History & Culture

Where outdoor cooking traditions come from: the people, places and regional histories behind barbecue and live-fire cooking.

  • The Charcoal Briquette: Henry Ford’s Backyard Invention

    The Charcoal Briquette: Henry Ford’s Backyard Invention

    The charcoal in most American grills traces back not to a barbecue company but to an auto plant’s scrap pile. According to Kingsford’s own company history, a research guide from the Benson Ford Research Center at The Henry Ford museum, and independent reporting from Detroit’s WDIV / ClickOnDetroit, the modern charcoal briquette grew directly out of Henry Ford’s effort to stop wasting wood at his Michigan sawmills.

    A Ford Dealer’s Timberland Tip

    The connection starts with Edward G. Kingsford, Henry Ford’s cousin by marriage, who ran a Ford automobile dealership in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, according to both the Benson Ford Research Center guide and ClickOnDetroit’s reporting. Ford needed a secure timber supply for the wood used in Model T body frames and other car parts, and Kingsford helped steer him toward land in the Upper Peninsula. Sources disagree on exactly when: Kingsford’s own company history dates this to 1919, stating that Kingsford helped Ford procure a stretch of timberland to supply wood for his auto plants that year. The Henry Ford museum’s research guide instead places the actual land purchase and construction of the Iron Mountain plant in the early 1920s. Both agree on the outcome — Ford Motor Company ended up owning a large timber and sawmill operation in Iron Mountain built primarily to feed its car factories, not to make charcoal.

    From Wood Scraps to a Uniform Briquette

    Turning wood into car parts left behind enormous amounts of scrap and sawdust. The Henry Ford museum’s research guide is explicit that Ford did not invent the charcoal briquette — charcoal was already in commercial and industrial use for foundries, workshops, hotels, restaurants, and curing tobacco, meat, and fish. What Ford did, per the guide, was modify the existing charcoal manufacturing process to reduce and standardize the size, turning an irregular lump into a uniform briquette that could be produced and sold at scale. Kingsford’s own history echoes this: Ford “found his answer in a new process for pressing blocks of reconstituted char” from the sawdust and waste his mills generated. Separately, ClickOnDetroit cites the Menominee Range Historical Foundation’s claim that an even earlier charcoal briquette design had been patented back in 1895 by W. P. Taggart, who described his invention simply as a lump of fuel — a reminder that Ford’s contribution was standardizing an existing idea, not creating the briquette from nothing.

    Ford Motor Company began producing and selling its own briquettes in 1924, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide, initially marketing to the same industrial and commercial charcoal buyers already in the market, then expanding into household use. A Ford News advertisement from September 15, 1924 announced that the new charcoal briquettes could be bought at the company’s Highland Park commissary store, suitable for fireplace grates, cooking ranges, and furnace kindling — an early sign the product was being aimed at homes, not just factories and hotels.

    Selling Charcoal Through the Car Dealership

    The briquette became a genuine consumer product almost by accident. In 1932, Walter Stoepple, an Iron Mountain plant employee and self-described avid outdoorsman, came up with the idea of a simple campfire starter kit — a shoebox-sized cardboard box packed with a dozen charcoal briquettes, pine cones, and curled wood shavings, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide. By 1935 the Ford Sales Department had formalized this into “Ford Charcoal Picnic Kits,” sold at Ford dealerships nationwide. The pairing made commercial sense for the company: promoting camping and picnicking encouraged the kind of leisure driving that sold Ford vehicles, even though the guide notes dealers weren’t required to sell briquettes and cars together. ClickOnDetroit adds that small charcoal grills were marketed alongside the briquettes at dealerships and eventually through hardware, sporting goods, and department stores, priced at $1, $2, and $3.

    From Ford Charcoal to Kingsford

    The Ford-branded charcoal business didn’t stay under the Ford name. By 1951, with the automaker no longer needing wood for car bodies, Ford Motor Company sold the Iron Mountain plant to the Kingsford Chemical Company, according to the Henry Ford museum’s research guide, Kingsford’s own company history, and ClickOnDetroit — a rare point where all three sources line up exactly. The plant kept making briquettes, but under the Kingsford name rather than the Ford brand, an honor named for Edward Kingsford rather than for the Ford family. The Henry Ford museum’s guide adds one further step neither of the other two sources mentions: in 1961, Kingsford Chemical closed the Iron Mountain plant entirely and relocated production to Louisville, Kentucky, ending the direct manufacturing link between the briquette brand and the Michigan site where it began.

    An Automotive Byproduct, Still Burning

    What started as a way to avoid dumping sawdust from a Model T timber operation became, within three decades, a separate consumer brand with no remaining operational tie to Ford. Kingsford’s own history describes the company today as converting more than a million tons of wood waste into charcoal briquettes annually — a figure the company reports itself rather than one independently verified here. The core historical claim, though, is corroborated across a museum research guide, the brand’s own company history, and independent news reporting: modern briquette charcoal exists in its current form largely because an auto company needed somewhere to put its scrap wood.

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  • How Postwar America Invented Backyard Barbecue

    How Postwar America Invented Backyard Barbecue

    The backyard cookout — dad at the grill, a patio full of guests, a tiki-glass drink in hand — reads as timeless Americana, but the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History dates its rise fairly precisely to the years after World War II. Drawing on the museum’s “Backyard Cookout” exhibition materials, its “Postwar Potluck” collections story, and reporting from Smithsonian magazine, the postwar patio turns out to be less about the food itself and more about travel, gender roles, and a very specific kind of suburban leisure.

