It's Barbecue Month!!!

Update: Gloria over @ Cookbook Cuisine is holding an online barbecue recipe round-up and a cookbook give-away on her blog until July 10, 2009. Go check it out and get those barbecue recipes a'cookin!

The last time I celebrated Barbecue Month online was way back in 2001. That was when I had the Months of Edible Celebrations website on AOL. Darn that AOL for removing all those files with such little notice. I did manage to download some of my files but I feel sorry for those who didn't heed the short warning. There were so many websites overflowing with darn good information. May 2001 was actually the last time I updated the website because at that time it was a calendar much like the google calendar I now have and it constantly had to updated. Calendars are that way you know, forever evolving:) Wouldn't you know, google is changing their calendar platform and it looks like I may have to let that go by the wayside too! It seems the days I have already added on the google calendar will remain however, the links I provided for sources, some here, some at other blogs and websites are no longer available. Darn them!!!

As I was reading through the "hot links" and barbecue trivia I included on the barbecue month file I downloaded from AOL, I came across some bad information. Oh, I'm sure some of the information is still quite viable. For instance, the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, is still hot in Memphis, TN. Back then their website called it "the Super Bowl of Swine, The College of Pig Knowledge, The Granddaddy of Grills and The Largest Pork Barbecue Cooking Contest on the Planet." In 2001 it was held the weekend of May 17-20. This year it began on May 14th and the Round One results are already posted. Many of the barbecue recipes I was linked to have vanished into thin air, however, the Useful Tips for Maintenance, Convenience and General Cooking link is still good as is the "Discovering our Barbecue Heritage" link from the Austin Chronicle. Although the author of that article discusses the art of smoking meat, it was and still is a short article and I found it to be quite fascinating. Another article posted by the same newspaper gave suggestions for Texas barbecue "joints." I wonder if they are still in business? I'll leave the Definitions, Distinctions, and Things to Remember link below for my Texas readers below just in case they are curious.

The art of smoking meats was well known in Roman times. The epicure Apicius gave us a recipe for curing ham which included 17 days of salting, two days of open-air drying and two days of smoking.

The Urban Barbecue link is still fired up. Titled "How To Grill in the City" (without getting the third degree) I think I was attracted to the included marinade recipes for their use of balsamic vinegar. I've been a fan of balsamic vinegar for ages:)

Still applicable is the link for Pit Cooking. It's instructions from The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker. Click the Team Mumu Pit Cooking link at the bottom of the page to learn How to tell dinner from a hole in the ground and more about the art of Mumu Pit Cooking. Fascinating history.

The mingling of Native American, Anglo, and African traditions gave birth to what present-day Americans know as barbecue. Native communities in North America were pit-cooking meats as early as AD 1100. Many enslaved Africans brought to the South basted their meats, primarily pork, with sauce while cooking them slowly over an open fire. In the Southwest, the merging of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cooking also gave birth to another type of food that shared the name "barbecue" - only, in this case, because of differences in livestock, pit-cooked sides of beef. Still today, the word "barbecue" means pork in the South and beef in the Southwest. (Key Ingredients: America by Food)

You may be wondering why I'm going through all these seasoned links and skimming past the bad information. Well, besides the amount of hours it took way back then to gather good informative barbecue explorations, I'm leaving for Idaho on Monday and will vanish from the Blogosphere for two whole weeks. I'll be spending Memorial Day Weekend with my grandchildren. Oh yes, my daughter and son-in-law too. I'm really going because Tabitha, who is now six, will be in her second dance recital and Noah, who is four is graduating pre-school. I will also be going on Tabitha's class trip to the zoo and both kids will be performing in a tumbling finale! My son-in-law, Jason will be returning to work, which is indeed an occasion to celebrate. He has been laid off for nearly three months from his job on a natural gas rig in Wyoming. Since they've only been in their new house for about 6 months, I think I'll buy him a new gas grill to celebrate!!! Or, should I buy him a charcoal grill?

