Barbecue comes from the Caribbean. When Spanish sailors reached Hispaniola at the end of the fifteenth century, they found the Taíno people cooking and drying food on a raised frame of green sticks over a slow, smoky fire. The Spanish wrote the word down as barbacoa, and most historians trace our "barbecue" back to it. From there the method and the word set off on a long journey: into the earth ovens of Mexico, the whole-hog pits of the American South, the brick smokers of Texas and, eventually, the kettle grill in your garden. It is a five-hundred-year story, and almost all of it happens low and slow.
A frame of green sticks
The Taíno left no writing of their own, so everything we know about the original word comes to us through Spanish ears. Early chroniclers, most famously Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, writing in the 1520s and 1530s, described the barbacoa as a wooden framework raised on posts. Fish and meat were laid on top, well above the embers, and cooked and smoked slowly rather than scorched. The word seems to have covered more than cooking, too: early accounts use it for raised platforms of sticks in general, including ones for sleeping or storing food. The precise original meaning is a reconstruction, which is why careful dictionaries say "probably" rather than "certainly".
You may have heard a livelier theory: that "barbecue" comes from the French barbe à queue, "from beard to tail", describing a whole animal on a spit. It's a lovely image, but there is no historical evidence for it, and linguists treat it as a folk etymology, a story invented to explain a word after the fact.
The Caribbean gave us another word from the same smoky world. French hunters on Hispaniola in the seventeenth century dried and smoked meat on a similar wooden frame called a boucan, a word the French had picked up in South America. The hunters became known as boucaniers, and English turned them into "buccaneers". The pirates of the Caribbean were, quite literally, named after a way of smoking meat.
Into the pit: Mexico's barbacoa
In Mexico the word took a different turn. Barbacoa there means meat cooked slowly in a pit: wrapped in the broad leaves of the maguey (agave) plant, lowered on to hot stones or embers, covered with earth and left for many hours, often overnight. In central Mexico, especially Hidalgo, the classic meat is lamb or mutton. In the north, and across the border in Texas, it has long meant beef, particularly the head and cheeks, which turn meltingly tender after a long cook.
Earth ovens are ancient in Mesoamerica, but sheep and cattle arrived with the Spanish, so the barbacoa most people know today is a meeting of indigenous technique and European animals. Untangling exactly which part came from where is difficult, and historians generally describe it as a blend.
The American South: whole hogs and long nights
The Spanish also brought pigs to the Americas, and in the Southern colonies of North America pigs thrived, often left to forage in the woods. Roasting a whole hog over a pit of hardwood coals became the centrepiece of big gatherings in Virginia and the Carolinas. By the eighteenth century a "barbecue" meant a social event as much as a meal: political rallies, church meetings and celebrations were all held around the pit. George Washington's diaries record him attending barbecues.
It is important to be clear about who did the cooking. Across the South, much of the long, skilled work at the pit was done by enslaved Africans and, after emancipation, by Black cooks and pitmasters, whose knowledge shaped Southern barbecue profoundly. For a long time that part of the story was left out; food historians have since documented it in detail.
Regional styles grew from local meat, local wood and local taste. Eastern North Carolina still cooks the whole hog and dresses it with a thin sauce of vinegar and red pepper, a style many historians regard as one of the oldest surviving. South Carolina has its golden mustard sauces, often linked to the region's German settlers. Memphis is known for ribs, Kansas City for its thick, sweet tomato sauce.
Texas, beef and the smoker
Texas went its own way, and its way was beef. In Central Texas in the nineteenth century, German and Czech immigrant butchers smoked meat and sausages in brick pits behind their meat markets, and customers ate them straight off butcher paper, often with no sauce at all. That meat-market tradition survives in small towns such as Lockhart. Brisket, once a cheap, tough cut, only became the headline act well into the twentieth century, when pitmasters learned to coax it to tenderness over many hours of gentle smoke.
Barbecue moved into the back garden in the 1950s. Charcoal briquettes were already on sale (their popularity is often linked to Henry Ford, who turned wood offcuts from his car factories into charcoal), and in 1952, according to the company's own history, George Stephen of Weber Brothers Metal Works near Chicago built a domed kettle grill from a metal buoy. Suburban America never looked back.
In Britain, Australia and much of the world, "barbecue" drifted towards something almost opposite to the original: sausages and burgers cooked fast over direct, fierce heat. Both uses are now correct. But the word's first meaning, meat cooked slowly and a little way from the fire, is what the smoker revival of the last twenty years has brought back.
Cooking real barbecue at home
True barbecue is about indirect heat, gentle smoke and time. You don't need a pit, only a grill with a lid or a simple smoker, and patience.
- Keep the meat away from the flames. Bank the coals to one side and cook on the other, at around 110–135°C. Our guide to direct versus indirect grilling shows how to set up any kettle or gas grill.
- Choose the tough cuts. Pork shoulder, brisket, ribs and beef cheeks are full of connective tissue that melts into gelatine over a long cook. Lean cuts simply dry out.
- Look for clean smoke. Thin, pale blue smoke gives a sweet, smoky flavour; thick white smoke tastes acrid. Use seasoned hardwood such as oak, hickory or fruitwood, and a small amount of it.
- Cook to temperature, not time. Pulled pork is ready to shred at around 90–95°C inside; our meat temperature guide covers the rest. Expect a "stall", when the temperature stops rising for an hour or more. It is normal.
- Rest it. Wrap the meat and leave it for at least 30 minutes, and ideally an hour, before pulling or slicing.
Where to find it in our books
Almost every chapter of this story is on the table in BBQ Grill Secrets. You can cook the Carolinas with the Eastern Carolina Pulled Pork, go back to the Caribbean with the Cuban Lechón (Mojo Pulled Pork) or the Jamaican Jerk Pork (Pit-Style), taste Mexico's pit tradition in the Barbacoa Beef Cheeks, and take on the big one, the Central Texas Smoked Brisket. To see every slow-cooked recipe across our books, search the recipe finder for smoked dishes.
Questions people ask
Where does the word "barbecue" come from?
Most historians trace it to barbacoa, the Spanish rendering of a word used by the Taíno people of the Caribbean for a raised wooden frame over a fire. It reached English in the seventeenth century. The popular French "barbe à queue" explanation has no supporting evidence.
Is barbecue the same as grilling?
Traditionally, no. Barbecue means cooking slowly with indirect heat and smoke, usually for hours; grilling means cooking quickly over direct, high heat. In everyday British and Australian English, "barbecue" is used for both, and for the equipment too.
What is the difference between barbacoa and barbecue?
They share a root, but in Mexico barbacoa means meat, often lamb or beef cheeks, wrapped in maguey leaves and slow-cooked in a covered pit. American barbecue usually means meat smoked above or beside a wood fire.
What is the oldest style of American barbecue?
No single style can prove it came first, but whole-hog barbecue from Virginia and the Carolinas is generally considered the oldest tradition, with Eastern North Carolina's vinegar-and-pepper style its best-known survivor.