In 1698, a Dominican missionary known as Pére Labat did what all good cooks throughout history have done—he wrote down the tips and tricks he learned from better cooks. Labat was in the French West Indies when he observed the use of a mixture of lime juice and chili peppers to season meat slowly cooking outdoors over indirect heat. When he wrote about it he possibly became the first person to record the use of an early kind of barbecue sauce, and I’m guessing, made a lot of people a little bit hungry just reading about it.

We had barely started at this point.

Barbecue had been around at least a couple centuries before that, originating with the barbacoa of the Taíno People of the Caribbean, and introduced to the Western world by Columbus’s voyages. Because whether you found the part of the world you were looking for or not, when you smell the roasty deliciousness of barbecuing meat, you want to share the experience.

Over the next several hundred years, the love of barbecue spread and was embraced most enthusiastically by the Southern United States where it became particularly a part of Black American culture. That’s when a broader variety of rubs and sauces really began taking it to the next level. Barbecuing became the quintessential American thing to do, making its way into political campaigns and into backyards across the country.

Ok, technically not barbecue, but I’m not going to turn my nose up at it.

Today, barbecue is pretty much synonymous with summer in the United States, and this year, at the Angleton household summer has arrived. Now, I will admit that like many careless Americans, I’m a little loosely goosey with the term barbecue. I am well aware that the term applies specifically to meat that is cooked with indirect heat and not on a grill, and that some of you are probably pretty persnickety about that definition. It might even make you a little mad that I’m about to use the term barbecue interchangeably with grilling out, which is apparently not the same at all.

But here’s the thing. This year we had a record crop of sweet cherries, largely because the birds we would normally fight for them were stuffed full already of a million cicadas. So we had to get a little creative. We jammed and pied and dried and salsa-ed.

Mmm. Tastes like summer.

Then we made sweet cherry barbecue sauce. And it is really, really good.

So now that the late spring days are starting to feel an awful lot like summer, we are cooking outside a lot more. At some point I’m sure we will legitimately barbecue in a smoker or in a pit. Most of the time we grill and call it good, because it doesn’t take as long to grill up a St. Louis pork steak as it does to smoke a Boston butt. 

And whether I’m using the word right or not, both taste amazing slathered in barbecue sauce.

Happy (almost) summer!