Gas or Charcoal, You Decide

Ah, the great BBQ debate. I sure don't want to get in the middle of that one. It's almost as dangerous as Mac vs. PC. I think I'll leave it up to Jason. I mean after all, he'll be doing the grilling. Actually, I may have to check with Michele. She does much of the barbecuing when Jason is away. I suppose, in these days of carbon footprint awareness, one should consider which is better for the environment. I found some recent "sizzling" facts at the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (HPBA) website. I'll leave the link below for you to explore because there is such a wealth of information provided, beginning with May is National Barbecue Month.

Although an article published by NASA's Earth Observatory reiterates the claim that "July 4 is by far the most popular day of the year for cookouts," the Fourth of July is No Picnic for the Nation's Environment, neither is Memorial Day which is the also a popular day for outdoor entertaining. Excerpts from Earth Observatory and Tristram West of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

"While more grills are fueled with liquefied petroleum gas, the majority of carbon dioxide emissions are from grills using charcoal briquettes, because the amount of carbon per Btu of gas is about one-third that of charcoal," West said...Although electric grills emit no on-site carbon dioxide, West said they have the highest emissions per hour of all the grills when accounting for fossil fuel emissions from producing and transmitting electricity. A liquefied petroleum gas grill operated for an hour would emit 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide while a charcoal grill would emit about 11 pounds. An electric grill would account for about 15 pounds of carbon dioxide...West cautioned against letting this data spoil your holiday fun, saying, "Considering that the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2000, the emissions from grills are relatively insignificant. In fact, all of the grills in use July 4 would have to remain lit every hour of every day for three years to approximately equal the average annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions..."So I suggest that you fire up the grill and relax. However, also remember that when the coals are no longer on the grate and the gas is no longer in the tank, the coals and gas are not gone. They're in the atmosphere."

Which leads me to my blunder. According to the Coal Region dictionary; Coal Speak, a barbecue is Sloppy-Joe-like but much tastier concoction served on hamburger buns at block parties. I'm not sure that's what Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer had in mind when he invented Charcoal Briquettes. The Origin of the Charcoal Briquette has been tarred by many, including myself. Way back in 2001, I too was guilty of giving credit to their invention to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. I'm not sure if I obtained that information from wikipedia, which got their data from another source. Quite frankly, I don't remember whether wiki was around in those days. Or, perhaps I got it from Joey Green's Weird Facts about Kingsford Charcoal Briquets.

Ford was interested in engineered woods ("Better wood can be made than is grown" (at this time plywood and particle board were little more than experimental ideas); corn as a fuel source, via both corn oil and ethanol; and the potential uses of cotton. Ford was instrumental in developing charcoal briquets, under the brand name "Kingsford". His brother in law, E.G. Kingsford, used wood scraps from the Ford factory to make the briquets. wiki

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, spoke the first words on the moon: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." The second thought he expressed was: "The surface is fine and powdery, it adheres in fine layers, like powered charcoal, to the soles and sides of my foot." Joey Green's

Truth be told, if you do a search in google, for "Henry Ford" charcoal, 26,700 pages are set aglow. If you add the name Ellsworth B.A. Zwoyer to that search, you come up with about 94 pages. What seems to be the problem? Is it the internet community spreading these falsehoods? What about Kingsford? Are they trying to sell more charcoal? Would you be surprised if they were? I certainly wouldn't. Perhaps, it has something to do with a relative of Mr. Zwoyer's.

In my last column talking about charcoal, and the invention of modern briquettes, I shared with you that Henry Ford invented the briquette. Well, unknown to me I was mildly rebuked by a reader saying that his grandfather invented the briquette, this was the readers e-mail message "So, Nino, you look at a U.S. Patent by Ellsworth BA Zwoyer dated 1897 and still believe that Ford invented the briquette in the early 1920’s...Still, I believe that Mr. Ford invented the briquette, I believe (not blind faith) but because of much evidence that it was his brainchild, based on most accounts. Mr. Zwoyer could have gotten to the patent office before Mr. Ford did. I don’t know, but in all fairness I wanted my readers to know that there is a split opinion of who created the briquette...You decide, but, if you are in favor of Zwoyer please sue the makers of KingsFord charcoal because they too are misinformed because they are printing a lie on millions of bags of charcoal when they tell their story on each bag they produce...Not only did Ford succeed in making profitable use of the sawdust and scrap wood generated in his automobile factory, but his sideline business also encouraged recreational use of cars for picnic outings. Barbecue grills and Ford Charcoal were sold at the company’s automobile dealerships, some of which devoted half of their space to the cooking-supplies business.

