BARBECUE, n. Apologies to my fellow Northern hemisphere residents for this wildly out-of-season word—as I write this, my street is covered in thick sheet of ice—but I ran across a good entry in the 1870 Transactions of the American Philological Association, so, like, time is not a huge concern for me here.
I was reading the 1870 Transactions of the American Philological Association because I found it in a Wikipedia citation while looking up “caucus” for a previous newsletter.
(Political sidebar: Isn’t Wikipedia a marvel? I use it every day and I donate monthly. Remember years ago when people would tell you not to trust Wikipedia, and now it’s a bastion of real cited knowledge in an internet swimming in disinformation and AI slop? I mean, you should still look into the citations; Wiki editors can be wrong. But they’re not gonna tell you to put glue on your pizza.)
Anyway, barbecue. However I define this word, I’m gonna make someone mad, so let me excuse myself: I’m a vegetarian and this is decidedly not my area of expertise. But it’s a noun that refers to a kind of grilled or smoked or slow-cooked meat, usually with a sauce of the same name. It’s also the name of the process and could be used to refer to the grill itself. You can use it as a verb, too, because anything goes—unless I start trying to tell you specific methods and ingredients.
Where does the word come from? Here’s what the American Philological Association had to say in 1870. (You can read their Transactions on archive.org. Since I’m emotional about the good parts of the internet lately, I just want to say that I also admire their archival project—even though it sometimes runs up against intellectual property law.)
What New Englanders managed by a caucus, the Virginians preferred to accomplish by a barbecue. The French translator of Burnaby’s Travels in America (published in 1775), thinking some explanation of this Virginian word was required, informed his readers, by a note, that “cet amusement barbare consiste à fouetter les porcs jusqu’à la mort, pour en rendre la chair plus delicate” [FD translating: this barbarous entertainment consists of whipping pigs to death to make their flesh more delicate] but the English author, in a third edition, corrects his translator, by stating that “a Barbecue is nothing more than a porket killed in the usual way, stuffed with spices and rich ingredients, and basted with Madeira wine’’! “It is esteemed’— he adds,—“a very great delicacy ; and is, I believe, a costly dish.”
This word—like “canoe,” “tobacco,” “hammock,” and several others—appears to have been imported to Virginia from the Antilles. Oviedo (Hist. gen., lib. vii., c. 1) mentioned barbacoa as the West Indian name of a scaffolding or covered platform for drying maize. In the Relation of De Soto’s expedition to Florida, in 1538 (translated by Hakluyt, 1609), “a loft made with canes, which they build to keep their maize in, which they call a barbacoa,” is described as ‘an house set up in the air upon four stakes, boorded about like a chamber, and the floore of it is of cane hurdles.” (Virginia richly valued, &c, ch. xi.)
As early at least as 1665, “barbicue” and “barbicuing” were in use among the English residents of Guiana, to denote the Indian method of curing meat or fish, by laying it on a hurdle or wooden gridiron supported by four stakes driven into the ground, and exposing it to the heat of the sun or the smoke of a slow fire.
Fans of Mexican food might note the word “barbacoa” in that passage, which in current usage (at least in US English) refers to slow-cooked meat, usually beef, that you might eat in a taco. This word is probably originally Taíno (an indigenous people of the Caribbean, the name itself is a term with a complex history). Its original meaning is what’s described above: a scaffolding of canes.
Here’s a 1585 engraving by Theodor de Bry of people cooking fish on a similar platform; according to the source text the people depicted are Roanoke, placing them in present-day North Carolina in the US, meaning this kind of cooking was widespread.
So the Spanish probably learned the word “barbacoa” in the Caribbean. When they arrived in Mexico and saw people cooking in earth ovens, they seem to have indiscriminately applied the term “barbacoa” even though an earth oven and a scaffolding of canes are pretty different.
There’s a competing etymology that says “barbacoa” comes from the Maya word “Baalbak’Kaab,” which does refer to meat cooked in an earth oven, but per Wikipedia there isn’t evidence that Baalbak’Kaab transformed into “barbacoa.” The OED and Merriam-Webster also both think the word was originally Caribbean. Whatever word we use for it, the practice of cooking in earth ovens is widespread among the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America. Curing or cooking meat on a wooden scaffolding or covered platform was also widespread.
US English “barbecue” certainly came from Spanish “barbacoa,” and you can see above, the whole history of the word covers many different approaches to cooking meat, so it’s not surprising that “barbecue” has so much regional variation today. For extra fun, you can also spell it barbeque, or, of course, BBQ. I’m told it’s esteemed a very great delicacy.
