Fw: Fw: [Sca-cooks] Questions- Gene's response- LONG

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> How wonderful to hear from you, Phlip!  Haven't heard in a long time.  I
> miss your messages.  I love them so!  You guys are all really interested
in
> this, and not full of academic bullshit like the more universityish emails
> I get.  And you, Phlip, are a wonderful, perceptive writer, always fun to
> read.  Keep it up.
>
> Now, here's the dope.
>
> "Barbecue" is from barbacoa, a Carib Indian word from the Antilles.  It
> originally meant a framework of sticks--a grillwork supported by short
> posts.  On this, meats were cooked and smoked over a fire.  Thus, real
> barbecue is the grilled stuff familiar in American backyards.  When
> pit-cooking started being called "pt barbecue" I don't know, but it is a
> usage that goes back a loooong way here in southern California.
Apparently
> both English and Spanish speakers started using it very early for the pit
> cooking the Native Americans did here.  However, I don't think the usage
of
> "barbecue" for pit-cooking occurs before the 19th century.
> Pit cooking is pretty much a human universal.  The archaeologist Luann
> Wandsnider did a wonderful survey of it some years ago in one of the
> archaeology journals.  Among the Maya I work with, the pit is a pib, and
> food cooked in it is pibil ("pib stuff" or "things pibbed").  Hence
> cochinita pibil, the common Yucatan dish of piglet (Spanish introduction)
> baked in the pib--or, now, usually in a regular oven.  In Hawaii the pit
is
> a luau, which gave its name to the traditional feast type.  We have a
> recipe for "willow-cooked lamb" in our Mongol/Chinese cookbook--apparently
> this was a Mongol dish--a lamb wrapped in willow leaves and then
> pit-barbecued.  The Native Americans here in southern Cal are masters of
> the pit barbecue, which they used mostly to roast agave hearts and such,
> but now use mostly for beef--and there is no better food in the world than
> a good Cahuilla pit-barbecue.
> Related to barbecue is bucan, the Carib word for a grill.  This is, of
> course, the source of the word buccaneer.  Buccaneers were people who
lived
> on isolated Caribbean islands, living by hunting game and wild cattle and
> such and cooking them on a bucan--for subsistence or to smoke the meat for
> preserving and sale.  Of course these guys inevitably indulged in a bit of
> piracy on the side, when the game got thin, so the word took on its
> contemporary meaning.
> Today, the world capital of bucan is Reunion Island, the French island in
> the Indian Ocean, where boucan cooking involves spicing/marinating and
> grilling, and boucane' is meat cooked thus.  The origin of this is that
the
> pirates were mostly chased out of the Caribbean in the late 17th and 18th
> centuries, and went to the wilder and less controlled Indian Ocean, there
> to spread their cooking habits.  Reunion bucane is identifiablly close to
> Jamaican jerk meat, which, of course, is orginally barbecoa.
>
> "Mongolian barbecue" is an English translation of Chinese menggu kaorou
> "Mongolian grilled meat."   This dish was invented by a CHinese chef in
the
> early 20th century--I believe in Peking.  It is based on Chinese cooking,
> with some Korean influences.  The only thing Mongolian about it is that
the
> chef thought it seemed pretty wild and woolly, and so gave it a name sure
> to convey that impression to his customers.  Mongols usually boiled their
> meat (it was probably tough--certainly is today) when they weren't
> pit-cooking it.  I suppose the Mongols must have grilled meat sometimes,
> but it wasn't a big deal.  The Korean bulkogi and related dishes--where
you
> grill thin-sliced meat at the table on a brazier--seems to be an immediate
> inspiration to Mongolian barbecue.  But that's a (somewhat informed)
guess.
> The original Mongolian barbecue involved slicing various kinds of meat
> exceedingly thin, along with some veg (cabbage, mushrooms...) and such,
and
> providing a range of traditional North Chinese sauces.  You, the diner,
> would pick out the meats and splash sauces on them, and then give them to
a
> chef, who would cook them by stirring them around very fast on a brazier
or
> grillplate.
>
> Then you stuff the meat into those little sesame breads, and enjoy.
>
> Those little sesame breads are called shaobing, "roasted cakes," and they
> have an interesting history.  THey are simply Persian nan
("bread"--cognate
> with Latin pan) somewhat miniaturized.  When Persia fell to the Muslim
> Arabs in the 700s, thousands of refugees streamed across Asia to China,
> where there were already colonies of Persian traders.  By the late 700s,
> Persians were a common sight in the capital (Chang'an, now Xi'an) and
> elsewhere.  Many lived by selling little nan's on street corners, baking
> them in big tandur pots.  In Persia and central Asia, they are baked in
> huge tandur ovens--one I saw in Afghanistan was probably 12' deep and
> equally wide.  You burn stuff in the bottom to heat the oven, then when
> it's burned down and the oven is hot, you stick the breads to the wall of
> the oven with a peelboard, and then peel it off with the board in a few
> minutes when it's done.  This requires great skill--I would drop 'em all
in
> the fire, myself.  Anyway, the whole process was miniaturized in Central
> Asia and China:  a pot maybe 3' deep for the cooking, and the shaobing
only
> about 4-6 inches long.  Cf the shrinking of tandur ovens in "tandoori"
> restaurants in the US.
>
> That do it for now?
> I hope not--I want to write more--
> best--Gene A

>
> At 08:33 AM 11/7/2004, you wrote:
>
> >We're discussing Mongolian BBQ here- anything you guys would like to add?
> >I'd be interested in whatever you might have found that relates to Real,
No
> >Shit (unless they use it for fuel) Mongolian BBQ.
> >
> >Also, Gene, do you have any input on BBQ- type things from your pre-
> >Columbian meso Americans? Open pit, closed pit, and grilling would all be
of
> >interest.

> >Saint Phlip,
> >CoD


Saint Phlip,
CoD

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....