Ask 10 pitmasters — amateur or professional — to describe the best ways to cook ribs, and you’ll likely get 40 different answers.
Topics up for debate: smoke or gas; charcoal or wood; pork or beef; rub or sauce; C or Q? Hyphens?Wait, hyphens?
Barbecue — or is it barbeque, or BBQ, or Bar-B-Q, or just Que? — has few, if any, agreed-upon standards. Used as a verb, it refers to the process of cooking over fire or smoke. As a noun, it refers to the output from that cooking: slow-and-low cooked meat. If you add an “ed” to the noun, it can be an adjective. And the spelling seems to be up for plenty of creative interpretation.
Barbecue with a C is preferred, according to pretty much any dictionary you pick up, as well as the Associated Press Stylebook, the guide that calls all balls and strikes on colloquialisms in the journalism world.
But the team that spells it with a Q is far from an outlier. The Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame (and, yes, you should try every restaurant in it) includes restaurants about evenly divided on the spelling front. Many honorees, including Dick Russell’s Famous Bar-B-Q in Mobile, Alabama, lean heavily toward the BBQ and Bar-B-Q variations. The Shed, the self-described “BBQ & Blues Joint” in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is also on team Q.
Hogs for the Cause, the food and music fest that raised $4.3 million for pediatric brain cancer in April, swings between “barbecue” and “BBQ” throughout its website. (An aside: There’s just something about cooking over smoke that inspires groan-worthy puns. Take, for example, these Hogs for the Cause barbecue team names: Smokey and the Bacon, Pass a Good Swine, 2nd Hand Smokers, Swinel Richie; Silence of Da Hams; and FamousOnInstaHAM.)
So, how did a method of cooking — described in a 2023 New York Times headline as a “singular cuisine” — beget such a plurality of spellings and usages? To find out, you have to go way back to the beginning — which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources, was in the late 17th century.
“The local Arawakan Indians [of Hispaniola] had a method of erecting a frame of wooden sticks over a fire in order to dry meat. In their language, Taino, they called it a barbacòa, which Spanish explorers borrowed,” writes Michael Quinion on the authoritative website World Wide Words, which is dedicated to the noble cause of “Investigating the English Language across the globe.”
The Oxford English Dictionary cites the 1697 writings of William Dampier, amiably described as a “buccaneer and explorer,” as the “earliest evidence for barbecue” in English.
Quinion attributes the first verb usage to “a work by Aphra Behn of 1690: ‘Let’s barbicu this fat rogue,’ showing that it was known well enough by then to be used figuratively.”
So, what about barbeque rather than barbecue? Several sources point to the French. “Many people believe that barbeque actually derives from the French barbe à queue, that is, ‘from beard to tail,’ signifying the whole of the pig being roasted,” Quinion writes. “Leaving aside the question that pigs don’t have beards (though the allusion would work for goats), the true origin is well authenticated, and the story is just another example of folk etymology.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, too, throws shade on the French origins of “barbeque.” “Barbe a queue ‘beard to tail’ is an absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word,” it declares.
And, if you didn’t think these variations were enough, the Oxford English Dictionary also lists borbecu, barbicue and babracot as (obsolete) spellings
Whatever way it was originally written, the term barbecue, by the mid-19th century, was appearing with some frequency in New Orleans area newspapers. The Daily Picayune, for example, reported on July 1, 1837 about a feast that sounds like a 19th-century Hogs for the Cause: “Not less than 20 sheep, 25 calves, 30 shoats, 60 bacon hams and several heifers… were consumed by the assembled multitude, at the barbecue lately given (A shoat, according to Merriam-Webster, is a young hog.)
In modern times, at least, the spelling variations do not seem bound by geographic borders. You’re equally likely to find a BBQ as a barbecue or a barbeque in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Kansas, Tennessee or the Carolinas. Even in London, there’s a chain of restaurants called “Big Easy Bar.B.Q & Crabshack,” which curiously claims to feature “traditional LouisianaBBQ and fresh lobster
Liz Williams, food writer, historian, founder, president and CEO of the National Food & Beverage Foundation and the Southern Food & Beverage Museum in New Orleans, believes the spellings are less about regional variation and more likely signals of a seriousness for the pitmaster’s skills. “I know there are some pitmasters and others who are offended by barbeque or BBQ, as they really feel that it is belittling or that it makes it seem less important or serious (than spelling it with a C).”
The Southern Food & Beverage Museum doesn’t have a barbecue section per se. Instead, it offers a Trail of Smoke and Fire, which discusses the regional differences in how people cook over fire. That encompasses much more than just barbecue, Williams said. “In some places like Florida, there isn’t a serious barbecue tradition, but they do smoke fish, so we included that,” she said. (Just for the record, Williams uses the C spelling of the word, as does the museum. “But I’m not making a statement about it,” she said. “Whenever I write it for a publication, I’m going to spelling it with a C because an editor is going to change it to that.”
As for BBQ, Williams thinks there’s a logical reason why the three-letter variation is popular. “If you have to buy a sign, and you have to pay by the letter, BBQ is just cheaper,” she said.
