Grilling

History

The story starts long before anyone owned tongs. At Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa's Northern Cape, a team led by Francesco Berna of Boston University found microscopic plant ash and charred bone about one million years old, bone heated to around 500°C ³. They read it as the oldest secure evidence of controlled fire, likely lit by Homo erectus. Other archaeologists, including Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa, urge caution: this looks like a one-off fire, and habitual fire use probably arrived closer to 400,000 years ago ³.

The first proof of actual cooking comes from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in northern Israel, on the shore of an ancient lake. Around 780,000 years ago, early humans there ate two giant species of carp. By testing the crystals in the fish teeth, researchers led by Irit Zohar showed the fish met moderate heat, cooked rather than burnt ⁴. The first grilled fish dinner, more or less, and nobody overdid it.

The word "barbecue" travels a different road. The Taíno people of the Caribbean cooked on raised wooden frames, a kind of rack built from four posts with sticks tied across the top. Their word for it, barabicu, became Spanish barbacoa. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés is widely credited with the first printed use, in 1526 ². In the United States, barbecue split into regional styles: in South Carolina, French and German settlers pushed sauces towards mustard, while Memphis, close to the Mississippi's molasses trade, went sweet and tomato-based ².

Then came the backyard. In 1952 George Stephen, who worked at Weber Brothers Metal Works near Chicago, looked at a buoy on Lake Michigan and wondered whether cutting the shape in half would let him control airflow ⁵. It became the Weber kettle, a domed grill built partly so a father of twelve could stop burning dinner. Stephen entered the American Royal's Barbecue Hall of Fame in 2013 ⁵.