Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (19 page)

The word bungalow, an Indian term for a small house, was applied to a
modern house style, a style characterized by its single story and low roof. It
was the architectural successor to the Victorian cottage popularized by prominent architect Frank Lloyd Wright. As Americans were pushed back from the
woods, as the roads became clogged with cars, and as the new architecture
thrust man into his surrounding environment, conditions had ripened for the
birth of the backyard barbecue.

Eleven years after the mass production of autos began at Highland Park,
Nell Nichols's 1924 piece, "The Backyard Barbecue," appeared in Woman's
Home Companion. It was the first national magazine article on the subject.
These early "barbecues" retained visible vestiges of the picnic. From the article's subtitle, "Just the right picnic for a big hungry crowd," to its thoughts on
appropriate entertainment, the article presented the barbecue as "the unusual
way to entertain informally during the late summer or fall." The menu presented would, with a few revisions, become standard in places that didn't have
their own long-standing barbecue traditions of whole hogs or sides of beef.

Considerable choice is offered in the meats to be barbecued, although beef
and chicken are the general favorites. Thick steaks and chops of all kinds
are delicious as are roasts of beef, mutton, and lamb. When the meat is
cooked it is served without delay. A table on the lawn holds, besides dishes
and silver, the other food, which may consist of potato chips or salad, sliced
tomatoes or cucumbers, cottage cheese garnished with thin slices of sweet
green pepper, sliced onion, rolls or bread, milk or iced tea, and fresh fruits
or iced melons. Coffee may be made on the coals, and corn on the cob
boiled in the kitchen or roasted in the ashes is an ever welcomed dish.

By 1926 Helen Powell Schauffler would write in her Good Housekeeping article,
"Over the Picnic Fire," "food cooked out of doors is usually rather hearty and
it is wasteful and unwise to make sandwiches with tempting rich fillings. You
would not dream of serving olive and nut sandwiches with a broiled steak at
your table so why do it out-of-doors?"

The nascent barbecue had yet to formally distinguish itself from the picnic.
Charcoal as fuel was recommended for emergency purposes only; later it
would become de rigueur for any decent barbecue. Readers were directed to
cook the meats in a frying pan as one would do at home on a stove. The "cook
picnic" resembled a new species. It was so changed that in a 1927 Ladies Home
Journal article entitled "The Little Barbecue Makes a Super Supper," Hortense
King proclaimed, "It is true that the well known picnic appetite is still present,
also the little green bugs and the stand pat mosquitoes, not to mention the
rain cloud that floats up and blows over just as the supplies are being set out.
... But nothing else of the traditional picnic remains-not even a sign of the
cold chicken and colder pies, the weighty meats and cheeses, the oozing layer
cakes."

With 1927, articles first mentioning the presence of, and reasons behind,
male cooks appeared. In a 1927 Sunset Magazine article entitled "Drive Right
in," the owner of a California auto-park, where people came to picnic and cook on the fireplaces provided, observed that the men did most of the cooking. He theorized that men cooked because they felt they knew more about
campfires and campfire cooking.

The advent of disposable plates, cups, and utensils meant that the barbecue
could be more self-service. With everyone, including the children, participating to some degree in the preparation and cooking of the meal, the need
for games or planned entertainment disappeared. The barbecue, unrushed,
soothing-the antithesis of the workday world-brought people together on
an informal basis.

A momentous year, 1929 saw the stock market crash and the appearance of
the outdoor fireplace. Throughout the decade-long depression that ensued,
the outdoor fireplace, around which the barbecue centered, multiplied. First
created in California, it became a possibility for backyards nationwide as articles in women's magazines focused on the fireplace's adaptability and the appeal of outdoor fireplaces to the male appetite. Related articles on etiquette,
furnishings, and little artistic touches conceived to enhance the barbecue accompanied these pieces.

