It’s time to grill, baby, grill

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It’s summertime, which means getting as much use out of the grill as possible.

With temps around the Charlotte area flirting with the triple digits lately, who wants to cook inside anyway?

Plus, we all know how good we are at barbecuing here in Charlotte, right? (Insert Michelle Obama joke here.)

It’s an appropriate time to celebrate with your loved ones the evolution of the outdoor grill and the industry that has grown out of charring carcasses.

No one knows for sure when humans first discovered that cooked animals are tastier than raw ones, but some believe it might have happened when we accidently found a deer or something that had been trapped by a forest fire and later roasted by said fire.

At least that’s a theory floated on the website of the National Barbecue Association, which is based in Louisville, Ky. As an aside, I noticed on the association’s website that they’ve held 20 annual meetings, and not one was in Charlotte. (Insert another Michelle Obama joke here.)

Once humans got a taste for cooked flesh, we couldn’t get enough. In the Americas, there was grilling even in pre-Colonial times. Back then, the Arawaks, the West Indies people who Christopher Columbus would run into, used a wooden structure — called a “barbacoa” in Spanish — for roasting meat.

Barbacoa at first referred to the structure used for cooking, but it eventually would come to be used as the name for the technique and even the food.

Barbecuing continued to be perfected in the Americas, especially in the southeastern U.S., where E.G. Kingsford helped to give the world the modern charcoal briquette.

Kingsford was a relative of Henry Ford, who, in the 1920s, became really interested in turning the wood left over from the production of Model Ts into briquettes. Kingsford and Thomas Edison helped with the creation of a charcoal-manufacturing plant Ford would go on to build.

At first, Ford Charcoal was sold to smokehouses. But Ford, being the shrewd businessman that he was, saw an opportunity in all those people buying his cars. They, too, might want to buy Ford Charcoal. Ford sold the briquets in bags, for a quarter apiece, featuring the Ford logo. Ford even sold grills in his dealerships.

Later, Ford Charcoal was renamed in honor of E.G. Today, Oakland, Calif.-based Clorox Co. owns the Kingsford brand and a bunch of other brands, including KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce, which Richard Davis, a child psychiatrist, created sometime in the ‘70s while dabbling with condiment concoctions. Davis sold KC Masterpiece to Clorox in the mid-80s.

But Ford and Kingsford are not the only Americans who shaped the barbecue industry and culture.

Around 1950, inventor George Stephen, founder of Weber-Stephen Products Co., is credited with creating the dome-shaped grill out of his desire to have a grill with a cover. He fashioned it from metal shapes used to make buoys and called it George’s Barbecue Kettle.

With it being the ‘50s and all, his friends called it Sputnik, and, in their defense, it did look like a satellite. These days, George is grilling in that big barbecue pit in the sky. He died in 1993 at 71.

In the 1960s, the industry really heated up when William Wepfer and Melton Lancaster, employees of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co., hit upon the idea that natural gas could be used not just to power homes but also grills. The gas grill was born, and Wepfer and Lancaster forever ignited a debate over which is better, gas or briquettes.

We won’t go there in this column.

But I will say that Charlotte’s economy owes a “thank you” to the barbecue pioneers of the past. All those barbecue joints around here help our economy, albeit in a minimum wage sort of way.

By the way, barbecuing and grilling are not interchangeable terms. Barbecuing involves using indirect or low-level heat to slowly cook food, typically cheaper cuts of meat. When food is grilled, it is placed over a direct flame or high source of heat to cook it quickly. Be careful when you use those terms around hardcore fans of the techniques.

Happy cooking.

Editor Deon Roberts can be reached at [email protected].