American barbecue began on Caribbean wooden racks and in Southern trenches of coals, tended through the night mostly by Black cooks whose names went unrecorded. These stories follow it outward: mutton in Kentucky, tri-tip in California, a beef head buried in South Texas. You will also meet a physicist with a wet sponge, a grill made from harbor buoys, and a pamphlet about three pigs.
Every tile in a Barbecue and Smoking game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Regional Styles
nine stories
1Two North Carolinas, split by a spoonful of ketchup
On the tile: Lexington dip1919
In North Carolina barbecue means pork, and the state argues about everything else. East of Raleigh, cooks use the whole hog and dress the meat with vinegar, red pepper and salt. Around Lexington, in the Piedmont, they cook shoulders only and stir tomato or ketchup into that vinegar, a change often credited to German settlers reaching for the sweet-and-sour flavors of home. The Piedmont version stays thin, and locals call it dip rather than sauce. The style's home ground got its start in 1919, when a barbecue stand, really a tent, opened near the Lexington courthouse.
In the Midlands of South Carolina, barbecue sauce comes out bright yellow. The mustard belt runs between Newberry and Orangeburg counties, and the story goes that German families who settled the stretch called the Dutch Fork brought a fondness for mustard that ended up in the sauce pot. The barbecue historian Robert Moss files that under dubious conjecture: German family names crowd the barbecue signs of Piedmont North Carolina too, and the sauce there is red. The geography is solid, though. The yellow stays close to the Midlands.
3Kentucky barbecues the sheep that stopped growing wool
On the tile: Mutton dip1800s
Western Kentucky barbecues mutton, meaning a sheep more than a year old, and it did not pick that meat for the flavor. Farms around Owensboro raised sheep for wool, and as the animals aged their meat turned tough and strong tasting. Hours of hickory smoke and an acidic basting fixed both problems. The sauce that goes with it is a thin, dark mop of Worcestershire, vinegar and black pepper, known locally as dip. Catholic parish picnics carried the tradition, and they still serve mutton every summer.
Burnt ends are the dark, chewy corners of a smoked brisket, and Kansas City once gave them away. At Arthur Bryant's, countermen pushed the trimmings to the side of the board for whoever wanted them. Then Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native writing in Playboy in 1972, announced that the real main course at Bryant's was the thing that cost nothing. Demand followed the compliment. Burnt ends moved onto menus, and they now sell as a specialty rather than a scrap.
5The Texas market that hid nothing and lent nothing
On the tile: No forks1900
Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, grew out of a meat market that Charles Kreuz took over in 1900, and for more than a century it served no barbecue sauce and handed out no forks. A sign gave the reasoning: no sauce because there was nothing to hide, no forks because they were already at the end of your arm. Meat came on butcher paper, eaten with bread and bare hands. The rule finally bent in October 2017, after too many visitors lost their tempers over it.
Chicago barbecue came north with the Great Migration, carried by Black families leaving Mississippi and Alabama. The city's Black population grew from under 50,000 in 1910 to more than a million by 1970. Cooks worked small storefronts using what butchers sold cheap, which is how rib tips and spicy hot links became the local plate. Their smoker is unmistakable: a steel box with tempered glass doors, so the meat cooks in plain view, and a long chimney that carries the smoke out through the roof. Chicagoans call it an aquarium smoker.
7The last Texas barbecue still cooked in the ground
On the tile: Cabeza1800s
Barbacoa de cabeza came north from Mexico, where cooks wrapped goat or lamb in agave leaves and buried it over coals. By tradition, South Texas vaqueros used the cut nobody wanted, the beef head, cleaning it, wrapping it and setting it in a covered pit overnight until the meat pulled apart into tacos. The dish outlasted the method. Health rules pushed pit cooking out of Texas restaurants, so most barbacoa sold now is steamed in steel, and one grandfathered pit in Brownsville is the last still cooking whole heads in the ground.
St. Louis built its barbecue around two cuts you rarely meet elsewhere. One is the pork steak, a slab sawed across the shoulder, grilled and then mopped with sauce; grocers advertised the cut as early as 1913, and in 1951 a St. Louis newspaper food editor named Dorothy Brainerd began pushing it as a thrifty dinner. The other is snoots, pig snouts cooked until they crackle. The local style leans on grilling and sauce rather than the long, slow smoke of its neighbors.
