust and other materials into a block or “briquette” that could be safely burned for cooking.
Ford licensed the process, had none other than Thomas Edison design a factory next to the sawmill to make charcoal briquettes and started selling bags of “Ford
Charcoal” at car dealerships right alongside Model Ts. Ford’s plan was to encourage people to buy more cars so they could drive to the countryside and have picnics where the charcoal would be used to cook the food.
Alas, the Great Depression and World War II put a damper on consumer spending, so Ford’s foray into grilling never quite took off. In 1951, an investor group bought the charcoal business from Ford and renamed it Kingsford Charcoal, after Ford’s relative who helped create it.
Around that same time, a salesman at Weber Bros. Metal Works in Chicago named George Stephen became frustrated with the grills he used to cook for his large family. Known as “braziers,” these are the grills you often see at parks with a box to contain the charcoal and a steel grate on top to hold the meat. The problem for Stephen was that without a top, cooking in inclement weather was impossible. Why not add a cover to the brazier?
At the time, Weber Bros. Metal Works was known for building buoys used for water navigation. The devices used half-domes of metal for the top and bottom. Stephen adapted the dome shape to a grill design, and the classic kettle-shaped Weber grill with a half-dome cover was born. He eventually bought the company and renamed it the Weber-Stephens Products Co.
Starting in the 1960s, the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue’s advertising agencies took over the promotion of backyard barbecues on behalf of the grill and charcoal makers.
For example, in the July 13, 1967, Houston Chronicle, an article
about grilling was conveniently located next to a Weingarten’s supermarket advertisement for all manner of beef roasts, Farmer Brown franks and Hormel sliced bologna.
The breathless article declared, “The old barbecue kettle is the new status symbol! It has reached the top rung of the social ladder.”
A barbecuing expert named Martha Weber who also happened to be the “home consultant” for the Weber-Stephens Products Co. proclaimed that
“the sale of charcoal briquettes mounted with the popularity of the covered barbecue kettle” is indeed a new status symbol and “(the kettle grill) has turned into a swank home furnishings piece to be used in the loveliest outdoor and indoor settings.” No details were provided on how the grill might be used in indoor settings.
And so it went in the golden age of advertising of the 1960s and ’70s: If you wanted to be a truly prosperous American, it was your duty to cook meat from your local supermarket in your backyard using a Weber kettle grill filled with Kingsford Charcoal. And it’s been that way ever since.