^B00:00:02 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:26. >> Good morning. I'm Jennifer Harbster. I'm a reference and research specialist at the Library of Science Technology and Business Division. I'd like to welcome you to today's program. Man, Food and Fire, the Evolution of Barbecue. If you love to barbecue then you're already familiar with the work of today's speaker, Steven Raichlen. I, as well as many others, consider him the guru of barbecue, but not just the cooking of barbeque but of its international culinary history. Steven's talk today will be on the evolution of barbecue so I thought it seemed fitting that my introduction would follow suit. Is it not working? Oh, that works. Oh, I can hear that. [ Laughter ] All right. So I thought it seemed fitting that my introduction was follow suit and I will talk about the development of the culinary genius of Steven Raichlen. Steven was born in Nagano, Japan. Grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and received a degree in French literature from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He won a Watson Fellowship to study medieval cookery in Europe. He also trained at the most distinguished culinary schools possible, Le Cordon Bleu and LaVarenne. Back in the states he settled in Boston, became a food writer slash restaurant critic and edited the Luke Meyers Left Bank Cook Book. He also became the director of the Taste of the Mountains Cooking School in Glen, New Hampshire. If my research is correct, his very first cookbook was, "A Taste of the Mountain School", which I think is correct. Yes. Which was soon followed by "A Celebration of the Seasons, A Cook's Almanac." He moved to Florida, married and freelanced for well-known food magazines including "Bon Appetit." His Los Angeles Times syndicated column, "New Foods" won the Newspaper Food Editors and Writers Award. He became director of the Cooking in Paradise School in St. Barts, wrote "Miami Spice" and "Caribbean Pantry Cookbook", along with a series of low fat cooking. Then in 1998 he wrote the "Epic Barbecue Bible", which won the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the Julia Child Cookbook Award. Around the same time, he wrote the award winning "Healthy Latin Cooking," which was published in both English and Spanish. A couple of years later, he wrote "Healthy Jewish Cooking" and "How to Grill," which also won awards. More cook books followed. "Beer Can Chicken," Big Flavor Cookbook," "Barbecue USA", which also won a James Beard Award, "Indoor Grilling," "Rake the Non-ribs," and "Planet Barbecue". Steven also became a TV personality and hosted PBS's Barbecue University at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. He is currently the host or probably grill master, of PBS's Primal Grill. And some time along the way, he beat the Iron Chef in Tokyo. His current cookbook is "Best Ribs Ever". A hundred killer recipes including slaws, baked beans and finger licking sauces. And this summer he published his first novel, "Island Apart," which is about love, loss, redemption and really good food. [ Laughter ] Recipes of the food referenced in the book are actually included in the novel. And just outside, our library's shop has copies of "Best Ribs Ever" and "How to Grill" for sale and Steven will sign copies after the lecture. I also encourage you to stop by our display cards of Steven's cookbooks and American barbecue books. And as food fans will remember Steven got his start at the library of congress in the rare book room where library Leonard Beck taught him about medieval cookery. So please join me in welcoming Steven Raichlen back to the Library of Congress. ^M00:04:26. [ Applause ] ^M00:04:35. >> Well, thank you. It is a tremendous pleasure and thrill and honor to be back here and I'll tell you if you ever want an enthusiastic audience, it's not Bubba's in a parking lot, it's librarians. [ Laughter ] Bless you all. Before I get started with the formal talk, I do want to remember Leonard Beck. Did anybody know Leonard Beck? He ran the rare books room. >> [ Inaudible ] >> Okay. So this is -- >> [ Inaudible ] >> Pardon me? Okay. This is back in -- thanks. This is back in -- would be 1975 -- and I had just gotten the Watson Foundation Fellowship to study medieval cooking in Europe and I'd never touched a medieval manuscript. I didn't know how to read medieval paleography. I really didn't know much about anything except that a couple bottles of Retsina the night before I wrote the application for the Watson somehow worked their magic and transformed my pros into a winning proposal. So I came here for two weeks before I embarked on my Watson studies in Europe and Mr. Beck very graciously indoctrinated me into paleography and the bibliography of old cook books and wrote letters of recommendation for me because I didn't even realize that to get into the Biblioteca Nacional you had to do more than just show up with your library card. [ Laughter ] At any rate, in memory to him and thank you all very much for coming out, I'd like to start my talk. And this talk kind of began with a question that I posed myself at the beginning of writing my most recent big book, which is "Planet Barbecue". If you don't mind, can everybody hear me if I don't -- I'm kind of a -- >>[ Inaudible ] >> Oh. Of course you do, I'm so sorry. I forgot. I broke the third -- fourth law. Okay. So in any case, that question is, why are people so passionate and obsessed about barbecue because they really are. A loaf of bread bakes, a cake bakes in the oven. A pot of soup simmers on the stove. These are all things we love but I wouldn't say they invoke arguments or passion or people coming to fisticuffs or not talking to family members for 20 years on account of. And barbecue does this. And I think the reason it does it is because barbecue is -- and when I say barbecue, I'm using the east coast or west coast version or meaning of the word. That means cooking with live fire outdoors. Do we have anybody here from Texas or North Carolina or -- okay. So you know that barbecue -- where are you from? >> Texas. >> And where are you from? >> [ Inaudible ] >> Okay. So you