Historia General y Natural de las Indias

"Oviedowas a real Renaissance man. He wrote a novel, he was a bit of an anthropologist and he knew about business management. In 1512 he landed a job as a manager of a goldmine in the newly established colony of Columbia. Back in the 16th century, this was like landing a job at a top hedge fund – there was no quicker path to riches. So Oviedosailed with an armada from Spain to Columbia, stopping off in what today is the Dominican Republic and Haiti to take on water and supplies. While there Oviedo encountered the indigenous people and, unlike his more rapacious colleagues, who tried to convert and enslave them, he tried to document their culture and daily life. That is what this book is about. In one scene he came across Taíno Indians who had driven four poles into the ground around a fire, rigged a green sapling grid on top of those poles and used it to cook wild game and fish. They called it a barbacoa , or at least that’s what it sounded like to the Spanish ear. This is the first mention of the word and it’s where our word “barbecue” comes from. So, in the original sense, the word actually referred to a grill. People ask, “what is barbecue? Is it a kind of food? Is it a technique? Is it a meal outdoors?” In a sense, it’s all of these things, but the original meaning was a device for live-fire cooking and smoking meat. Now a couple of interesting things about barbacoa . When your grill grate is made of wood, it has to be several feet above the fire or else it will burn. When you cook several feet above the fire you’re actually cooking at a lower temperature for a longer time in the presence of a lot of wood smoke. That is the definition of true American barbecue today. And by barbecue, I mean North Carolina pork shoulder, Kansas City ribs, or Texas brisket smoke-roasted low and slow. When I gave a talk at the Library of Congress a few years ago, they took me to the rare books room and actually put a 16th-century edition of this book in my hands, opened to the page with the word barbacoa . That was pretty thrilling. Europeans have been grilling for millennia. The ancient Greeks and Romans had metal grid-irons that they would position on a raised fireplace over an ember fire. The Europeans did direct grilling over hot heat, what we think of as grilling today. A European would have thrown a steak on a grid-iron or stick a suckling pig on a spit in a fireplace. But this idea of slow smoking spread first to North America as early as the late 1600s. In North America, we adapted from the Caribbean and indigenous American tribes this unique technique of roasting low and slow over wood smoke. One of the first laws promulgated in the Virginia colony concerned the discharge of firearms at barbecues. George Washington wrote a lot about barbecue in his diaries. So I’d say that Oviedo’s influence, to the extent that it was felt, was felt first in North American and not in Europe."