In July of 1929, Sunset Magazine, with its West Coast middle-class readership, was the first publication to do an article on outdoor fireplaces. A year
later an article in the nationally distributed Ladies Home Journal proclaimed:
"Now comes the outdoor fireplace, with its companion table and benches,
under intimate shade, to invite picnicking in one's own garden. Breakfast
bacon served hot off the open air grill when the scent of flowers is fresh with
the morning; a barbecued dinner away from the walls at the end of a hot summer day.... Here is an idea evolved by California and rapidly becoming a
Vogue on the Coast, which begins as a highly practical contribution to kitchen
economy and ends by becoming a decorative element in landscaping the
garden."

Outdoor fireplace construction was either attached or detached. Both
styles were massive affairs of brick, stone, or cement. At first the attached fireplace, adjacent to the house, with a common chimney but separate fireback
and flue, was the most common. The detached grill built out in the garden
away from the house would in time become the more popular of the two.
Larger than the electric ranges now prevalent in the American kitchen, detached fireplaces usually dominated the space in which they sat. All had grills,
metal racks placed at waist level over the pit area that held the fuel. Some even
had spits and ovens.

The outdoor fireplace is of Spanish origin, descended from the chimenea del
patio (patio chimney), which was often constructed on the patio in a hacienda style home. That cooking apparatus had hooks from which a pot of beans
could be suspended over the heat and a grill over which meat could be cooked,
all alongside a beehive-shaped adobe oven on the patio of the California hidalgo's hacienda. This structure, and variations on it, would become so popular across the country that in a March 1, 1937, article for American Home,
George Carpenter would write, "The home-owning class of people in this
country consists of two groups; those who have outdoor fireplaces and those
who wish they had them. Nothing in the way of home modernization in recent years has caught the public fancy like the outdoor fireplace and grills."

Ironically, the outdoor fireplace was popular with those who could afford it
because it was convenient and inexpensive. No longer did one have to pack up
food and travel to the campground, the outdoors could be enjoyed with the
comforts of home-the real napkins, cold drinks, and comfortable tables and
chairs. The upper-middle class of California and the suburban Northeast and
Midwest invested time and money in their barbecues because in these places
al fresco dining had come to be viewed as luxurious.

Outdoor cooking differed from its indoor counterpart in that the man
presided over the grill. It was his. He commissioned it or maybe even built it
himself. Thus articles like Harry Botsford's 1937 American Horne piece, "Picnics Give a Man a Chance," began to appear. Cooking was an important twopart process involving the man and his wife. She bought, and he cooked.

During the Great Depression the barbecue outside the South remained
largely an upper-middle-class affair. Who else could afford the fireplace, the
steaks, and the magazines that talked of the barbecue and its paraphernalia?
Articles in the women's magazines in the summers of 1939-41 sounded very
much like those of previous years, impressing the reader with the barbecue's
fashionableness- "This Year Give a Barbecue," Woman's Home Companion
suggested. In 1939 President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor served
the visiting King George of England hot dogs grilled over their outdoor fireplace in Hyde Park, New York. The barbecue, though long fashionable, was
now socially acceptable. Instructions for the novice on how to do it continued
to be provided. Reader's Guide to Periodicals lists more than twenty articles on
barbecue preparation during the period between July 1939 and August 1941.
During the war years, the number of articles dwindled to five from September
1941 to September 1945.

Once America became involved in World War II, the forced rationing of
food and petroleum products began. In order to buy these commodities, consumers needed not only the requisite number of dollars, but the requisite
number of points as well. Now that citizens were allocated a mere three gal Ions of gasoline a week for their cars, barbecues became less frequent, and
their menus were altered. The casual afternoon jaunt to the country ended.
The response, as House Beautiful put it in June of 1942, was to use your "Backyard as Your Summer Home." American Home and other magazines began to
sell patterns complete with "construction drawings and material specifications" for building an outdoor fireplace.

Steak once again dominated the menu. Americans had become so predisposed to this cut of meat that one 1947 article in House and Garden, after extolling the virtues of the good Western-style steak, discussed at length ten
places where the reader could obtain the best steak and potatoes. All the
restaurants were in California, and all but one, the Brown Derby, grilled their
meat. James Beard's barbecue cookbook, Cook it Outdoors, was published in
1941, signifying the professionalization of this mode of cooking.

