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- About 52% of all Americans are planning on hosting or attending at least 5 barbeque events each summer (Impulse Research Corp, “Topline Report: BBQ Facts”, 2/02).
- A study by McCormick Seasonings Company found that barbeque ribs and steaks rank along side ice cream and chocolate at the top of the list of foods Americans “crave”.
- 91 % of grill owners use barbeque sauce always or sometimes while grilling (Barbeque Industry Assoc.).
- BBQ is now the No. 1 Summer home leisure activity; with nearly one in two households owning a barbecue grill of some kind.
- Bottled barbeque sauce is the most popular flavor enhancer (1999 Weber GrillWatch Survey).
- Spaniards introduced domestic pigs to this continent.
- Corn was introduced by Thomas Jefferson to Europeans as polenta or Johnny Cake .
- It is widely believed that the tomato was first grown in Mexico. Europeans were introduced to tomatoes in the mid-16th century. They were used only as an ornamental plant due to the tomato's membership in the nightshade family. It was not until the 1830s that the tomato was accepted as safe.
- Beef was not an important part of the American diet before the Civil War. Cows were not indigenous to the Americas. You could not find cattle in the New World until the Spanish introduced them to Mexico in 1540.
- Henry Ford invented the charcoal briquette in 1920 with the help of Thomas Edison. Ford is the man who popularized the gas-powered car in America and invented the assembly line for automobile manufacturing. Ford created the briquette from the wood scraps and sawdust from his car factory. E.G. Kingsford bought the invention and put the charcoal briquette into commercial production.
- President James Madison’s wife Dolly Madison was the first person to serve ice cream at the White House.
- Did you know, grilling and barbequing are two different things? Grilling is cooking directly over the coals but barbequing is cooking indirectly or smoking with the coals under the opposing side of the grill from food. Water soaked hardwood chips or logs are used to produce the smoke. Traditionally barbecuing meat is a low heat (2200F) and long cooking times (4-12 hour) process.
- Just where did the term barbeque originate? The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word barbeque was derived from the Spanish word barbacoa which itself was taken from a Haitian word barbacoa, meaning, "a framework of sticks set upon posts." Meats and fish were placed on these posts and slowly cooked. BBQ has been around for thousands of years. The Japanese used a porcelain smoker, "the green egg", for thousands of years. The green egg is commercially available today. Another theory is that French-speaking pirates in the Caribbean, upon observing a pig being roasted whole by the Natives, described this cooking method as being de barbe en queue, that is, "from beard to tail."
- Pineapples were introduced to Hawaii in the late 1700s from South America but were not commercially cultivated until the 1880s.
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