    Where the Museum Says It Started

    The National Museum of American History’s “Postwar Potluck” story, published by the museum’s Caitlin Kearney, states that backyard barbecue as a widespread American practice began in the 1950s, as postwar Americans used their newfound leisure time for casual outdoor dinners after the frugality of wartime rationing. That’s a somewhat tighter claim than culinary historian Robert Moss makes in Smithsonian magazine’s separate reporting on the Weber grill: Moss traces casual backyard barbecue back further, to the 1920s and the first wave of American suburbanization, when magazines began publishing instructions for digging small backyard cooking pits, an echo of nineteenth-century communal pit barbecues. The two accounts aren’t strictly contradictory — Moss is describing early roots, the museum’s “Postwar Potluck” piece is describing when the practice went mainstream — but they do put different dates on when backyard barbecue actually began, and readers should treat the postwar period as an acceleration rather than a clean starting point.

    What the War Changed

    Whichever starting date is used, both Smithsonian sources agree on why the postwar years mattered so much. Paula Johnson, curator of the museum’s “FOOD: Transforming the American Table, 1950–2000” exhibition, told Smithsonian magazine that meat had been rationed during the war and scarce before that, during the Depression, so by the 1950s Americans were ready for a different kind of food on the table. The museum’s “Backyard Cookout” materials add a second driver: newly affluent postwar Americans had, for the first time, the money and opportunity to travel — to Mexico, California, Hawaii, Florida, the Caribbean, and further afield to the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia — and came home wanting to recreate that casual, tropical-inflected lifestyle in their own yards.

    The Tiki Backyard

    That travel habit reshaped what the backyard cookout actually looked like, according to the museum’s exhibition text. The restaurant and bar chain Trader Vic’s is credited with popularizing many of the foods and drinks that became fixtures of the backyard scene. Hosts swapped gin and scotch for rum and tequila drinks inspired by tiki bars, and pupu platters — egg rolls, fried shrimp, beef teriyaki skewers, spare ribs, chicken wings — were copied from restaurant menus and magazine spreads promoting the same foods for home entertaining. Workday suits gave way to aloha shirts, once considered formal Hawaiian attire, and guayaberas of Caribbean origin. Even the yard decor followed the trend: the museum’s collection includes a molded-plastic pink flamingo, designed for Union Products by Don Featherstone in 1957, which the museum describes as evolving from a simple lawn ornament into an enduring icon of American backyard kitsch.

    Who Cooked What

    The backyard grill also created a new, explicitly gendered division of labor, according to the museum’s “Backyard Cookout” materials: men “manned” the grill to cook the meat for the main course, while women worked primarily indoors preparing the side dishes. The “Postwar Potluck” story adds texture to the kitchen side of that split, describing home cooks working with increasingly all-electric kitchens — citing a period cookbook, Let’s Get Acquainted with Your Hotpoint Electric Range, which doubled as an appliance manual and organized whole “budget oven meals” designed to cook together at a single oven temperature. Outdoors, the new “grill master” role for men was itself notable enough to be treated as a cultural shift rather than a footnote, the museum’s materials suggest.

    Selling the Cookout

    By the late 1950s, the backyard cookout had become its own retail category, not just a pastime. The museum’s “Backyard Cookout” text states that American manufacturers and retailers were actively promoting new tools, clothing, furniture, and serving ware built specifically around grilled patio meals. A contemporary magazine account captures how quickly the trend took hold: Look magazine’s July 12, 1955 feature, “America Bit by the Barbecue Bug,” described a new convert to backyard cooking as someone who, after one bite of a self-charred frankfurter, becomes hooked as a cook, poring over grill advertisements and recipes the way “a gardener studies seed catalogues.” What began as a postwar novelty had, within a decade, become an entire consumer industry built around a single suburban ritual.

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  • The Gas Grill: Two Companies, One Contested First

    The Gas Grill: Two Companies, One Contested First

    Unlike the Weber kettle, the gas grill doesn’t have one tidy origin story — it has two competing company histories that both claim the title of “first.” The company history pages of LazyMan Gourmet Grills (formerly Chicago Combustion Corporation) and Modern Home Products / Charmglow tell different versions of who actually invented the outdoor gas grill, and the two accounts flatly disagree with each other on both the year and the company.

    A Commercial Broiler First

    The oldest thread runs through Chicago Combustion Company, founded in Chicago in 1932 by Louis McGlaughlin to build industrial and commercial gas burners, according to LazyMan’s own company history. Its ARGIL burner became known for precise flame control, and McGlaughlin, after relocating to New York, adapted that burner technology into a gas-fired commercial broiler called the “BROILBURGER.” LazyMan’s history states the BROILBURGER was the centerpiece of the company’s booth at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it caught the attention of restaurants that wanted charcoal flavor without the hassle of charcoal. Early BROILBURGER units, per LazyMan, were actually fired by Ford Charcoal Briquets before later versions switched to full gas with lava rocks standing in for charcoal. Through the 1940s, that burner technology was folded into commercial utility stoves, still nowhere near a backyard patio.