Well, it seems, I'm not the only one who has some rebuking to do. The above article was published by Houma Today in 2008. The link brings up the printable version of the article. I didn't print it but I did want you to see it:)

Yes, the History of Barbecue is torrid and some of the quotable sources, (like that link I just left you) are more than reliable. However, I did have to do a bit more searching on my own. I didn't want to be going off to Idaho leaving you in the dust. Indeed, Zwoyer's "Design for fuel" patent dated May 7, 1897, is visible @ google patents, patent #D27483. However, so is Thomas Edison's "Apparatus for Bricking Pulverized" which was filed on May 23, 1898. Digging a bit deeper, it appears Thomas Edison had an earlier patent which I'm thinking was part of the process to his later pulverizing experiences. It was simply called Mixer and filed June 27, 1897.

As much as I would like to add fuel to the fire, I think it best that I let these thoughts ferment for a while. If you should decide to stoke the embers, let me give you a bit of advice. It's all in the Spelling!!! You say BBQ, I say Barbecue and others say, barbeque. Such is the case with briquettes or briquets. These spelling predicaments have caused me problems before. The most noted was back when I did some investigation into Van Houten Cocoa for Chocolate Milk Powder Day last year. Also to consider is this bulletin produced by the United States Geological Survey. Lots of fuel, briquetting processes discussed. With names like Henry R. Dorr, who by the way also had a patent and the San Joaquin Coal Company, one can only be assured of the many who have contributed to our Memorial Day grilling feasts!!! As for Kingsford, the only Kingsford I could find at google patents was by a Thomas Kingsford who patented a starch process from corn and other material. He also was head of the Kingsford Starch Factory in Oswego, New York. The Kingsford Company does indeed have its ties to Henry Ford.

In his new role of inventor a former Boston journalist has developed a method of utilizing coal waste that promises to be of great economic value. Henry R. Dorr,, of Rutland, Vt., some years ago a member of the Heralds, has devised and patented a method of converting coal dust, both anthracite and bituminous, into briquettes. The process is said to have great superiority to those hitherto in use. The utilization of coal dust or "culm," by making it into briquettes has for some reason or other never been practiced to any extent in this country. In Europe however, particularly in Great Britain, Germany and France, great economies have long been effected in this direction.

In 1897, John Treadwell named the town for Nikola Tesla, a famous electrical inventor, who was first to harness the use of alternating currents. Treadwell planned to use Tesla's invention to send electricity to Bay Area cities from a coal-burning power plant at Tesla. However, this plan never materialized for fear of competing with the new hydroelectric power plants...Instead, Treadwell built the first successful coal briquetting plant in the United States. This plant was located in Stockton and operated from 1901 to 1905. The briquetting process greatly improved the quality of Tesla coal, which made it a popular household heating and cooking fuel. The coal briquette was a new commodity to Americans, and it brought national attention to the Tesla coal mines, especially after its debut at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901. A fire in 1905 destroyed the plant and eventually forced coal mining to permanently shut down at Tesla. Thanks to Tesla, American briquette plants were soon springing up across the United States. source

Recipes & Musings

With years of barbecuing under our belts, I'm sure everyone has their traditional Memorial Day Menu sitting on the coals waiting to be fired up. I thought it might be just the perfect time to share some barbecue recipes from these darling note cards I have designed by an artist at Red Farm Studio in 1953. It seems, greeting card manufacturer, Red Farm Studio is still in business and still has many freelance illustrators submitting work on a regular basis. So far, I found Liz Trostli and Courtney Autumn Martin who share their creations online. Unfortunately, I wasn't thrilled with the Red Farm Studio website but, I did find a tidbit of info which is below.