know that barbecue is a specific low and slow method applying primarily to brisket. But, in any case I'm using the broad term for grilling, barbecuing, smoking, anything having to do with live fire. Okay. So I think the reason we feel such a passion -- well I'm going to show you the reason and it's a little talk called the Evolution of Barbecue or two million years of barbecue history or two million years of human history scene through a grill. [ Laughter ] So if we may bring the lights down a little -- well you can't because you're recording but everybody can see that, right? >> Yeah. >> Okay. So welcome to "Planet Barbecue". It is 6:00 in the evening and in Buenos Aires Argentina, an Asador Grill Master is cooking a style, a very primal style of barbecue called Asado. Whole animal stuck on cruciform stakes in front of a fire. It is 6:00 in Gaziantep, Turkey and a kabob man is molding minced lamb and spices onto metal skewers to make what the Turks called Shish Kabob and what they called sword meat and what we call Shish Kabob. That's what Shish Kabob means. It is 6:00 in Malaysia and the satay man is getting ready to serve bouquets of chicken satays, a typical serving would be about 30 in one sitting. It is 6:00 in Longabon, South Africa and another grill master is cooking a fish called Snook, which is glazed with apricot jam and butter over a driftwood fire. It is 6:00 in Old Deli and a Kabobi Walla [implied spelling] is cooking seat kabob, another minced lamb and spiced kabob and notice the electric fan at the far end of the screen that aerates his grill. That's how he turns the heat up or down. It is 6:00 clock in Malaysia and a kabob mistress in the city of Malacca is, first of all, about to prove that barbecue is not just a guy thing and, second of all, is about to wrap minced spice fish moose and banana leaves to be grilled over a charcoal fire. It is actually 3:00^M00:10:00in the morning in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Keith Alan is about to pull off some of his hickory roasted pork shoulders to make some of the best pulled pork in the country. So how did barbecuing and grilling begin? [ Laughter ] Well, it didn't start in Texas. It didn't start in North Carolina. It didn't even start in the Americas. We have to go back, way back -- that's actually just to show you how far along we've come from homo erectus barbecue to barbecue television. Anyhow. We're going to go back about 3 million years and we're going to go back to a very distant human ancestor called Australopithecus. And Australopithecus was kind of best personified by Lucy the fossil remains that were found in -- almost intact, the summer of 68, the summer that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" came out. And Lucy did not have barbecue and one way we know is if you look -- I don't know if this is going to work here -- Lucy had giant jaws and a giant mouth and a very small brain. Okay? And Lucy's follower was another prehistoric creature called Homo Robustus. And Homo Robustus also didn't have barbecue but Homo Robustus did start making tools and part of the process of making stone tools is what? Pounding two stones together to chip them off. And I want you to remember that when we fast forward about a million point eight years. So the first of our human ancestors that we have evidence -- cooked meat with fire was Homo erectus. Now anthropologists use a test that they call the subway test. Anybody know the subway test? So imagine you're on a subway car, right? And if an Australopithecus came in the subway car and sat next to you you'd probably get up and go to another subway car. [ Laughter ] And if a Homo Robustus sat next to you, you might move to the facing seat. If a Homo Erectus came on board, might be a little uncomfortable but wished that he would play on your rugby team. How do we know that Homo Erectus cooked meat with fire? Ate barbecue? Well, first of all, let's speculate on how Homo Erectus discovered fire-cooked meat and my theory is -- one theory is that there was a volcanic activity and a lava flow caught an animal, trapped an animal. Somebody tasted. But for me it's more likely that there was a forest fire that swept through the woods, roasted an orrac, [implied spelling] which was a prehistoric steer or a bison on the hoof and then again, somebody tasted. I imagine our ancestors with always hungry and always looking for food. Tasted fire-roasted meat and uttered the first grunt of gastronomic satisfaction in history. [ Laughter ] Anyhow. Here is an imagined Homo Erectus barbecue. And the discovery that you could cook meat with fire lead to very profound evolutionary changes in a very short amount of time. And the next piece of the lecture I'm going to talk to you about was actually developed by a Harvard anthropologist named Richard Wrangham and he wrote a book called "Catching Fire". A brilliant book, I can't recommend it enough. So here we're looking at a Homo Robustus skull and what do you see? I'll kind of -- sorry, I got to do it right here. Okay. So you see a relatively small cranium for the brain. You see giant jaws and you see giant teeth. Basically, Homo Robustus was a chewing machine. You also see a bony ridge at the top of the skull. It's labeled with arrows and these kind of protruding bones where the cheekbones would be. That's -- those -- that's called the zygomatic arch in the sagittal crest and those were used to anchor giant chewing muscles. Because it turns out if you observe primates in the wild, gorillas, modern day gorillas will spend up to six day -- six hours a day chewing their food. When you don't have the benefit of eating cooked food, it takes a lot of muscle power, jaw power to render it digestible. So one way we know that Homo erectus discovered the art and act of cooking meat and eating meat is this whole machinery, the jaw machinery, the musculature shrinks down. At the same time cooked food is a lot easier to metabolize. A lot more efficient to metabolize than raw food and we see a tripling of the size of the cranium, the brain in 100,000 years. This is an eye blink in evolutionary history. So what else happened during this discovery