    Two Rival “First” Claims

    Here the two histories genuinely conflict. LazyMan’s own account says that until the mid-1950s the gas grill business was “almost exclusively found in commercial cooking,” and that Chicago Combustion Corporation sold the first-ever portable gas grills in 1954, with two other companies — Charmglow and Falcon — releasing their own competing portable grills shortly afterward. Modern Home Products, the company that owned the Charmglow name, tells a different story on its own site: it credits its founder, Walter Koziol, with inventing the world’s first outdoor gas grill in 1960, marketed under the trade name “Perfect Host” — a 22½-inch round portable cart unit built from steel, running on natural or LP gas.

    These can’t both be strictly true. LazyMan’s version puts Chicago Combustion six years ahead of Charmglow and frames Charmglow’s grill as a fast-follower product; MHP’s version omits Chicago Combustion entirely and claims the world’s-first title for its own 1960 design. Each is a company’s own account of its history, not independently verified, and outdoor cooking coverage of the period doesn’t settle which came first — only that both companies were building and selling gas grills within a few years of each other in the mid-to-late 1950s.

    Propane Makes It Portable

    Whichever company got there first, the piece that made a gas grill practical for a backyard rather than a restaurant kitchen was fuel. LazyMan’s history credits Don McGlaughlin, Louis’s son, with sourcing 20-pound propane cylinders for the new portable grill — tanks that, at the time, were used almost exclusively by plumbers rather than by cooks. By 1959, LazyMan says, its portable Model AP sold for $131.25, and that year marked the company’s first real national sales spike for a residential gas grill. In 1960, Chicago Combustion also began wholesaling permanent natural-gas grill installations to the New Jersey Natural Gas Company, which billed customers $1 a month for 39 months to cover installation — an early sign that gas grills were being sold as a home fixture, not just a portable appliance.

    From Round Steel to Cast Aluminum

    On the Charmglow side, Modern Home Products’ own history describes a rapid string of design changes once the Perfect Host caught on. By 1961 the Charmglow name had become well known enough that MHP renamed itself Charmglow Products. In 1962, Koziol re-engineered the original round steel grill into a rectangular painted-steel design with a hinged lid — a shape MHP’s history calls a more efficient grill concept than the round original. By 1964 the company had introduced what it describes as the first rustproof cast-aluminum rectangular gas grill with a patented hinged lid, a design MHP’s own materials say became widely copied across the industry. In 1966, the Chef’s Choice series added a one-piece cast bottom and, according to MHP, received an industry award for design — the company’s account of its own accolade, not an independently confirmed one.

    The Charmglow line didn’t stay with the Koziol family the whole way through, however. MHP’s history records that in 1969–1970 the Charmglow name, along with its grill and lighting products, was sold to the Beatrice Foods Company, though the Koziols retained the underlying company assets and reinstated the Modern Home Products name once the sale’s non-compete period ended in 1987.

    What the Rivalry Left Behind

    Regardless of which company’s “first” claim is taken at face value, both histories point to the same underlying shift: sometime between the mid-1950s and early 1960s, gas burner technology that had spent two decades in commercial kitchens moved onto a backyard patio, adapted to run on portable propane tanks instead of piped commercial gas lines. That’s the part the Chicago Combustion and Charmglow accounts actually agree on, even if they can’t agree on whose grill got there first.

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  • The Invention of the Weber Kettle Grill

    The Invention of the Weber Kettle Grill

    Every backyard charcoal grill sold today owes something to a Chicago metal shop and a batch of leftover buoy parts. According to Weber’s own company history page and independent reporting from Smithsonian magazine, the domed kettle grill that defined “Weber” as a brand wasn’t dreamed up in a design lab — it was welded together by a Chicago Weber Brothers Metal Works employee who was tired of burning his dinner.

    A Sheet-Metal Shop, Not a Grill Company

    Weber Brothers Metal Works was founded in Chicago in 1887, and for decades it made ordinary sheet-metal goods — hinges, wagons, and similar hardware — with no connection to outdoor cooking, according to Smithsonian magazine. By the 1950s, George Stephen, Sr. worked in sales at the company, which his father then ran. Stephen had a habit of tinkering with side products — mailboxes, fireplace equipment — that never quite took off, Weber-Stephen’s current chief marketing officer, Mike Kempster, told Smithsonian.

    What Stephen actually needed, by his own company’s telling, was a better way to cook a steak. Weber’s history page describes Stephen building a brick fireplace barbecue at home in the popular style of the day, only for a dinner party to end with the steaks going up in flames. Smithsonian’s reporting frames the same frustration more broadly: the standard backyard cooker of the era was an open charcoal brazier, essentially a metal tray of coals with a grate on top. Wind scattered ash onto the food, rain filled the tray with water, smoke choked the cook, and the meat rarely cooked evenly.

    Two Halves of a Buoy

    The fix came from what was sitting around the shop floor. In 1952, Weber Brothers Metal Works was filling orders for round steel buoys for the Coast Guard and the Chicago Yacht Club, built from two welded half-spheres. Stephen took two of those half-spheres, added legs to one, and used the other as a lid, according to Smithsonian. The first attempt at home didn’t work — the charcoal fire simply went out for lack of air. A neighbor watching the experiment told him he needed to let some air into it, Kempster recounted to Smithsonian, so the two men grabbed a metal pick from Stephen’s toolbox and punched holes in the bottom. Kempster’s summary of the moment, quoted by Smithsonian: “That was research and development in 1952.”

    Stephen sold the result as “George’s Barbecue Kettle” for $29.95 — around $270 in today’s money, per Smithsonian’s reporting. Over the next several years he refined the design further: wheels for mobility, a taller lid for more airflow and capacity, and a porcelain-enamel coating over the steel body to stop it rusting. Weber’s own history timeline dates the original kettle to 1952, matching Smithsonian’s account. The odd, rounded shape — nothing like the boxy braziers on the market — earned it an early nickname that had nothing to do with cooking: “Sputnik.”