For over 50 years, Red Farm Studio has been a widely recognized name in the greeting card and stationery industry. Our story begins with a single artist painting in a studio on a farm (can you guess the color of the farm?) in Reading, Massachusetts. Red Farm Studio was born and we soon outgrew our "life on the farm". The company moved to Rhode Island in 1957. First to Providence and then to Pawtucket where we reside today. Zoom Info

I've made a slideshow out of the charming recipe notes in this series. I do hope you enjoy them. Before you view the "show," I would also like to take a moment to mention two other things.

1. I haven't heard from the winner of the Military Wives Cookbook Free Give-Away yet. If anyone knows who Nic is, please let him know that he won. I won't be able to send the book until I get back from Idaho but I sure would feel a bit more at ease knowing I have a way to send him his book. If I don't find out by the time I come back from Idaho, I may have to choose a new winner. If that happens, and I do eventually hear from Nic, I will send him my copy of the book. I would rather this event is put to rest.

2. I received two polarizing emails the other day. I think it is because I have recently joined the world of twittering, which to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure where my place is in that world or, whether I belong there at all. Anyway, one person wrote to thank me for the amount of links I include on my posts and my sidebars. Another wrote to complain, which was rather surprising since I have never linked to them or their website as far as I can tell. And let me tell you, I spent a good amount of valuable time checking, which is the reason why I haven't been as visible as usual. I do have a tendency to use a lot of links. In the past year or so, I have favored links of other bloggers. I do this because I "grew up" in the time when the spirit of the web was all about links. In 1998, as now, linking was a way to offer visitors further information and to validate another persons time, energy and passion. Yes, many websites have disappeared however, many are still alive and well. They are because they offer good content and the word is spread by linking. Twittering, does not seem to be an acceptable way of linking as I understand it however, there are those who link to provide more information not only as a way to promote there work or that of someone else. It doesn't really matter to me if someone doesn't provide a link back to me. Not that I don't appreciate it, certainly I do but because, I will do what I do whether anyone links or not. I've had almost 50,000 page views to this blog since its inception. To some, that may seem like a drop in the bucket. To me, after 214 posts I'm glad that someone has been fed. 

When I return from Idaho, I hope to be changing the design of this blog. I am thinking about adding a third column. I was almost done with it when I had to check back through all of my previous posts to make sure I was not linked to that unhappy email. If you would like to see what the new design is, here is the link. (I'm not really sure I like it:) If you would rather not be linked anywhere on this blog, including the sidebar, please speak now OR forever hold your piece. It is difficult enough trying to make sure all my resources are current. I will NOT be checking links for those who decide they would rather be somewhere else. I could certainly understand someone not wanting to be linked if I had an X-rated blog but as we all know that is not the case:) If, on the other hand, you would like to be added to the search engine, let me know through email. My search engine has basically three categories at present. Most of those food blogs in the sidebar are already in the search engine under Food Blogs, those who have separate pages with just recipes are included under Recipes Only and those who provide article pertaining to Food History are listed there. The search engine is what I usually use when trying to find recipes and such that coincide with the celebration I am sharing. It seems to be a popular way for visitors to to dig deeper. I only hope google doesn't decide to change that too!!!

I hope everyone enjoys their holiday as much as I plan on enjoying mine. Now, on to the show. You should be able to click the whimsical images to see them close up and to view the recipes. Louise:)

Resources
1. Definitions, Distinctions, and Things to Remember
2. May is National Barbecue Month
3. All Abut Charcoal
4. Gas Versus Charcoal: Which Is Better for Grilling? (@ Chow)
5. Charcoal vs. Gas? Which is better for the environment.
6. Barbecued Hot Beef Sandwiches (From John Madden's Ultimate Tailgating)
7. Cast-Iron Potato Salad (From: Bobby Flay and Jack McDavid, Grillin' and Chillin Show)
8. BBQ & Smoke Recipes
9. Healthy BBQ Tips