History
Barbecue was first "discovered" by none other
than Christopher Columbus in 1492 when he landed on what is today the Dominican
Republic. He saw that the Native American (Taino Culture) people were slow
cooking large cuts of various meats and seafood on covered platforms in the air
over an open fire.
The
Taino word for this operation is called "barabicu." The word
translates to "sacred fire pit" in English and also shows how they
slow cooked with spent coals in an "open pit" to amplify and direct
the smoky heat up to the meat. The same process was also used by the
nearby Timuca natives in southern Florida where the exact same word
"barabicu" was being used to describe the same all day process with
the same translation. The Taino culture was also extent in the majority of the
Caribbean Gulf and many different local variations were found from Barbados to
the more Leeward Islands populated by the Arawak nation who translate
"barabicu" to"barbacoa". The process was probably founded on
Barbados (called so for its plentiful local bearded fig trees which give the
name to the island "Los Barbadoes" or Bearded One) where the green
supple fig branches were easily fire resistant and would smoke heavily instead
of being consumed in the long process of cooking meats and large fish.
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