    From Side Hustle to Company Name

    The kettle sold in small numbers at first; Stephen kept working for the family company while selling grills to friends and neighbors on the side. In the mid-1950s, his father told him he had to choose one or the other, Kempster told Smithsonian. Stephen chose the grill, going out on his own with little financial backing. By 1958, business was strong enough that he bought out his father’s partner and took over the company outright. He renamed it Weber-Stephen Products — keeping the Weber name, according to Smithsonian, partly as a safeguard, so he could return to metalworking if the barbecue venture failed. It’s a detail that surprises people, Smithsonian notes: there was no longer anyone named Weber connected to the company by the time Stephen built the first kettle in 1952 — the last Weber family descendant was already gone.

    The Round-Shape Claim Weber Later Backed Away From

    For years, Weber’s own marketing argued that the kettle’s round body was thermally superior to boxier grills — a 1970s Weber ad cited by Smithsonian claimed the domed shape reflected heat as evenly as a kitchen oven. Kempster told Smithsonian that later testing didn’t actually bear this out: the kettle reflects heat well, he said, but Weber has never been able to prove it does so any better than a square or rectangular grill would, noting that most kitchen ovens are rectangular anyway. What actually makes the kettle effective, according to Kempster, comes down to details like grate positioning and air-damper placement, not the sphere shape itself. The shape endures for a different, more practical reason: round steel is genuinely difficult to manufacture, requiring large presses to draw the metal into that curve, which is part of why competitors were slow to copy it.

    A Wider Wave, Not a Single Invention

    Stephen’s kettle landed at a moment when backyard cooking was already spreading through American suburbs, not in isolation. Culinary historian Robert Moss, author of Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, told Smithsonian that casual backyard barbecue actually traces to the 1920s and the early wave of American suburbanization, when magazines began running features with instructions for digging small cooking pits — themselves an echo of nineteenth-century communal pit barbecues. The postwar suburban boom accelerated that shift further, Moss said, as Americans moved from cities into new suburbs and backyard leisure became a kind of escape from modern life. Weber’s kettle didn’t create backyard grilling — it gave a fast-growing audience of suburban cooks a covered, better-controlled way to do something they were already increasingly doing.

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  • Baltimore Pit Beef: History of a Roadside BBQ Tradition

    Baltimore Pit Beef: History of a Roadside BBQ Tradition

    Baltimore’s pit beef sandwich has a murkier paper trail than most regional barbecue traditions, and the writers who have chased it down say so plainly. This account draws on two Baltimore Sun features: Richard Gorelick’s 2015 investigation into pit beef’s Baltimore origins, and Luke Broadwater’s 2014 profile of Chaps Pit Beef for the paper’s “Postcards from U.S. 40” series.

    An Origin Nobody Can Quite Pin Down

    Gorelick, writing for the Sun’s City Paper section, found that most food historians he consulted agreed pit beef emerged from Baltimore’s east-side working-class neighborhoods, but the specific when and why remain unsettled. Searching the paper’s own archives, he located the earliest mention of pit beef in a 1968 advertisement for Al Kelz’s Elite Tavern on York Road, where it was listed alongside steamed and soft crabs, crab fluffs and crab cakes as part of a crab-focused menu — notably not on Pulaski Highway, the corridor now most associated with the dish. After that ad, Gorelick found no further mentions until 1976, followed by years of passing references in notices for bull roasts and neighborhood fundraisers, with no dedicated coverage of pit beef as a food culture in its own right.

    Pulaski Highway’s Roadside Stands

    Anecdotal accounts place pit-beef stands along Pulaski Highway as early as the 1970s, according to Gorelick’s reporting, well before the press caught up to the trend. Sun columnist Rob Kasper made a passing reference to “the pit beef places I had heard so much about” in a 1982 article, though he noted the stands hadn’t yet opened for the season that February; by 1987 Kasper was describing pit beef as Baltimore’s favorite food. The turning point Gorelick identifies came in 1992, when the Sun ran its first dedicated feature treatment of pit beef culture, including a roundup of ten stands, timed to coincide with the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the popularity of Boog Powell’s concession stand, Boog’s Corner, inside the new ballpark.

    Chaps and the Modern Pit-Beef Stand

    Broadwater’s 2014 Sun profile traces the most recognizable name in Baltimore pit beef to a specific parking lot. Bob Creager, a former steelworker who had no restaurant experience, opened a small pit-beef stand in 1987 in the parking lot of a Southeast Baltimore nightclub owned by his father-in-law, Gus Glava. Family members put up $7,000 to build a twelve-by-fifteen-foot stand with no electricity, and Glava suggested naming it Chaps, after his own club. Creager learned to cook pit beef by trial and error, crediting Mike DeCarlo of the nearby stand Big Al’s as an informal mentor. According to Broadwater’s reporting, the same 1992 Sun feature that Gorelick identifies as pit beef’s public debut also drove a sudden jump in sales specifically for Chaps — the two Sun accounts, written five years apart by different reporters, independently point to that single 1992 article as a turning point for the food’s visibility.

