History of Barbequeing

Cooking meat over a fire isn't a new idea, but the practice of gathering for a barbeque of cooked meat found its roots in the south of colonial America. and the earliest recorded entry of the word in The Dictionary of American English was in 1733.

While the origins of the term barbeque are much debated, the most plausible root of the word is a West Indian term barbacoa which describes a method of making a grating of thin green sticks to place over a fire. Thin strips of meat were then layed on this grating and cooked over the hot coals. Records of colonial settlers in america adopting the practice of cooking on a barbacoa predate the year 1600.