Urbanites, who lacked a yard but owned a penthouse, broiled their Fourth
of July steak on a portable grill. The first portable grills appeared in the late
193os and were homemade. In 1940, American Home published an article referring to an industry-constructed portable.

Men continued to cook, but they cooked less steak. A pound of porterhouse steak cost twelve points and would feed at most two people, while one
pound of hamburger cost seven points and could feed twice as many people.
Recipes for burgers with fillers such as bran and carrots proliferated.

In the postwar years, the general population of the country, and its middle
class in particular, grew substantially. Immediately after the war, manufacturers began to mass produce new goods for the consumer, including the portable grill. Its mobility and low price quickly made it more popular than the
outdoor fireplace. In 1946, in the summer after the war, magazine articles returned with renewed vigor to the barbecue. At least eight articles in magazines
such as House Beautiful, American Home, and Popular Mechanics touted the
portable barbecue. Constructed of aluminum, a technological by-product of
the war, manufacturers produced many styles and sizes: rectangular and circular, with and without warming ovens, spits, and incinerators. Some had detachable legs that enabled them to be put in the trunk of the car. They ranged
in price from as low as $8 for a small, no-frills model to as much as $39.95 for
a twenty-one-inch grill on wheels without a spit.

Why did the permanent indoor barbecue become so popular in the 1950s?
The technology had finally arrived as industry concentrated on manufacturing consumer goods with unprecedented intensity. America's real average income by 1956 was over 50 percent higher than in 1929. People could afford new
products. The interior architecture of the house had changed. The kitchen had opened up. It flowed into the dining area and the dining area into the living area. "Rooms" and the walls that defined them disappeared.

Instead of adding more rooms, Americans added more patios. Often they
had two patios, one between the carport and the bedroom and the other in
the U hollow of the living room-dining room-bedroom area. The second terrace became the barbecue shelter. More articles were written about the barbecue in the 1950s, in particular in the years 1953 and 1954, than any other time
before 1980.

The next addition to the barbecue equipment arsenal came in the late 19506
with the introduction of the Japanese hibachi. Technically, we imported the
Japanese hichirin. By definition the hibachi does not have a separate charcoal
bowl and is used exclusively for heating. Nevertheless, the hibachi, miniature
grill, or brazier, operating on as few as six to eight charcoal briquettes, was inexpensive, economical, and fun -and therefore popular. Food could be cooked
wherever people were.

When Henry Ford manufactured the first charcoal briquettes in 1924, supply exceeded demand. He made them from wood leftover from his Model T
assembly plants. He chose the briquette's pillow shape because it decreased
shipping bulk and improved quality. A company employee suggested cooking
with it. Ford sent briquette shipments to all his dealers for two decades. This
idea did not work. Early barbecue grills used wood, and, though later grills
used charcoal, the method remained linked to a small class of people. In 1951,
there were only four manufacturers of charcoal; by 1963, there more than fifty.
The largest of these was the Kingsford Company, which in 1951 had bought
out the old Ford Company. By 1963, 500 million pounds of charcoal would be
used by 40 million cooks to prepare 1.5 billion meals a year.

The best indication of the growth that followed in the 196os and 19705 is the
history of the Weber-Stephen Company, a manufacturer of barbecue grills.
The founder of the company, George Stephen, was in 1956 part owner of
Weber Brothers Metal, a Chicago sheet metal factory. That year his desire for
a smokeless, slow-cooking, evenly heated grill led him to design the first
Weber grill, with its distinctive spherical bowl and cover. By 1958, Stephen left
Weber Brothers and founded Weber-Stephen Products because of the demand. In 1964, he opened another factory to increase production. By 1976, the
$80, 221h-inch kettle, with sales increases of 25 to 40 percent a year, had returned over $20 million in sales revenue from an international market of the
United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.