    Not Quite Barbecue, By Design

    Gorelick’s piece raises a classification dispute that’s central to understanding the dish: pit beef, cooked directly over hot charcoal on a spit or grate rather than slow-smoked at low temperature, is not barbecue in the technical sense many barbecue writers use, and Gorelick notes it is nearly impossible to write about the dish without addressing that distinction. He also records complaints, dating back to the 1992 coverage, about modern shortcuts — grilling over gas instead of charcoal, machine-slicing instead of hand-carving, and serving on white bread instead of a roll — suggesting that debates over authenticity have been part of pit beef’s public identity from nearly the moment it became a named tradition rather than just a private neighborhood habit.

    From One Stand to a Franchise

    Chaps grew steadily after 1992, according to Broadwater’s reporting: a 2008 appearance on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” brought another surge of business, and the stand later drew visits from national television crews and celebrity chefs. What began as a one-employee operation with no seating expanded, through ten rounds of construction, into a business with about twenty-five employees and roughly fifty seats. Pulaski Highway — U.S. 40 — became known locally as “Pit Beef Row,” a strip Broadwater notes was once also home to Big Al’s and Big Fat Daddy’s, though many of the original stands along that stretch have since closed or relocated. Chaps’ condiment, tiger sauce, is described in Broadwater’s article simply as two parts mayonnaise mixed with one part horseradish — a plain formula that belies how firmly it has become attached to the sandwich regionally.

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  • Kreuz Market and the History of Texas Meat-Market BBQ

    Kreuz Market and the History of Texas Meat-Market BBQ

    Lockhart’s meat markets didn’t set out to invent a barbecue style — they were butcher shops that smoked what didn’t sell. This history relies on Kreuz Market’s own published timeline, Texas Monthly’s 1999 report “Pit Split” by Joe Nick Patoski, and Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn’s 2017 piece “Mapping Texas Barbecue History.”

    Butchers, Not Restaurateurs

    Vaughn’s research for Texas Monthly traces commercial Texas barbecue to the period after the Civil War, when butchers and meat markets began advertising barbecued meats alongside their fresh cuts. He cites a July 19, 1888 item in the San Marcos Free Press that credits a local butcher with the idea and praises the new arrangement, since it meant people no longer had to wait for a communal barbecue “to furnish our people barbecued meats.” Vaughn’s team also found Sanborn Fire Insurance maps from Texas towns showing meat markets with attached smokehouses and barbecue pits, which insurers treated as fire hazards. City directories from the 1890s show barbecue stands beginning to separate from meat markets into standalone businesses — a slow transition, not a single invention.

    Lockhart’s Market

    Kreuz Market’s own history page states that Jesse Swearingen opened the first meat market in Lockhart in 1875, already selling barbecued pork and beef alongside fresh meat. Charles Kreuz Sr. bought the store in 1900 and renamed it. In 1911 his sons Theodore, Will and Alvin took over; Will later sold his share to brother-in-law Hugo Prove. The original metal building was replaced with brick in 1925. According to both Kreuz Market’s history and Texas Monthly’s 1999 account, the Kreuz family sold the business in 1948 to Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, a longtime employee — Texas Monthly specifies he bought it from Alvin Kreuz and two other co-owners. Schmidt ran the market until 1984, when he retired and sold it to his sons Rick and Don.

    The 1999 Split

    Edgar Schmidt died in 1990, leaving the market’s building to his daughter, Nina Sells, while his sons continued to own and run the business itself as tenants. That arrangement held until the mid-1990s, when — according to Patoski’s 1999 Texas Monthly report — negotiations over a new lease broke down. Rick, who by then was sole owner after his brother Don’s 1997 retirement, wanted a renewed long-term lease; Nina wanted roughly $400,000 in rent over five years, a figure Rick called excessive. The dispute drew coverage from the Austin American-Statesman and CBS’s Eye on America before the lease expired on August 31, 1999. Rick relocated Kreuz Market four-tenths of a mile to a new building on North Colorado Street, and in a moment captured by national television, his pit man transported hot coals from the old pits to light the new ones. Nina reopened the original downtown building under a new name, Smitty’s Market, honoring her father.

    Three Markets, One Small Town

    The split briefly threatened to weaken Lockhart’s reputation, but Patoski’s reporting notes the opposite read was also plausible: Lockhart could end up with four notable barbecue businesses instead of one. Texas Monthly’s own 1997 ranking of the state’s best barbecue had already named Lockhart the only town with three joints on the list — Kreuz’s, Black’s Barbecue, and Chisholm Trail B-B-Q. Black’s, a competing meat market whose motto touts being the oldest in Texas under the same family, posted signs reading “No Crisis Here” and “No Feud, Just Good Food” while the Schmidt family dispute played out. Nina’s husband, Jim Sells, and her sons had also placed at competition cook-offs in Luling and Lubbock before Smitty’s opened, giving the new venture its own competitive credentials rather than starting from nothing.

    What “Pioneer” Leaves Out

    Vaughn’s Texas Monthly piece pushes back on the idea that Kreuz Market, Southside Market in Elgin, and Prause Meat Market in La Grange were the sole originators of Central Texas barbecue. He argues their prominence in the popular telling is partly a matter of survival — they are still in business, while dozens of other nineteenth-century meat markets that also sold smoked meat, documented in Sanborn maps and old city directories from Texarkana to San Angelo, simply closed and were forgotten. The German and Czech immigrant butchers behind Lockhart’s markets were genuine early practitioners, but Vaughn’s research indicates the smoking of unsold meat as a preservation measure was a broader, more diffuse regional habit before a handful of surviving shops came to represent it.

