A good barbecue - good food, good times, and about the closest thing we get to cookin' round a campfire these days, the hottest, driest July on record with a fire ban to match.
With, or even without, the Canadian National bar-b championships in Whistler this week, a barbecue is a summer cause célèbre , even in its simplest form of throwing a few wienies or patties on the grill.
Everybody has a good barbecue story. Some of my more printable ones are from my family.
My dad, always the joker, the trickster, the life of the party, especially after a few rounds, was famous in certain circles for climbing a pine tree during one particularly playful outing. Part way up he fell, right into the (hot) barbecue.
Yes, his pride, his rump and dinner were all hurt. (Sorry, dad, but you have to admit, it was pretty funny.)
In Edmonton, where I grew up, barbecues in the '60s were a sign of... something, I'm not sure what. Having arrived in the suburbs of suburban Edmonton?
Having a barbecue meant you were moderne , cool, a somebody with a house, a shiny car, and a barbecue.
Barbecues were a symbol of suburbia itself, meaning you weren't cramped with your hubby or wife in a three-bedroom walk-up with three or four kids and no chance of doing anything remotely barbecue-ish because you didn't even have a balcony to put a barbecue on. Barbecuing was picnicking elevated.
Everybody in the 'burbs in the '60s had a bar-b, usually one of those round little black-metal-pan affairs on three legs, two with wheels, and the crank on the side to raise and lower the metal rack, which was usually crooked because of the piddly axel or warped because the metal couldn't stand up to the heat of a dozen stinky briquettes soaked in "starter fluid".
But ours, oh, our barbecue was something to behold.
I'm not sure where my dad got the idea from, but he decided to build a big impressive brick barbecue with a curved front to match our kidney-shaped patio, which riffed on the then-cachet of kidney-shaped swimming pools.
I think the old metal bar-b drove him nuts more than once, the rack teetering dangerously, as it tended to do, with all the expensive, important meat on top.
My grandpa helped him build it, this iconic structure that seemed to be the envy of every beer-soaked barbecuing dad in the neighbourhood, who'd stand around the charred drumsticks and press down on the sides of the grill and exclaim how amazingly solid (and straight) it was.
Only years later did I learn that the stuff my dad and countless others used as a bed for the charcoal briquettes, the fumes from which we'd all suck in as we huddled around on cold, mosquito-infested, Edmonton nights, was vermiculite - our brand, if I remember right, was Zonolite, now connected to asbestos-related cancers.
But, man, those char-grilled burgers and chicken and "copper-plated potatoes" (potatoes brushed with Kraft French dressing and cooked in foil) were sure good.
Depending on where you look, the origins of barbecuing are woven into as many historic threads as there are wires in a grill-cleaning brush.
Of course, there's the old saw, "barbecuing is as ancient as roasting a mastodon steak over an open fire." In North America, that could also have been a bison steak, given the hoards that roamed here when two-legged proto-Americanus walked. Or a saber-toothed cat, another common neighbour, hundreds of thousands bones from which were found at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, left over from an outrageous BBQ?
That eminent food and science expert, Harold McGee, says that barbecuing - what he calls a "distinctly American cooking method" - took on its modern form about a century ago.
The term "barbecue", he explains, comes from the Spanish barbacoa from the West Indies and a word from the Taino, one of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, one of whose carved gourds happens to be sitting next to my computer right now.
It meant a framework of green sticks suspended on corner posts on which meat, fish and other foods were laid and cooked in the open over fire and coals. Both the height and the fire were adjustable, so food could be grilled quickly or slowly smoked and dried.
In Canada or, lets face it, most of North America, we tend to interchange the terms "grill" and "barbecue" (or "braai" if you're from South Africa). But the two terms have evolved to have different meaning.
To barbecue is to slowly cook meat at a very low temperature in a closed chamber by means of hot air, and we don't mean talking to it. It should produce meat that is smoky in flavour and fall-apart tender, as in y'all need more barbecue?
Grilling, on the other hand, along with broiling, are really more directly related to the old mastodon steak routine - they're the modern, controlled version of roasting over an open fire or glowing coals, much like the ones my dad fell into.
The trick to just-right grilling is to use high amounts of heat and to match the browning rate on the outside surface with the inner conduction rate. Ergo moving the meat (or veggies) around on the grill to find the sweet spots where the outside will get nice and brown (caramelized) with intense heat and then continuing to cook the food, maybe in a different spot or at a different time, as in the flames are dying down, with more distant or weaker heat.
The whole barbecue/grill thing gets even more confusing when I read the handbook for our Ducane barbecue, I mean gas grill or, as it's variously referred to, "outdoor gas cooking appliance."
Even though it was manufactured in the Ducane family's 400,000-square-foot plant in Blackville, South Carolina, home to pulled pork and Carolina Red Barbecue Sauce, it is never once called a barbecue. But we sure love eating whatever it is we get off the grill.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who loves to barbecue - or is that grill? - corn on the cob in its husk, or corn-in-the-shuck, as they say in Carolina.