as a result of the discovery of cooking meat with fire? Well one thing that happened is that if you observe primates in the wild, when they get food they basically go sit on a branch or by themselves so nobody else will take it away from them but we became communal cookers and communal eaters. We sat around a fire. We shared a fire. We developed -- some people hypothesize we developed language to be able to communicate because we became social animals. By the way, when you jaw shrinks and your teeth shrink and your brain grows, those are the three ingredients you need for the gift of speech. So some people would argue that speech began with barbecue. What else happened? [ Laughter ] What else happened? So early on, Homo erectus knew how to harness this power of fire to cook meat but he didn't know how to make fire. So you had to have one person, once you had a fire, tend the fire, keep feeding it wood and then you had to have other people go out and hunt and gather. So the first division of labor, the concept that one spouse would go home and bring home the bacon as it were and the other spouse would stay home and tend the home fires that originated with the discovery of fire. So you could truly say that barbecue begat civilization. [ Laughter ] Okay. Well, what did early man eat? This is a -- a picture of a bison from the wall of the Lasco cave. The early prehistoric diet was highly carnivorous, that we know. And by the way, the first until recently, the firsts fossil evidence of a hearth, a prehistoric hearth went back about 6000 years so we're making a leap of faith based on fossil evidence that man mastered fire much earlier than the fossil evidence suggested. But this is a cave in Longabon, South Africa. A site of a lot of prehistoric discoveries, Homo erectus bone traces and they actually, by going back and reanalyzing the data discovered that what looked like a pile of discolored earth was actually a deliberately made fire from about a million years ago. So we're getting closer to actually discovering that original primal hearth. This, by the way, is a glimpse of what a prehistoric hearth looked like about 15,000 years ago. Well now we come to the question of when and how did we learn to make fire? And for this, I took a little trip to the world's only Neanderthal theme park. It's in the southwest of France it's called [speaking French] park and they have a historic interpreter, much the way at Plymouth Plantation, they have people dressed up like pilgrims to show you how pilgrims did it. Well, here they have people dressed up like Neanderthals. Show you Neanderthal skills. So it was here that I learned how you make a fire and it starts by striking two stones together. However, note, that one of the stones is flint and the other is marcasite. It's metallic. If you strike two pieces of flint together, you get a cold spark. It's not hot enough to actually set straw on fire. But what happens is that, that little spark goes into sort of a bird's nest fashion with straw with a little shredded dried fungus, which is highly flammable, the original tinder. And then you wave that thing around and it becomes a fire. And what's interesting is I watched this guy, the Neanderthal interpreter make a fire in about two minutes. It was not much more time that I used to take with my lighter in college to set stuff on fire. And another theory about how early man made fires, so that's the percussion theory; this one is the friction theory. And that holds that if you rub two sticks together very fast it will create enough friction and heat to set stuff on fire. But if you've ever watched a reality show, you know that it's not as easy as it looks and this is one guy who has mastered it. He's a professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Marseille and I ran into him at the marina at Marseille. He does a lot of scuba exploration finding prehistoric caves that are hidden by water. In true journalistic fashion, you know, I said to him, I don't believe you can do it. Nobody could, you know, could really make this work. And he spends a lot of time figuring out the proper wood and the proper spindle size and low and behold he created a fire also in about a minute. So once you are into this, you are -- ^M00:20:00you can master very quickly. Well this is a scene at Prehisto Park. This would kind of duplicate what the world looked like maybe 40,000 years ago with Neanderthal. This is a communal hunting scene. This is a fishing scene, I'm sorry, at the bottom of the screen you'd see a spear going into a fish and the early hunter gathers were really quite sophisticated. They could organize their hunting skills to bring down an animal ten times their size. This is the old pit covered with grass and a spike at the bottom to kill the mastodon. And early butchery skills using stone knives. And finally, our first technological leap forward in the art of barbecue. Sp, first thing, you just throw the meat in the fire. I actually do that with a steak and so did Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was called a caveman T-bone and he called it the best way there was to cook a steak. The second technological advance was putting the meat on a stick and in one direction it morphed into shish kabob and in the other direction it morphed into rotisserie. By the way, things have not changed that -- all that much, we still cook meats on sticks over live fire. That's a designer marshmallow to make an uptown s'more. [ Laughter ] So the next sort of period of barbecue I like to talk to -- talk about is what I call barbecue as religion. Now, we have some Texans here. Do we have any North Carolinians here or Carolinians here? Okay. So for you guys barbecue is a religion but barbecue was intimately bound up with religion in the ancient world. Animal sacrifice was a big part of the practice of religion and this shows -- this is a 17th century engraving showing a scene of animal sacrifice. And if you read the text, it was really interesting how they did it. They decided the Gods, the Gods or one God wanted the hooves and the skin and the horns and the meat would be left over for the congregants. [ Laughter ] And here is another biblical animal sacrificing. And you all know the myth of Prometheus, the God who gave man the gift of fire and the other Gods were so angered by unleashing this powerful technology to incompetent humans that they chained Prometheus to a mountainside where an eagle would come and eat out his liver every day. You can just see at the bottom of screen there just a little bit of the flame from the torch he used to transfer the fire. So one surprising reference to barbecue that I found was in the Iliad by Homer and there are three lines that describe an animal sacrifice that took place the night before one of the battles, actually the battle that Achilles went out to battle Hector and what they would do is they would bring a cow and they would raise a pire on the beach. And then this is very -- Homer is very specific about this. They take meat from the thigh and wrap it with strips of fat and season it with holy salt, which would have been probably what we Fleur de sel today, sea salt. And as the meat was grilling, they would douse it alternately with wine and olive oil and the wine was probably Retsina because the wine skins back in those days were sealed with pine resin into keep them from leaking. This is a dish that I read about in Homer and I have made and it's delicious and I'm sure you're hearing it you would know how to make it and you will make it this weekend. [ Laughter ] So the ancient Romans called their hearth, which was indoors, they called it the focus like your wife might say to focus on what she is saying. And the focus, it became the focal point of family life and it also gave us the word for ka-cha [assumed spelling]. So bread historically baked on rocks next to the fire. A great rotisserie scene in the movie, "The Satyricon" by Felini and described in "The Satyricon" and it's a rotisserie pig and when you cut it open, instead of intestines it's been filled with sausages, cooked sausages that come slithering out. We jump next to the Middle Ages very briefly and the patron saint of cooks and grill masters is St. Lawrence and his martyrdom was to be grilled alive by the people that tortured him and he is supposed to have said to his torturers, I'm cooked on the back, turn me now over and cook me on the front. The next sort of important epic in the history of barbecue is the age of discovery. And this is a scene, an imagine scene of the West Indies and their similar scenes you find in Florida and Virginia. And a Spanish explorer by the name of Fernando Gonzalo Oviedo y Valdes and last time I was here, you guys showed off and took me up to the rare books room and put that book in my hand, he saw some Taino Indians on the -- in a little village in what's today the Dominican Republic or Haiti, the island of Hispaniola and they were cooking over a gizmo that looked like this. And he asked what is that? And they thought he was referring to the gizmo. So they said it's a barbacoa or that's what it sounded like to the Spanish ear. And that gave us our word barbecue. Now, I want to call attention to a couple of things here and that is first of all, Europeans had metal technology for millennia so if you look at their grills, Roman grills, they actually had proper gridirons that looked like barbecue grill grates that you could position close over the fire which enables you to do a very high heat cooking that we would call grilling. Right? How you cook a steak or a chop. But when your grill grate the made with wood you have to have it high above the fire, right? Otherwise the sticks will catch fire. So when your grill grate is high above the fire, what are you doing? You're bringing the temperature way down and you're bringing the smoke way up so thus implicit in the idea of barbacoa is the idea of low, slow and smoky. The hallmark and essence of traditional barbecue. Now, just a quick note about the way these images were created. So explorers would go out and kind of do little sketches in their your journals and notebooks and then they'd take them back to professional engravers in the Netherlands or Belgium and one guy, this guy named DeBrice and he's the one that did this engraving which also happens to be in your collection here. And you get some fanciful imagines actually -- let me come back -- I'll show you a fanciful image in a minute. But anyhow, likely you would not have had a big fire and a lot of smoke at the same time, okay, because you know if you ever made a campfire, either you have a big fire or you have smoke but you don't usually have both at the same time. So Obiedo came back and wrote up his findings, the first description of the barbacoa, the barbecue grill. First description of corn meal, the first description of the avocado in a book called, "The Natural History of the West Indies" and that book also happens to be here. I want to take a quick detour to Boston beach Jamaica, 400 years later. Home of a style of barbecue called jerk. Traditional jerk is cooked on wooden poles over a low smoky fire. Those poles actually happen to be what they call pimento. We call it allspice wood. So here almost half a millennium later, you still find one culture in the Caribbean cooking on a wood barbacoa. Any rate. Back to sort of fanciful interpretations. So this is a little known hughanaught -- portrayal of a little known hughanaught community near Saint Augustine near northern Florida. Take a look at the food on the grill. You have that crocodile, which actually wasn't native to the Americas yet. Alligators, you have pythons. So this is sort of third generation of eyewitness reporting but it is great. Look at the fan being used to aerate the fire, something you still see in the barbecue trail today. Barbecue also became propaganda in the 16th century. This is an imagined image of a barbecue in Brazil showing cannibalism among the natives and the accusation of cannibalism was used to justify the hash treatment of the Native Americans. If they were cannibals they were savages, therefore they deserve to be enslaved and forcibly -- have Christianity forced upon them. Another interesting side note into the early Caribbean age of barbecue, in northern Haiti, they