    A Family Business, Still Contested

    Kreuz Market’s own timeline continues the story past the split: Rick Schmidt retired in 2011 and sold the restaurant to his son Keith, who partnered with relatives the following year to open the separate Schmidt Family Barbecue and Lockhart Smokehouse restaurants. Rick Schmidt died in 2019 at age 73. The 1999 rift between Kreuz Market and Smitty’s Market has since eased in public reporting on the family, but the two businesses remain separately owned storefronts, four-tenths of a mile apart, each descended from the same 1875 meat market on Lockhart’s town square.

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  • Skylight Inn and Eastern NC Whole-Hog Barbecue History

    Skylight Inn and Eastern NC Whole-Hog Barbecue History

    Eastern North Carolina’s whole-hog tradition is often traced to a single 1769 diary entry, but its modern shape comes from twentieth-century pit houses like the Skylight Inn. This history draws on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s introduction to its North Carolina BBQ oral history collection, written by sociologist John Shelton Reed, along with Garden & Gun’s 2019 interview with pitmaster Sam Jones and the Sam Jones BBQ restaurant’s own published history.

    An Old Style, Documented Early

    According to Reed’s account for the Southern Foodways Alliance, George Washington recorded in his diary that he “went in to Alexandria to a Barbecue and stayed all Night” on May 27, 1769, and likely ate meat from a whole hog cooked for hours over hardwood coals, then chopped or pulled. By the early nineteenth century, Reed writes, a vinegar-and-cayenne-pepper sauce — itself originally West Indian — was already being sprinkled over the finished meat. Reed describes this style as persisting largely unchanged to the present day in eastern North Carolina and the adjoining parts of South Carolina and Virginia, distinguishing it from the piedmont barbecue tradition further west, which took on tomato ketchup and pork-shoulder preferences from German and Scotch-Irish settlers.

    From Special Occasions to Storefronts

    Barbecue in North Carolina was, Reed writes, never really home cooking — it was simply too much trouble. Until the early twentieth century it was reserved for occasions like harvests, fundraisers and political rallies. After the First World War, men who had cooked for those events began selling barbecue from tents and stands at courthouse squares and outside tobacco auctions. The automobile made a fixed, sit-down barbecue restaurant possible soon after; Reed identifies North Carolina’s first as Bob Melton’s in Rocky Mount, opened in 1924. Reed also notes a labor detail often left out of barbecue histories: although most eastern North Carolina barbecue establishments were white-owned through the mid-twentieth century, most of the actual pit cooking was done by African American cooks, and a handful of Black pitmasters opened their own restaurants during the same period.

    The Skylight Inn

    Against that backdrop, Pete Jones opened the Skylight Inn in Ayden in 1947, at age seventeen. Per the Sam Jones BBQ restaurant’s own history page, Jones served whole hog cooked over wood, continuing a method his family describes as older than his own restaurant. National attention arrived gradually. According to the restaurant’s history, National Geographic’s 1979 book “Back Roads America” named Skylight Inn among the country’s best barbecue, and in 1982 Pete Jones was invited to serve barbecue at a congressional event, drawing praise from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The clearest institutional recognition came in 2003, when the James Beard Foundation named Skylight Inn BBQ an America’s Classic, an award Sam Jones flew to New York to accept, according to the restaurant’s own account. Pete Jones died in February 2006; his son Bruce, nephew Jeff and grandson Sam kept the pit fires going.

    A New Generation, Same Wood

    Sam Jones grew up working at Skylight Inn, and told Garden & Gun that he felt embarrassed by his small-town roots before travel changed his outlook. In 2013, an invitation to cook at a Charleston event connected him to a wider community of chefs and pitmasters, which Garden & Gun reports helped push him toward opening his own restaurant. With longtime friend and Skylight Inn colleague Michael Letchworth as a business partner, Sam Jones BBQ opened on November 10, 2015, near Greenville, North Carolina — the restaurant’s history page specifies the location as Winterville. Both Skylight Inn and Sam Jones BBQ continue cooking whole hog over wood-fired pits, a rule Sam Jones described to Garden & Gun as absolute for anyone who grew up in that part of the state: if it isn’t wood-fired whole hog, it isn’t barbecue at all.

    What the Sources Agree — and Don’t Fully Cover

    Reed’s Southern Foodways Alliance introduction and the Sam Jones BBQ material describe two different registers of the same tradition: Reed’s is a broader regional and economic history extending back to the eighteenth century, while the Skylight Inn material is a single family’s specific twentieth-century lineage. Neither source gives an exact founding date for whole-hog cooking as a family practice at Skylight Inn beyond Pete Jones’s 1947 opening; the claim that the family’s whole-hog method predates that opening by generations comes from the restaurant’s own promotional materials rather than an independently documented family history, so it should be read as the family’s own account rather than a verified timeline.

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  • Big Bob Gibson and the History of Alabama White Sauce

    Big Bob Gibson and the History of Alabama White Sauce

    Alabama’s white sauce is now sold in bottles nationwide, but its history is tied to one Decatur pitmaster and a backyard pit dug in 1925. This account draws on the Encyclopedia of Alabama’s entry on Big Bob Gibson BBQ, written by historian Mark A. Johnson, and the Southern Foodways Alliance’s 2006 oral history interview with Gibson’s grandson, Don McLemore.

