Barbeque

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. A cooking technique that involves grilling food over direct heat while also serving as a festive outdoor event where such food is enjoyed among friends and family, often enhanced with specific sauces
2. A culinary practice characterized by the grilling of various meats over an open fire, frequently accompanied by a social gathering that celebrates shared meals and flavors
3. A method of cooking food outdoors by slow grilling over smoke or open flames ; a gathering of people sharing grilled dishes in an informal setting

Etymology: Before it meant food, it meant a raised wooden framework, used for sleeping on or for curing meat. The Taíno of the Caribbean called this structure of sticks on posts "barbakoa". A person might rest on it above the damp ground, or lay meat and fish on it to dry and cure in the smoke of a fire beneath. Spanish colonists picked up the word in the Caribbean as "barbacoa", one of a cluster of Taíno words that passed through Spanish into European languages. Its siblings include "hammock", another Taíno answer to sleeping above the ground, along with canoe, hurricane, tobacco, maize, guava, iguana and savanna. English borrowed the word from Spanish in the middle of the seventeenth century. Spellings wandered at first, among them barbecoa and barbeque, and the meaning wandered with them. In English it settled on a meal of roasted meat or fish, while travellers' accounts still used it for the wooden frame itself. The attention then shifted from the frame to the fire. An early dictionary sense describes roasting an animal whole, a hog split open and cooked on a great gridiron, and from the cooking the name spread to the occasion built around it. That last step happened in the American colonies. A whole roasted hog feeds a crowd, and by the eighteenth century the Virginia version was a social event as much as a method, an outdoor gathering for neighbours, celebrations and political rallies. The word has carried both meanings ever since: something you do to meat, and something you go to. The whole hog gave rise to the word's best-known myth. It is often said that the name comes from French "barbe à queue", "beard to tail", because the animal was spitted from one end to the other. The story is tidy and memorable, but etymologists reject it. The word came from Spanish, which had it from the Taíno, and no French phrase was involved. The "-que" ending is no modern misspelling. It appears among the word's early English forms and survives as a variant of "barbecue". It also produced one lasting offspring: Americans abbreviated it to BBQ, attested by 1956, three letters now painted on roadside signs across the country. Spanish, meanwhile, kept the word close to its first shape. "Barbacoa" is still an ordinary Spanish word for a grill or an outdoor roast, and in Mexico it names meat slow-cooked in a pit.

Synonyms: grill, broil, roast, cook, smoke

Antonyms: raw, uncooked