Speaking of delicacies, here’s what I’ve read lately in small-r romance:
The Beast Takes a Bride (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Julie Anne Long. Sometimes you gotta read the book that everyone else is talking about, you know? And this one, while very much in the standard straight histrom “man big, woman small” mode, is great. I do appreciate a set of characters with diametrically opposed sorrows: giant scary scarred war hero Magnus has never been wanted, while petite beautiful genteel Alexandra has never been free to choose who she wants. He essentially buys her—paying off her father’s debts in exchange for her hand in marriage—thinking she could never want him. Naturally, she resents it. Their marriage is heartbreaking disaster until it isn’t. It’s lovely and emotional. And Julie Anne Long is funny! There’s also a love of words on display, including previous Word Suitcase features “furbelows” and “costermonger,” which always endears a book to me, plus this delightful passage about “shillelagh”:
“ShiLAYlee. It’s an Irish word for a versatile sort of cudgel. A cudgel is a club.” Angelique made a swinging gesture. “The sort you hit people with in order to defend yourself. It can also be used as a walking stick.”
Angelique was a former governess who had never lost the impulse to instruct, and Dot’s mind was a vast, fertile plain (or a howling tundra, or an attic full of cobwebs and mysterious, broken toys depending upon whom one asked). Dot considered every new word a gift to be displayed proudly and liberally in her sentences for weeks thereafter, the way someone else might set out their best china plates.
“I think it’s the most beautiful word I’ve ever heard. ShILLAAAYLEEE.”
Library ebook.
A Wolf Steps in Blood (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary, fantasy) by Tamara Jerée. Absolutely gorgeous, hungry, dripping-with-blood prose in this little gem of a book, about two magic Black lesbian outcasts in rural Alabama who need each other to survive, and brilliant worldbuilding wielded like a knife:
Red wolves haven’t lived in Alabama since the 1920s. Our ecological status is extirpated, a fancy word for locally extinct. Sometimes, I think of those last maligned wolves from a century ago, hunted and poisoned and trapped as the world closed in around them. In our old tales, the last of us made a pact with witches in a desperate bid for survival. We had to adapt to a different world, a world that wanted us dead. We chose forms like the humans who had helped us only to learn that they too were hated by the two-legged world we sought to join. Even with our new hands, we could not enter the same doors as the lighter ones. Even though the woods were no longer our home, we couldn’t live in the same neighborhoods.
Yasmine, the narrator, is a werewolf suffering the violence of the world while viciously repressing her own animal needs for freedom and love and, yes, violence—but the natural violence of a predator that hunts to live. She’s trapped in Pickens County and trapped in her body, binging and purging and rarely letting her wolf out. She begins to accept herself when she meets Kalta, a witch in exile, and the two of them share an instant sexual and emotional bond. Tender like a bruise and very sexy, this was also beautifully crafted and really powerful. Indie published; ebook purchased from Smashwords.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman (gay trans m/bi m, historical) by TJ Alexander. Full, very excited disclosure: this book comes out March 11 and I got to blurb it! I’m incredibly honored and I’ve been bragging for months that I got to read this book early. So, should you acquire a copy of this, somewhere in the first few pages, it will say my name and “Witty, exhilarating, and achingly tender, A Gentleman’s Gentleman lavishes its trans hero with the elegant waistcoats he desires and the love and acceptance he’s resigned himself to living without. His reserved valet stole my heart. I adored this!” I meant every word, and here are a few more: you should also know that this book has a carriage chase and a scene where somebody climbs up a trellis to get into a second-floor bedroom in the middle of the night. The good shit. Advance Review Copy.
And in books that are romance adjacent, I read the anthology Black Love Matters, edited by Jessica P. Pryde, which is an excellent essay collection on Black romance and Black love more generally. The essays range from personal to academic, or sometimes both at once, in a way I really appreciated. They discuss the state of romance publishing, its history, individual texts, and what a revelation it is to see yourself represented as someone worthy of love and happiness. Beverly Jenkins writes about slave narratives, Carole V. Bell analyzes a trio of romance novels including Alyssa Cole’s How to Catch a Queen, and Christina C. Jones sings the praises of Black indie romance. Ebook purchased from Amazon.
I also read Lev A. C. Rosen’s The Bell in the Fog and Rough Pages, the second and third in his series of noir murder mysteries set in the queer scene of 1950s San Francisco. Andy, the detective, is a gay ex-cop trying to redeem himself for the wrong he did while working for the police, and I do love a sad wet protagonist who hates himself too much to ask our his crush. And a community brought together by queer books! I also love Lee, Black genderfluid drag queen Girl Friday, and Elsie, Jewish suit-wearing butch nightclub owner, and you know, everyone in this bar. The setting is so, so good. Library audio, ebook, and print.
I’m gonna try to migrate this newsletter and my entire website to a new host, so I won’t be back in your inbox until March 23.