The contest that calls itself the world championship of barbecue started small. In 1978 the young Memphis in May festival added a cooking competition on a vacant lot beside the Orpheum Theatre downtown, and by the festival's own account twenty teams turned up to split a thousand dollars. Memphis already had its barbecue, dry-rubbed ribs and chopped pork shoulder. What the contest added was an audience, and the event has since grown into a four-day gathering that draws teams from other countries.
Kansas City barbecue traces to one man and an alley stand. Henry Perry was born in Shelby County, Tennessee, in 1875, cooked in steamboat kitchens, and reached Kansas City in 1907. By about 1908 he was selling smoked meat to garment district workers from an alley stand. He later cooked in an old trolley barn at Nineteenth and Highland through the 1920s and 1930s, in the neighborhood becoming famous for jazz. Customers rich or poor, Black or white, paid a quarter for meat smoked over oak and hickory and wrapped in newspaper. He died in 1940.
Charlie Vergos opened a tavern in a downtown Memphis basement in 1948, and the room came with an old coal chute. He used it first to smoke hams for sandwiches, then in the mid-1950s started grilling pork ribs over charcoal in it rather than smoking them low and slow. His seasoning began as salt, pepper, oregano and garlic; after a trip to New Orleans he folded in chili powder and cayenne. His son John says that mix of Greek and Cajun seasoning is still the rub, and the ribs still go out without sauce.
Alabama dresses barbecued chicken in something pale and tangy. Bob Gibson was a railroad worker in Decatur who stood six feet four and weighed more than three hundred pounds, which is how he became Big Bob. He sold barbecue on weekends before opening his own place in 1925. For his chickens he mixed mayonnaise, vinegar and black pepper, split and seasoned the birds, smoked them about three hours over hickory, then dunked them in the sauce. White sauce stayed mainly a north Alabama taste until commercial bottling began in 1994.
Tootsie Tomanetz started cooking barbecue in the mid-1960s at the City Meat Market in Giddings, Texas. Decades later she was tending the fire at a Saturday-only place in Lexington while working weekdays as a school custodian in Giddings. In 2008 Texas Monthly named that pit the best barbecue in Texas, and a joint almost nobody had heard of became a destination. Her routine did not change much: start the pits at two in the morning and cook until the meat runs out.
5A Goldsboro preacher said his sauce came in a dream
On the tile: Adam Scott1917Legend
Adam Scott was a Holiness church minister in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who worked as a janitor and a bank messenger before barbecue took over. He began catering club parties in 1917, and the story he told was that the ingredients for his thin, peppery vinegar sauce came to him in a dream. His son Martel, who joined the business in the 1930s, spiced the mixture up, and the family patented it in 1946. Bottles of Scott's sauce reached grocery shelves in the 1940s and are still sold today.
Warner Stamey learned to cook pork shoulders in the 1920s from two of Lexington, North Carolina's first barbecue men, Jess Swicegood and Sid Weaver, who sold pork from tents across from the courthouse. In 1938 he bought Swicegood out and put his own name on the place, then moved the business to Greensboro in 1953. What spread furthest was not his restaurants but his students: he taught a generation of Piedmont cooks the Lexington style. He is also credited with bringing hushpuppies, a fish-camp side dish, onto barbecue plates.
7A magazine called it a capital, so he built a dome
On the tile: Skylight Inn1947
Pete Jones opened the Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, in 1947, cooking whole hogs as his family had for generations; a great-great-grandfather had sold barbecue there from a covered wagon. In 1979 National Geographic singled the place out as the barbecue capital of the world, and Jones took the compliment literally. He had a silver-painted wooden dome built on the roof, loosely modeled on the United States Capitol. For years the restaurant had no sign, on the theory that it did not need one.
8A Memphis founder enters the barbecue hall of fame
On the tile: Cozy Corner2020
Desiree Robinson and her husband Raymond opened the Cozy Corner in Memphis in 1977. She took a job at the phone company and worked the restaurant on weekends, then later ran it with their children. In 2020 the American Royal's Barbecue Hall of Fame inducted her, the first African American woman elected to it. Her class also included Aaron Franklin of Austin and Joe Don Davidson, who has produced and sold Oklahoma Joe's smokers since 1987.
