I like food. Just about all types of food. I haven't met a cuisine I haven't been willing to try. There are a few things I don't care for. Raw meat and fish, for example. This probably makes me a bad New Englander, but I can't stand raw oysters. And my Polish ancestors might be inclined to disown me because I'm not a big fan of ham. But all in all, I'm a big fan of food and its preparation. I like having friends over to share a meal. I like watching cooking shows and reading cook books. I like good kitchen equipment.
For all of the food and food related things I like, I really love barbecue. There are a LOT of people that love barbecue. Just about any place you go in the good ol' U. S. of A. you can find a decent barbecue joint. TV shows and books about barbecue are popular and seem to only be increasing in popularity. Barbecue is a sauce, a cooking method, a type of cuisine and an apparatus for cooking food in. Just about every culture has some sort of method for slow cooking and roasting poorer cuts of meat to turn them into delectable treats fit for a king.
Like most things that can be considered truly American, it is a hodge podge of things picked up and adapted from a variety of other cultures and combined into something wonderful. Hell, you can even spell it barbecue, barbeque, bar-b-q or BBQ. They're all good. Very, very good indeed. A history of barbecue is outside the scope of what I want to talk about here. What I am going to write about over the next few blog entries are my thoughts as to why barbecue as a cuisine instills a love that is both deep and wide.
No comments:
Post a Comment