Memorial Day and Barbecue History
A Southern Barbecue, a wood engraving from a sketch by Horace Bradley, published in Harper's Weekly, July 1887.
Today is Memorial Day and May is National Barbecue Month. We share this story today about the history of barbecue.
Barbecue has its roots in Native American, Spanish, and African culinary heritage. The Arawak people of the Caribbean had a diet that included a lot of non-sauce barbecuing of meat on green wood grills they called brabacots. The Spanish translated the word to barbacoa from which we get the English word barbecue. The Spanish learned from Native Americans how to barbecue the pig and popularized the cooking style among European settlers in their colonies. They brought the barbecue culture they had learned in the Caribbean with them to Louisiana and Florida which they held from 1736 to 1801.