9An Arkansas counter that may be the South's oldest
On the tile: Jones Diner2012
In Marianna, Arkansas, one cinderblock room sells chopped pork and nothing else, on white bread with a thin red sauce. Some version of the Jones family's barbecue has run since the 1910s, when Walter Jones tended the pit; the diner moved to its present corner in 1964. Historians describe it as perhaps the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the South owned by a Black family. In 2012 the James Beard Foundation gave it an America's Classics award. It closes when the meat runs out.
Cooks used to blame melting fat or collagen when a brisket climbed to about 150 degrees and then sat there for hours with the fire still burning. Greg Blonder, a physicist, tested it by putting a water-soaked sponge and a lump of pure beef fat in a smoker at 225 degrees. The fat warmed steadily. The sponge, which has no protein or collagen at all, stalled near 140 and stayed stuck for hours. The answer was evaporation. Meat sweats, and sweating cools.
Brisket and pork shoulder come from muscles that work hard, and they are laced with collagen, the connective tissue that holds muscle together and ties it to bone. Its protein chains are twisted around each other like rope, which is why the raw cut is tough. Heat and moisture slowly unwind them into gelatin, which holds water and coats the fibers. That conversion needs hours, not just degrees. Rush it with high heat and the water escapes before enough gelatin forms, leaving something dry and rubbery instead of tender.
Grilling instructions have told cooks for decades to soak wood chips first, on the theory that damp wood smolders longer and smokes more. Wood barely absorbs water, so most of it clings to the outside. Set a soaked packet on a hot surface and it stalls at the boiling point of water for a long stretch, pouring out a white cloud that is steam rather than smoke. Only once the wood dries does it begin to combust and make the compounds that flavor food.
Smoke flavor is not one thing, but two compounds carry much of it. Wood cell walls are held together by lignin, and when heat tears lignin apart it releases guaiacol and syringol. Guaiacol supplies the taste people call smoky; syringol supplies the smell. Both belong to a family of compounds called phenols. Neither is sitting in the log to begin with, which is the strange part: the fire has to build the flavor out of the wood before it can reach the meat.
5Smoke was a preservative before it was a seasoning
On the tile: Preservation
Smoking meat began as storage rather than flavor, and it never worked alone. The meat was salted first, and smoke only treats the surface. What happens there is chemistry. Smoke dries the outside, leaving less water for microbes. It leaves behind phenols and aldehydes, formaldehyde among them, that are hostile to bacteria, along with acetic and other organic acids that give wood smoke a low pH. Those same phenols act as antioxidants, slowing fat from turning rancid. The taste people now drive across states for was the side effect.
George Stephen worked in sales at Weber Brothers Metal Works outside Chicago, a shop welding steel hemispheres into buoys for the Coast Guard and the Chicago Yacht Club. Unhappy with the open brazier he used at home, he took two of those half spheres and set one on the other as a lid. He sold the result in 1952 as George's Barbecue Kettle for $29.95. An early nickname for the round grill was Sputnik. In 1958 he bought out his father's partner and renamed the company.
Building a Model T took a lot of wood. On a summer camping trip in 1919, Henry Ford asked a cousin by marriage, Edward Kingsford, to help him mill his own lumber, and Kingsford arranged 313,000 acres of Michigan timberland and a sawmill. Then the scrap piled up. Orin Stafford, a chemist at the University of Oregon, had a fast way to make charcoal, but it came out as powder, so he bound it with starch, tar and a little water and pressed it into lumps he called briquettes. Ford's plant began turning them out in 1924.
8A ruined Fourth of July chicken led to pellet grills
On the tile: Pellet grill1985
Joe Traeger sold heating equipment in Mount Angel, Oregon, and had spent years working with wood pellets as furnace fuel. On the Fourth of July in 1985 he stepped away from a new gas grill, came back to find it engulfed in flames, and kicked the whole thing off his deck. Then he set out to build something better. His answer fed pellets into a firebox with a motor-driven auger, a wood fire that ran itself, and the Barbecue Hall of Fame credits him with inventing the pellet grill in 1986.