used a style of barbecue called buconai [assumed spelling], or buco. Buco is a slang word in the Spanish Caribbean and Canada for that matter for smoke and you would preserve meat over a fire, smoky fire. If you look at the bottom of this image, animal hides for the fuel put on the fire to generate the smoke and the smoke was also used to preserve corpse as a quick mummification and this term buco, buconai gave us the idea of the buccaneer because runaway sailors or runaway slaves^M00:30:00would go native in these villages on the north coast of Haiti using this technique buco they became as buccaneers. So the next sort of broad period of barbecue history we want to talk about is the colonial period and the early American period. George Washington, a huge barbecue buff, writes about one barbecue that lasted three days in Alexandria, Virginia. In fact, the first election he ever ran for it was for a seat on the house in the House of Burgesses. He lost and one commentary -- commentator of the period very laconically implied that it was because he failed to provide the customary refreshments, i.e., he didn't stage a barbecue for voters. Back in the day, this is sort of a scene of how barbecue would have been done in a Virginia plantation. A trench or pit was dug in the ground and small shallots or small pigs were stretched across sticks over the fire. Today, we speak of the machine in which you cook -- the cooker in which you cook barbecue as a barbecue pit. Right? There's Pits and Spits is one brand, Old Hickory is one brand. Oklahoma Joe. Do you ever wonder why it's called a barbecue pit? Well because this is what it was meant to simulate. Barbecues became very -- major acts of patriotism and to celebrate great patriotic events. When the British surrendered at York, barbecues were staged throughout America. When the corner stone of the capitol was laid, right around the corner from here, giant barbecues and ox rows were staged in what became the mall. This one is actually from New York. But I just love the technology you've got these kind of reflecting -- reflectors full of pans at the bottom and the carcass striped bare. Almost looks like a whale carcass, not a steer carcass. Political rallies, giant barbecues when hundreds sometimes thousands of animals would be cooked for barbecuing and Abraham Lincoln, his administration both profoundly influenced the course of American barbecue history and he was influenced by it because when his parents were married, their wedding feast was a barbecue and it's described at great length in the Karl Sanders biography of Lincoln even to the point of where the main course was lambs and they tossed spruce branches on top of the lambs during the cooking to kind of hold in the smoke and give them a leafy flavor. Well, with the emancipation of the slaves an the abolition of slavery, a new class of entrepreneur arose and that was a pit master who could actually cook barbecue for money. Prior to that time barbecue were social events done on plantations, primarily for community activities and paid for by one person. But the rise of this new class of barbecue cooks and their subsequent generations gave rise to the first barbecue joints in America. This is leaping ahead a half a century but it's Perry's Barbecue in Kansas City and Mr. Perry opened one of the first commercial barbecue joints where you could actually go and order barbecue when you were hungry for it. Amazing concept. Mr. Perry trained such people as Arthur Briant and Mr. Gaits and so he kind of created a dynasty of barbecue -- barbecue restaurateurs. He also created the first -- was the first rough and tumble gruff barbecue pit master. When asked if people were enjoying his restaurant or how they were enjoying the barbecue, he replied, "My job is to make barbecue not entertainment." [ Laughter ] Here is Arthur Briant. One of the legends of Kansas City Barbecue. So we're going to jump next to the 20th century to the period that I call barbecue comes home. And it begins with an American industrialist Henry Ford who had a lot of wood scraps left over from manufacturing the Model T Ford. And so he had read about a process whereby you could grind up the wood scraps with coal dust and borax and petroleum binders and stamp them into sort of a little pillow shape and that became the charcoal briquette. And Ford actually started a spin off business that was called the Ford Charcoal Briquette Company. I had never heard of it either but he did have a relative that he sold the business too and the relative's last name was Kingsford and the rest, as they say, is history. So we've got the fuel. Next, we need the backyards and that sort of happened in the 50s with the rise of the interstate road system and the development of the first suburbs. So now everybody has a fuel and everybody has a backyard and a place to cook. And the last thing we need is a mass marketed grill. And this begins in Palatine, Illinois at a company that made nautical buoys. [ Laughter ] And one of the workers there a guy named George Stevens had the idea to take half a nautical buoy and cut vent holes in the bottom and then take part of the other half and cut vent holes in the top. He hadn't welded legs on them yet but he would shortly. And because the nautical buoy company was called the Weber Metal Works Company this became known as the Weber Kettle Grill. So barbecue came home. We had the fuel, it came to the backyard and our sort of modern notion of something barbecue -- barbecue is something you cook when you want to eat it in your backyard on command finally became reality. So what I'd like to do next is sort of take you on a quick tour of what barbecue means around the world. Okay? Because I know we asked our Texan and North Carolinian what barbecue means. Well, if you happen to be in Bali, Indonesia, it would mean this. This is Bobby cooling a spit roasted whole hog. Stuff -- the cavity is stuffed with chilis and gallon of ginger and incredibly fragrant. If you're from North Carolina, it would look like this. This is pulled pork and if you're from Munich, Germany, it would look like this. This is called is swine haxen. And