Thinking about how Memorial Day has lost some of its solemnity as a remembrance of fallen members of the armed services and has become another celebration of beer drinking and barbecues, I got to wondering when, in fact, backyard cookouts first developed.
I know that “barbecue” is as old as fire, but the backyard charcoal grill seems to me to be a post WWII suburban phenomenon. Is is correct to assume that dad didn’t grill hamburgers in the backyard in the '20s or '30s? I don’t recall seeing outdoor grills in the reprints of Sear & Roebuck catalogs from the turn of the 20th century. I’ve seen older images of picnicking and of campfire cooking, but those aren’t the same.
I’m not finding anything online that outlines the development of the backyard family cookout (as opposed to larger-scale public barbecues in the southern U.S. sense.)
What I want to know is why it’s still popular. I’m glad we invented kitchens and air conditioning and no longer have to cook outside with the heat and bugs.
The defining technology was probably the invention of the charcoal briquette in the 1920s. It allowed people an easy source of outdoor fuel (coal itself, while common, was not used for open air outdoor cooking).
My guess is that they got really popular after 1952, when they started selling the first Weber kettle. That made grilling portable, controllable and cheap.
Weber is definitely a landmark, but grilling took off before the Weber grill became popular. In the early 60s, the flat, circular grillswere everywhere and were slowly replaced by the Weber.
Seriously? For burgers, hotdogs, turkeys, chicken, hams, steaks, lobster tails, shrimp – hell just about every meat in the world tastes awesome directly grilled or barbecued over charcoal. And it’s a taste that can’t be reproduced in the kitchen. This is to say nothing of the fraternity (and sorority) of outdoors cooking and bonding.
I don’t know the history of the charcoal grill, but pit barbecue goes back to at least very early colonial American history. And now that I think of it, Hawaiians have also been doing pit barbecues since forever. It’s a good system. Food goes in the pit in the morning, and it’s done - without tending - after a hard day’s work.
I’d like to read a good study of the American grill as the center of modern masculinity - my dad doesn’t even know where the dishes go, but he loves to grill him some steaks, and I know he isn’t an isolated phenomenon.
This might be more true than not in many households. The only cooking my father-in-law does is on the grill. Same with my best friend’s husband. “Real men” barbecue, but they mostly stay out of the kitchen.
My father did some indoor cooking, but much of that was with fish and shellfish that he had caught himself, so it was more of an extension of outdoorsmanship.
I grill pretty much year round about 3-5 times a week. Usually what I’m grilling is chicken breasts and pork chops but ribs, pork loin, steaks, shrimp, scallops, ribs, etc. all make an appearance. I own a gas grill, a charcoal grill, and a smoker. I typically use a gas grill because it’s quick and convenient and save the charcoal grill for special occasions.
There are several advantages to grilling outdoors.
#1. Flavor. This is less noticeable with the gas grill but even there I can do things I really can’t do indoors.
#2. Convenience: It’s easier for me to clean the grill than it is to clean pots and pans. (Yes, I clean my grills on a regular basis.)
#3. During the summer I can cook outside which helps keep the house a little cooler.
ISTM that a feature of some sit-coms of the era was the Man of the House building a brick barbecue. Not a Weber grill, but something for outdoor cooking and entertaining.
Car camping was popular in the 1920s, and people did have iron grills. RealityChuck says charcoal briquettes came about in the 1920s, so with the iron grills I think it’s fairly safe to assume people were making steaks outdoors then. (And even without the briquettes, wood can just be burnt down to coals.)
That’s exactly our case, too, and I don’t particularly like to grill outdoors either.
In the early '60s a couple of our neighbors had “old” brick barbecues in the yard, but I have no idea how long they predate me. They could have been ten years old or forty years old for all I know.
I vastly prefer the taste of meat grilled over charcoal to anything I can do in a frying pan. Veggies, too, taste much better when they’re grilled.
Grilling (or barbecuing) means that the heat is not produced and retained in the kitchen, where the AC has to cool the kitchen and the whole rest of the house back down. It’s actually cooler to grill outside rather than heat up the kitchen.
I know my way around the kitchen but there’s a definite manliness to barbeque cooking. (My wife also knows her way around a barbeque, to be fair.) As a man, what’s not to like about it? Fire! Iron! Meat! If it wasn’t for the fact that my colon would eventually dissolve I’d have prime rib steak every night.
And I must second the point that cooking outside your kitchen means your kitchen isn’t dirty. Barbequeing is simpler; put meat on fire, eat meat. If serving outside,crack open the paper plates and you needn’t even wash very many dishes.
It’s not just an American phenomenon. *Mangal *(grill) culture is huge in these parts among both Arabs and Jews, and while the dishes may be a bit different, the “manliness” of the process is identical.