American servicemen met Japan's mushikamado after World War II: a clay rice steamer that had been given a domed lid, which let a cook hold and control the heat. Commercial imports came later. In 1974 Ed Fisher, who was bringing pachinko machines over from Japan, added mushikamados to his shipments and opened a shop in Atlanta to sell them. The imported clay broke in transit and cracked under sudden temperature shifts, so the design was rebuilt in tougher ceramic, and the egg-shaped cooker settled into American backyards.
Barbecue comes from barbacoa, a word Spanish colonists picked up in the Caribbean from the Taino language. It named a framework of sticks, and such frames did many jobs: a bed, a platform to keep food from animals, a loft, a rack for curing meat over smoke. English borrowed it in the same sense. In the 1690s a barbecue was still the wooden framework itself; the sense of an outdoor feast followed in 1733, and only by the 1890s did the word come to mean the meat.
The word buccaneer began as cookware. French hunters on Hispaniola killed the island's wild cattle and boars and smoked the meat over slow fires on racks they called boucans, a word that traces back to Tupi or another Indigenous language of Brazil. A man who lived by the boucan was a boucanier. When Spain set out to destroy both the hunters and the herds they depended on, many turned to raiding ships instead, and English speakers turned boucanier into buccaneer. The pirates of the Caribbean were named for the way they cooked.
For most of American history a barbecue meant a fire, a whole animal and someone willing to tend it for hours. In the colonial and antebellum South that work fell to enslaved Black cooks, who made ribs, feet and knuckles worth eating and whose methods became American barbecue. The credit went elsewhere. Even after emancipation, the white host of a barbecue was often called the pitmaster, though Black cooks had done the cooking.
George Washington's diaries are mostly weather, crops and visitors, but between 1769 and 1774 he recorded going to six barbecues. One he hosted himself. One, in Alexandria, kept him out all night. In August 1770 he noted that he dined at the barbecue with a great deal of other company and stayed until sunset. He spelled the word several different ways over the years, a fair measure of how new it still was in English.
In 1707 the London satirist Ned Ward published a pamphlet called The Barbacue Feast; or, the Three Pigs of Peckham, Broil'd under an Apple Tree. It describes a gathering cooked, as he put it, after the West Indian manner: three hogs laid on a wooden frame over coals and basted with what Ward called a most admirable composition of green Virginia pepper and Madeira wine. Scholars treat it as the earliest detailed account in English of barbecue as a public party rather than as a cooking method.
American politics and barbecue grew up side by side, and 1840 was the peak. Whig organizers wanted to sell William Henry Harrison, who came from a Virginia mansion, as a frontier everyman, so they raised log cabins at rallies, poured hard cider and staged enormous barbecues. Voters came for the meat and stayed for the speeches. Turnout that year shot to about eighty percent, more than twenty points above the election four years earlier, and Harrison won.
The biggest barbecue in American history may have been a swearing-in. For his inauguration as governor of Oklahoma on January 9, 1923, Jack Walton called for a parade, a square dance and a barbecue for as many people as Oklahoma City could handle. Crews dug six long trenches at the state fairgrounds, filled them with nineteen railroad cars of wood, and laid 289 cattle over the coals along with hogs, sheep, rabbits, chickens and game. Thousands filed through fifteen serving sheds for an estimated 125,000 meals.
Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, the day a Union general reached Galveston and announced that slavery in Texas was over. The anniversary came with parades, ball games and barbecue, and Black Texans wanted ground of their own to hold it on. In 1872, under the leadership of the Reverend Jack Yates, two Black congregations in Houston bought ten acres on Dowling Street. The celebration had a permanent home, and the ground is still called Emancipation Park.
In central Mexico, barbacoa is not a sauce or a style but a method: meat cooked slowly in a pit in the ground. The version tied to the state of Hidalgo wraps lamb in the broad leaves of the maguey, a kind of agave, and lowers it into a pit whose stones have been heated until they glow. The pit is covered over with dirt and left overnight. Below the meat sits a pot of rice, vegetables and chiles that catches the drippings and becomes the broth served alongside.