swine haxen are spit roasted ham hocks that are flavored with among other flavorings mug wart, a popular mid-evil seasoning. Tastes a little bit like a juniper berry. This is a charcoal-burning rotisserie. And this is what barbecue looks like in Jamaica and the animal you're seeing here is actually a whole hog and you can tell because if you look right in the front, you see the little tail right in the front. The idea is it's boned and butterflied out. So not more than two inches in any direction of the meat is exposed to the spice and the fire. Okay. So it's an incredibly ingenious effective way of making sure that every bite you take will be bursting with scotch bonnet jerk seasoning flavor and smoked fire. And this may be the most calorie dense barbecue in the world. It is grilled bacon from Hungary. Take a slab of bacon. You grill it as the burning bacon fat falls off. You let it drip onto a slice of rye bread, spread with sliced onions and tomatoes. These are rib steaks from the bass country in Spain using a technique that's actually pretty widely used around the country and that is massive doses of salt for grilling just before serving the steaks, turn it on its side whack with a knife to knock some of the salt off. This is going whole hog azary [assumed spelling] style. And by John. It's actually a lamb lowered into a barbecue pit similar to an Indian Tandor and burgers, of course, are enjoyed around the world. This is the world's large burger on the left hand side it's called a plescavita. It's the burger of Bosnia and Syrbia. And it's about the size of a dinner plate. Grilled foie gras in Israel and another cool technique for those of you who are do-it-yourselfers, oiling a grill grate with onion dipped in oil and rubbed across the bars of the grate with a barbecue fork. Marinated grilled kangaroo in Australia. Sweet and salty lacquered barbecued eel in Korea. Grilled spiney lobster on enguela [assumed spelling] in the Caribbean. Grilled octapus in Greece, which actually has become a real crossover dish. I don't know if there's a sheik modern restaurant around that doesn't have grilled octopus on the menu these days. By the way, another cool technique here grilling a whole seabrean on grape leaves. Grilled cuttle fish in the Philippines. And the action in this scene actually takes place underneath the surface. This is a Tondor, an Indian barbecue pit used for making Tondory bread called non. An invention of a local chef hero here in town. This is grilled bread and chocolate from Jose Andreas. Drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt. Absolutely amazing for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or desert and grilled eggs from^M00:40:00Cambodia where the eggs are kind of opened up. The liquid egg is forced out. The egg is scrambled with fish sauce, spices, cilantro. Put back in the egg and grilled shish kabob style. And this bamboo segment will be hallowed out stuff with sticky rice and put directly in the fire until the bamboo is charred and then it's pulled out of the fire and it is grilled sticky rice. Totally amazing. Shish kabobs from Turkey. And notice how each skewer has a different shape? Each one of these is flavored differently. At the end it's a vegetable kabob, a standard kabob and then there's something called Adana Kebab. With the flat secures. That's a really hot fiery kabob. They all become indistinguishable and kind of brown, golden brown when grilled. But thanks to the different shape of the skewer, the kabob master knows what he's serving. A desert cooked in the grill. This is a fire heater poker using to make a Crema Catalana, a bask version or a Spanish version of creme brulee. Spit roasted pineapple at a Brazilian cheroskeria in Rio Grange do Sul sprinkled simply with cinnamon sugar. The most amazing grilled dessert I had on the whole tour of Planet Barbecue is grilled ice cream. Balls of ice cream dipped in beaten egg and then in shredded coconut. Refrozen, then cooked on a screaming hot fire so fast that the egg and coconut set up to form a shell before the ice cream can melt. Cool techniques. Cool ways to eat barbecue. So this is called Buy and Brie in South Africa. You go into a meat market and you buy presliced pork shoulder or steaks and then little prebagged -- prebaggies of spices and then the market provides a little grill free of use for its customers to grill lunch. Another cool way to serve barbecue, this is in Istanbul and it is a Kurdish grill joint that is sort of like a do it yourself sushio bar only for grilled kabobs instead of grilled fish. A scene in the Pacific Northwest, this is called a salmon bake or salmon roast. It's what Louis and Clark would have seen when they finally got out to the Pacific. Open salmon just cooked in front of a wood fire with no more seasoning than fresh air and wood smoke. Similar idea in Columbia where they have a meat, it's an animal called chigaro, its cappy berro. We say it's like a giant guinea pig and it's cooked on stakes, navara [assumed spelling], over a eucalyptus fire and it actually tastes pretty good. I'm going to show you some weird stuff that didn't taste so good but this one tastes pretty good. And this was the original foe go jeshow [assumed spelling], which is now popular Brazilian steakhouse chain. Prime ribs cooked on a rotisserie in front of a fire. Interesting scene in Biyon in Semari, Cambodia. This was a scene of a battle -- the night before a battle and you can see it's kind of stylized. But at the bottom of the triangle there's a fire. You can see tons of flames and you can see these sticks that are split. In the split sticks is the food and fast forward 800 years later; this is how Cambodians still grill fish. You see it's a long split bamboo stick and that takes the place of a skewer. We have grill grates in North America and Europe but most of the world actually does not grill with grill grates. Most of the world has a big open box full of coals and then the food is either put in a grill basket or on a skewer or on a split stick like this. The highest tech grill -- grills I know and the most high pollutant grill master, a guy named Victor Edwinozeez [assumed spelling] at the restaurant Etstaberry [assumed spelling] in the bass country of Spain, his grills are on these fly wheels and he can raise and lower them to the millimeter and he builds a fresh fire for each dish you order. So in the back wall here he's got an oven where he's burning local oak logs to embers and if you order let's say a fish filet he'll shovel out enough coals for one fish fillet under one of those grates he'll grill it. When it's done he'll build another fire for your steak, another fire for your shrimp. He has a box of embers and ashes where he cooks eggs, duck eggs in the shell. Incredibly ingenious grill master. This is in Germany, which is, for me is one of the best-kept barbecue secrets on Planet Barbecue. This is called a [speaking foreign language]. It's a swinging grill. Germans use wood fires, not charcoal or gas and they also cook in flames, not on embers and when your fuel is wood and your fire is flames there's a very mercurial fire. It has hot spots and cool spots so this grill is designed to spin or swing. Sometimes it's when chains swing over the fire and that gives you even cooking. And you'll be invited in a German household for a night of swinging [laughter] and it's not that kind of swinging. It's this kind of swinging. So this is in Mexico in the Yucatan. This is called taco el pastore. It's a Mexican version of a Greek gyro and the beauty of it is there's a charcoal burning rotisserie burning in the back and the meat is cut off and sliced and with that knife he'll flick it over his head on to a waiting tortilla here and do you see the piece of pineapple on top? So the pineapple juices drip down tenderize the meat because pineapple is a natural tenderizer and then you'll get a little piece of grilled pineapple with it too. This is Singapore actually and this is a grilled fish moose grilled in banana leaves. And talk about ingenious, this is a grill master in Marrakech, Morocco, and if you take a close look, look at his grill grate. It's the cooling coil from the back of an old refrigerator. I didn't quite dare ask what was in this sausage but it was pretty tasty. One of the most ingenious dishes, one of the most primal, it's called [speaking foreign language] or beef tenderloin cooked in a cloth. A wet cotton cloth, about a pound of salt sprinkled with oregano. You tie it up into a bundle. You lay it directly on the embers of the fire and it cooks like a charred log and then you crack it open at the table. And what you get is the most succulent delicious moist piece of tenderloin that you'll ever taste plus a really great presentation. Another really ingenious dish from the west coast of France this is called eclat de mote and the skillet has holes in the bottom. It was an old chestnut-roasting skillet, pine needles dried pine needles on top. Muscles and bay scallops on top of that. You cover the pan. You set the pine needles on fire and in a woosh of smoke and fire the muscles are steamed over by this pine scented smoke. It's a dish with two ingredients. Completely amazing. So barbecue's not normally what we think of as health food and yet in Asia in particular and Korea, I would argue that it is. This is called Kalbequi [assumed spelling] it's beef short ribs that are butterflied open grilled over natural charcoal, served over a lettuce leaf with a variety of pickles, chilly sauces, rice, the whole shebang wrapped up in your mouth and if you kind of diagram it, it's mostly plant food. Just a tiny bit of flavorful meat as a condiment. It's sort of the old FDA pyramid on the grill. Last of all, the single weirdest thing that I ate on Planet Barbecue, this is a Greek dish called cocoretsi [assumed spelling] and it starts with sheep's -- with lambs -- let's see, brains, tongue, sweetbreads, spleen, liver, lungs, testicles and I'm probably leaving out some stuff but you get the idea and then you wrap the whole shebang in small intestines and it's put on a rotisserie and grilled. You can think of it as haggis on a spit. And it's actually pretty tasty. It's one of those weird dishes that I would eat twice and I can't say the same thing about grilled sheep's udder in India or grilled spleen in Morocco. So it has been 1 point 8 million years since the first invention of barbecue. In a way, things have hardly changed at all. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Questions? >> We have a little time for questions. Questions? >> Yes, sir. Please, when you ask a question, say your name, where you're from and maybe even the last for digits of your social. [ Laughter ] >> [ Inaudible ] >> Hey, no kidding. >> And my questions is put in a bundle. Is that from Peru? >> No. That's in Columbia. >> That's from Columbia. >> Yeah. Made in both restaurants and in private homes. >> Can you talk a little bit more about that? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, just to tell you how the sick mind of a barbecue writer works about. So I actually heard about that dish at a trade show and I knew at that point although Columbia is not a place you would think about barbecue but I had to go to Colombia to go see it. ^M00:50:00So I have these pen pals at my website from all over the world and I contacted a pen pal and I flew first down to Cartagena and then to Bogota. And when I got to Bogota, I had no idea if this person was going to show up or if anything had been set up. But low and behold they appeared in an SUV and I won't answer what the cargo of the SUV was when they picked me up. But any rate, they took me on two splendid days of barbecue hopping around Bogota, Columbia. So the idea is that the cloth moistens the salt. The salt keeps the meat moist and flavors the tenderloin. Because let's face it tenderloin is one of the least flavorful pieces of the whole cow and by wrapping it up the salt and the cloth form a hard crust almost like a cast that you'd form on a broken arm. And so you cook it and it's exactly 8 minutes on one side and 9 minutes on the other side. Or vice versa. I forget which. And then with a leap of faith you crack it open, if you hit it right, it comes out perfect medium rare. I cheat a little bit and I insert an