Mount Pleasant Magazine July/August 2019

LC 34 www.LowcountryCuisineMag.com | www.MountPleasantRestaurant.com | www.CharlestonRecipes.com lowcountry cuisine B arbecue. What exactly is it? An outdoor social gathering? The act of cooking outside over a grill? Or is it the grill itself? In the Lowcountry, it’s none of the above. There is only one definition of barbecue here, and it is delicious! But just how did barbecue become the signature dish of the region? Some food historians suggest Spanish explorers encountered their first taste of it when they landed in the New World five centuries ago. The native peoples in both the Caribbean and southeastern North America cooked meat very slowly over burning embers in an open pit. The Spanish dubbed this new style of cooking “barbacoa.” However, there is another theory that the French term “barbe-a-queue” — meaning beard-to-tail — that may have been the origin of the word, since the entire pig, head to tail, is cooked. We may never know for sure which language should be credited. But we do know that barbecue is traditionally pork rather than beef since, in the South, pig farming — rather than raising cattle — was the norm. Pigs were less expensive to maintain since they don’t require large open fields, and they could even be set loose in forests to feed themselves when money was tight. The BY MARY COY A Slow-Roasted History The Back Story on Barbecue