    A Railroad Worker’s Weekend Pit

    Robert “Big Bob” Gibson worked for the L&N Railroad in Decatur, Morgan County, when he started tossing hickory coals into a dugout pit behind his house on Danville Road in 1925. According to the Southern Foodways Alliance interview, Gibson stood six-foot-four, weighed more than three hundred pounds, and was known as a big, good-humored man who was easy to talk to. He cooked on weekends at first, feeding friends and neighbors off boards nailed to a sycamore tree. Don McLemore, who joined the family business in 1973, recalled that his grandfather did not raise his own animals. Instead, per the SFA transcript, “he’d buy a whole hog and cut it up himself” and use nearly every part of it — shoulders, hams and ribs — rather than cooking the carcass intact on one pit, the method associated with Eastern Carolina whole-hog pits. Gibson also smoked whole chickens, splitting and seasoning them before three hours over hickory smoke, per the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

    From Backyard to Restaurant

    Word of the weekend cooking spread enough that Gibson quit the railroad. He first partnered with his brother-in-law, Sam Woodall, opening a stand on Moulton Road called Gib-All’s. That partnership lasted about a year, according to McLemore’s SFA interview, before Woodall left to go into business with his own brother, and Gibson continued alone under the name that stuck: Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q. Over the next two decades the operation moved several times around Decatur, including a stretch of roughly ten years at two locations on Highway 67 near present-day Priceville, before Gibson resettled the business in Decatur in 1952. That year, his daughter Catherine “Punk” McLemore took over daily operations in exchange for half ownership — a detail confirmed independently by both the Encyclopedia of Alabama and McLemore’s own recollection of his mother joining the business.

    The White Sauce

    Gibson is credited by his family, and by both sources here, as the inventor of Alabama’s mayonnaise-and-vinegar white sauce — a mixture the Encyclopedia of Alabama describes as mayonnaise, vinegar and black pepper, dunked over chickens straight off the smoker. McLemore, in the SFA interview, said his grandfather’s authorship has never been disputed within his own knowledge, though he admitted the family does not actually know how Gibson arrived at the recipe. The sauce was developed strictly for chicken, to keep the meat moist through hours of hickory smoke; Gibson also kept a vinegar-based sauce for pork and a Brunswick stew cooked in a black wash pot, a recipe McLemore said the restaurant still uses today. Decades later, other Alabama restaurants began putting their own white sauce on the table, with some labeling it an original recipe — a claim McLemore disputed in the interview, saying those competitors had only adopted white sauce recently, by comparison to his grandfather’s decades of use.

    Where the Two Sources Disagree

    The record isn’t perfectly clean on two points. The Encyclopedia of Alabama states the family built a larger restaurant on Sixth Avenue in 1987 because their landlord would not allow them to remodel the existing building. The Southern Foodways Alliance’s separate profile page, however, describes the move differently, stating the original restaurant burned to the ground in 1988 and the family rebuilt next door, saving the original neon sign. The two accounts do not name the same trigger or year for the same relocation, and neither source resolves the discrepancy. Likewise, the Encyclopedia of Alabama dates the opening of the Danville Road second location to 1992, while McLemore’s own oral history interview places it around 1990 or 1991. Both are close enough to represent the same event, but the exact year is unconfirmed.

    Growth Into a National Name

    After Gibson’s death in 1972, five grandchildren and their spouses took over. The business gained a national competitive profile after Chris Lilly, a native of Florence, Alabama, joined the family in 1992 following his marriage to Gibson’s great-granddaughter, Amy McLemore. Under Lilly, the Big Bob Gibson team began competing at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, first placing in 1997 for a tomato-based sauce. Per the Encyclopedia of Alabama, the team has since won the contest’s grand championship five times — 2000, 2003, 2011, 2014 and 2017 — and the pork shoulder category twelve times between 1999 and 2025, for thirteen total category wins. In 2025 the restaurant marked its hundredth year in business, and in July 2026 Southern Living named the white sauce to its “Southern Food Hall of Fame” list of fifty iconic foods.

    A Regional Distinction Worth Noting

    It’s worth being precise about what “whole hog” means in Gibson’s case, since it differs from the single-carcass pit cooking associated with parts of the Deep South and the Carolinas. Gibson’s practice, as his own grandson described it, was buying whole animals from local farmers and butchering them into standard cuts before smoking — a meat-market-adjacent approach rather than the intact, all-night single-pit method. Both sources agree on the outcome, though: a backyard sideline that, within a single family’s ownership, became one of Alabama’s most decorated barbecue names.

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  • Barbacoa in Mexico: Pit Cooking from Pib to Hidalgo

    Barbacoa in Mexico: Pit Cooking from Pib to Hidalgo

    Before “barbecue” was a word for American cookouts, “barbacoa” was a Spanish word that took root in the Caribbean, and in Mexico it came to name something quite specific: meat wrapped in leaves and cooked slowly in an earth oven. This article draws on NPR’s reporting on the word’s origin, on Mexican and English-language coverage of the pit tradition in México Desconocido and Mexico News Daily, and on an AFAR feature built around a Yucatán chef. The sources here are journalism and a university humanities project rather than archaeological studies, so treat the deep-history claims as reported, not proven.

    A Word That Traveled

    NPR’s Jaclyn Diaz reports that the word is believed to come from the Taíno term barabicu, which referred to a wooden frame used to cook over a fire. Spanish conquerors turned it into barbacoa, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo is widely credited with first using the word in print in 1526. Michelle LeFebvre, an associate curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told NPR the frame was built from four posts with more posts tied across the top, much like a rack.

