We’ll give you this: you know how to buy the food, fire up
your grill, and make something so delicious that your family and friends will
be singing your praises. But what you might not know is how grilling began.
Care to guess?
To be as precise as we can, grilling began about 500,000
years ago at the time of the domestication of fire, which makes complete sense
if you think about it. While our early ancestors might have been raw food
junkies out of necessity, fire definitely gave them more options. There is an
opinion that the idea of cooking meat came from forest fires that burned
animals which made them taste better and easier to chew. Could be. In any case,
since men were the main hunters, women would be in charge of cooking. So
they’re more than welcome to claim credit as the first grill masters we know
of.
As you probably know, although the words are sometimes
interchangeable, grilling and barbecue aren’t the same thing. As Tori Avey
writes, “the word barbecue likely originated with the
Caribbean Taino Indians, who would smoke or dry meat over a frame made of green
sticks. Edward Ward recorded one of the earliest English tales of barbecue in
his travel account, “The Barbacue Feast: or, the three pigs of Peckham, broil’d
under an apple-tree.” The pamphlet was published in London in 1706. In his
story, several English colonists had been enjoying a rum-filled evening in
Peckham, Jamaica when their bellies began to rumble. They decided to create a
rack from sticks with a fire burning beneath. Once the fire had burned the
sticks down to coal, long wooden spits were placed across the rack and topped
with three whole pigs. Using the resources available to them, the men crafted a
foxtail “brush” to baste the meat with a mixture of pepper and Madeira wine.
The pigs were cooked for several hours before being removed, portioned, and
distributed to onlookers. Cooking food over a fire was nothing new, but the
social aspect of barbecue was a new and noteworthy experience for Ward. He
described how the events were scheduled to start well before the food was
served. Guests gathered around to watch every detail of the cooking process,
from the construction of the pit to the removal of the meat from the fire. Cooking
became a communal experience.”
Another source gives credit for the barbecue to the Arawak
people of the Caribbean. The Arawaks also gave the English language the word cannibal, but we’ll just skip over that
one.
If we jump ahead a few centuries, we learn that barbecue pits
were built with stones or bricks above ground. In 1897, Ellsworth Zwoyer
patented the charcoal briquette. In the 1920s, Henry Ford, in collaboration
with Thomas Edison and EB Kingsford, began commercial manufacturing by making
the briquettes sawdust and wood scraps from Ford's auto plants.
Brick and fieldstone barbecues became common in parks and
backyards, but they weren’t easy to build. Somewhere along the way somebody cut
a steel drum in half lengthwise, hinged the two parts together like a
clamshell, and attached four legs. The quest to build the perfect backyard
barbecue was on. After World War II when people began to move into the suburbs,
outdoor grilling became quite the craze and remains so today.
While we applaud the inventions of all of the above, we feel
a little sad that none of those people had the advantage of the being able to
use a top-notch, top-quality grill scraper like the ones that we make! Our
scrapers will keep your grill clean and well-maintained. You can get a mini
one, or a heavy duty one, or a heavy duty one with a squeegee. Any of them will
get the job done right, save you time and money, and take some pressure off
your back, legs and feet. If only the Arawaks had known.
If this is your first time visiting us, we’d like you to
know that our products are made right here in the USA. This is something we’re
extremely proud of. We know that it helps to keep Americans working, and
there’s no question that we help them keep on grilling. Either in a restaurant,
or in a food truck, or right at home.
Please follow our Upcoming Products
page for more of what we’re up to, and of course come to our website to view
all of the products and everything we offer at Redi-Gril.com. If a product doesn’t say
Red-Gril it’s not the original!
Redi-Gril Grill Scrapers by Redi-Gril, LLC
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