instant reheat thermometer in it. Thanks. What year? >> '82. >> Oh my gosh. What'd you major in? Physics. >> Oh my God. Wow. Okay. By the way one of my classmates in '75 was Steve Jobs but he dropped out before he could graduate. Other questions please? Yes, sir. >> [ Inaudible ] >> Yes, sir. >> [ Inaudible ] >> Great question. So the question was to what extent are we the only ones who use charcoal briquettes. Do other countries use briquettes? Do other countries use charcoal? So first of all, let's take Planet Barbecue as an ensemble. I would say that 90% of the world's grilling takes place over charcoal and that is natural charcoal not a briquette and the charcoal can range from oak -- it's probably the most popular cooked in kilns in South America and if you get Planet Barbecue there's a picture of our charcoal Kiln. It can be maple in Canada. It can be coconut husks and coconut shells in Thailand and Southeast Asia. It can be a very rare kind of oak cooked in a cave. You know the way you make charcoal, right? You set a tree or a log on fire and then before it can burst into flames and be completely consumed, you seal the kiln up or in this cave in Japan, what they'll do is they'll actually seal the mouth of the cave with clay and that enables the log to be partially consumed but still leave combustible elements. What you're getting rid of is you're getting rid of the water which makes fuel an inefficient -- wood an inefficient fuel and incidentally you're also getting rid of the aldehydes and the most of the flavor producing components, which is why despite the reputation of charcoal being a flavorful fuel to get a smoke flavor you actually need to add woodchips to charcoal. So 90 percent of the world cooks on natural charcoal. The three big briquette countries are the United States and South Africa a bit and then Australia. And everybody else is using the natural lump charcoal. There are some cultures that cook on straight wood. Italy is a big wood cooking culture. Uruguay is a wood cooking culture. Gas grills pretty much only North America, a little bit in South Africa. A little bit -- well, actually a lot in Australia. Do we have any Australians in the audience? Okay. So I can bash them a little bit. Okay. So they are barbecue -- they think they are barbecue maniacs but a lot of their so called barbecue grills are really gas heated flattops like a griddle like you find at a greasy spoon and that's what they call a Barbie but it is changing now and they're going more and more to a regular gas grill and much more to charcoal. Good question. Another question. Yes, sir. >> [ Inaudible ] >> That is a great question and I'm going to attempt a layman's answer to it and then I'm going to turn it over because here at the Library of Congress, we must have somebody, a scientist in the science department. Somehow. When you burn wood you release water and you release CO2 and then you release, I guess compounds, it's 20 or 30 components. One set of compounds are aldehydes. Another set of the compounds are resins and in hardwoods particularly hardwoods that are seasoned and dried they produce a very pleasant flavor but if you burn a soft wood like pine or pitch, you get a very sooty flavor. And if you burn pressure treated lumber, you get arsenic because that's one of the things used to pressure treat it. [ Laughter ] So you wouldn't -- so having given that layman's overview, anybody want to add something about what is in smoke that makes it -- gives it a great flavor? Physics? Does that -- >> [ Inaudible ] >> Okay. I am working -- my next to next book after the next two is going to be a book on smoking so we'll address that in full. But I will tell I've done experiments where I've smoked salmon with 8 different woods and you can taste the difference and my favorite for salmon was cherry wood. Yes, ma'am. >> [ Inaudible ] >> First of all where are you from? >> [ Inaudible ] >> Okay. Great. Wow, you came all the way to San Francisco for this lecture. I'm deeply honored. My wife might argue -- first of all my wife would say, let's get this right. I pick the date, I invited the company, I the shopping, I did all the prep, I set the table. I told you at exactly what time to go out and light the grill. You went out and burned some meat and then I orchestrated the meal. Cleaned up afterwards and sent everybody home with thank you gifts. So who actually is the boss? But if she weren't saying that, she'd probably say something because women are way too smart to stand out in the hot sun downwind of a smoky grill. [ Laughter ] But I think, beyond that, I think -- well, let me ask a Question. This is not scientific. Did any of the guys in the audience, when you were growing up, did you used to build elaborate model airplanes and ships and then fill them with firecrackers and model airplane glue? [ Laughter ] And the work of a day set it on fire in six seconds. So I think we are just genetically, kind of hard wired to play with fire in a way like that. But the final point I want to make is that there are many -- I would say as almost as much as a fifth or a quarter of the world the real heavy hitting grill masters are women, not men. And that's true of Southeast Asia; it's true of the Balkans, Serbia -- >> [ Inaudible ] >> Well that is true. [ Laughter ] I mean, men do predominate, but if you look at Planet Barbecue you'll see more women -- it's still a guy thing. I don't know. We like to play with fire. We're just too dumb to stay indoors where it's cool. One more. Do we have time for one more? Because this is so much fun. You didn't have anything to do this afternoon did you? >> [ Inaudible ] >> Yeah. >> [ Inaudible ] [ Laughter ] >> Well that's interesting. In a sweat hut that would be more of a luau or a clambake. So to answer that sort of question, in the beginning, I think the reason we have such an emotional response to barbecuing and grilling is that it's made us human. We look the way we look. We think the way we think. We interact the way we interact because we are homo barbecuens, the only animal that cooks its meat with live fire. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov ^E00:59:07