This article is about the cuisine. For the cooking appliance, see Barbecue grill. The various regional variations of barbecue can be broadly categorized into those methods which use direct and those how long do you boil ribs prior to barbecuing use indirect heating.

A barrel-shaped smoker on a trailer. Pans on the top shelf hold hamburgers and hot dogs. The lower grill is being used to cook pork ribs and “drunken chicken”. The English word barbecue and its cognates in other languages come from the Indigenous Taíno word barbacoa. After Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, the Spaniards apparently found Taíno roasting meat over a grill consisting of a wooden framework resting on sticks above a fire.

Traditional barbacoa involves digging a hole in the ground and placing some meat—usually a whole lamb—above a pot so the juices can be used to make a broth. It is then covered with maguey leaves and coal, and set alight. The cooking process takes a few hours. Linguists have suggested the word was loaned successively into Spanish, then Portuguese, French, and English. As early as the 1730s, New England Puritans were familiar with barbecue, as on 4 November 1731, New London, Connecticut, resident Joshua Hempstead wrote in his diary: “I was at Madm Winthrops at an Entertainment, or Treat of Colln or Samll Brownes a Barbaqued. While the standard modern English spelling of the word is barbecue, variations including barbeque and truncations such as bar-b-q or BBQ may also be found. The spelling barbeque is given in Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionaries as a variant.

Because the word barbecue came from native groups, Europeans gave it “savage connotations”. This association with barbarians and “savages” is strengthened by Edmund Hickeringill’s work Jamaica Viewed: with All the Ports, Harbours, and their Several Soundings, Towns, and Settlements through its descriptions of cannibalism. Another notable false depiction of cannibalistic barbecues appears in Theodor de Bry’s Great Voyages, which in Warnes’s eyes, “present smoke cookery as a custom quintessential to an underlying savagery that everywhere contains within it a potential for cannibalistic violence”. In American English usage in the Southern U. S, grilling refers to a fast process over high heat while barbecuing refers to a slow process using indirect heat or hot smoke, similar to some forms of roasting. According to estimates, prior to the American Civil War, Southerners ate around five pounds of pork for every pound of beef they consumed. Each Southern locale has its own variety of barbecue, particularly sauces.

South Carolina is the only state that traditionally includes all four recognized barbecue sauces, including mustard-based, vinegar-based, and light and heavy tomato-based sauces. The barbecue of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee is almost always pork, often served with a sweet tomato-based sauce. Alabama is also known for its distinctive white sauce—a mayonnaise- and vinegar-based sauce originating in northern Alabama, used predominantly on chicken and pork. Kansas City’s history as a center for meat packing. Pit beef prevails in Maryland and is often enjoyed at large outdoor “bull roasts”, which are commonly fundraising events for clubs and associations. Barbecue in Texas is predominantly beef due to the state’s historic ties to cattle raising.