    That matters for Mexico, because the pit method is a different technique. Vocabulary.com’s Peter Barrett notes that in Mexico and parts of the United States, barbacoa still describes a distinct tradition of cooking goat, lamb or beef for hours in a pit dug in the ground. One Mexican account offers another etymology: México Desconocido says the word is believed to come from the Maya Baalbakkaab, “meat covered with earth.” Its wording is cautious (“se cree”), while the Taíno derivation is the one NPR and Vocabulary.com report, so treat the origin of the word as unsettled.

    The Earth Oven Before the Spanish

    Mexico News Daily’s Chris Sands writes that the Maya pib earth oven predates the colonial period by hundreds of years, if not far more, so pit cooking in Mexico did not begin with the Spanish. México Desconocido reports that scholars consider the dish to originate in the pib, and that the method was pre-Hispanic, used to prepare birds, fish and venison; the oven was a round hole lined with stones and heated with firewood. Sands adds that barbacoa in olden times was made with animals as varied as turkey, deer, rabbit and iguana, and that sheep, pigs and cattle arrived with the Spanish in the early sixteenth century.

    How the oven works is consistent across these accounts. According to Sands, the heat comes from the embers of burned wood and heated stones. Once the meat is wrapped in banana or maguey leaves, the pit is covered to trap the heat, and larger cuts are typically cooked overnight.

    Central Mexico: Lamb in Maguey

    México Desconocido says barbacoa de borrego, or lamb barbacoa, is prepared in many states, including Tlaxcala, Querétaro, Puebla, the State of Mexico and Mexico City, while Hidalgo has the strongest reputation. The magazine describes a Ruta de la Barbacoa through three Hidalgo towns: Actopan, Ixmiquilpan and Villa de Tezontepec. After the colonial introduction of livestock, it says, lamb wrapped in maguey leaves (pencas) was added to the earth-oven tradition and has endured. Sands describes the Hidalgo version as lamb set over a grill inside the pit, wrapped in maguey and cooked overnight, then shredded for tacos, with the drippings caught in a pot and turned into consomé. México Desconocido adds that it is served with corn tortillas, salsa borracha and that consomé.

    Where did Hidalgo’s fame come from? The magazine suggests, using hedged wording, that it could go back to 1971, when Actopan held the first Barbacoa Contest, and that a 1980s visit from television host Raúl Velasco to Actopan’s fair probably gave it national exposure. That is a plausible explanation offered by one outlet, not an established history.

    Yucatán: Cochinita Pibil

    In the Yucatán Peninsula the pit is the pib and the signature dish is cochinita pibil. Allegra Ben-Amotz, writing for AFAR in 2019, followed chef David Cetina of La Tradición in Mérida, a third-generation cook who learned the dish at age eight from a grandmother who dug a pib in her backyard. In his method, suckling pork is rubbed with a paste made from annatto seeds and spices, marinated in sour Seville orange juice, wrapped in banana leaves, placed in a sealed container (an aluminum box in the modern version), set into a pib lined with smoldering wood and hot stones, and left overnight.

    Ben-Amotz reports that Maya cooks made the dish for centuries before the Spanish conquest with game such as venison and wild boar, and that Spaniards brought pigs in the sixteenth century. Cetina’s summary: “It’s a very Mayan technique updated with pork, a European ingredient.” Brigham Young University’s Humanities Cookbook, in a note from Spanish and Portuguese professor Brian Price, tells a similar story: the Spanish brought pigs, and the Maya applied their own techniques to the new animal, giving a dish whose name blends Spanish and Maya.

    Mexico News Daily adds that pibipollo, a large round tamal cooked in the pib, is eaten on Hanal Pixán, the Maya Day of the Dead. And tradition has adapted: Ben-Amotz notes that newer cooks roast the pork in an oven instead of a pit and substitute other citrus for the costly Seville orange, and that cochinita pibil is now sold frozen and canned across Mexico.

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  • Memphis Barbecue: Pork Sandwiches, Ribs and Beale Street

    Memphis Barbecue: Pork Sandwiches, Ribs and Beale Street

    Memphis is one of only two American cities, alongside Kansas City, whose barbecue is treated as a regional style in its own right. This overview leans on barbecue historian Robert F. Moss’s history of Memphis barbecue and on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Tennessee BBQ oral histories, recorded with the people who run the city’s pits. It looks at the pork sandwich, the ribs and the people behind them; the story of one famous rib house is covered in our separate Rendezvous article.

    What Defines the Style

    Moss identifies pork shoulder and pork ribs as the signature cuts, with charcoal as the fuel of choice, unlike the split-log fires of Texas and the Carolinas. He describes the sauce as dark, tangy and sweet, built on tomato and molasses, with slaw and sweet baked beans as the essential sides. He also lists Memphis oddities: barbecued bologna and barbecue spaghetti, which he calls a Memphis invention. The Southern Foodways Alliance, describing The Bar-B-Q Shop, calls barbecued spaghetti “wholly local” and says the restaurant’s predecessor, Brady & Lil’s, was its supposed originator.

    Beale Street and the First Barbecue Kings

    Moss traces Memphis barbecue to the early twentieth century, when smoked ribs and pork sandwiches became lunch staples and late-night food for crowds on Beale Street. He ties the city’s growth to migration: Memphis’s Black population grew from about 3,800 at the time of the Civil War to more than 50,000 by 1900, as many people left farming for city work, with lumber laborers arriving on their days off, joined by riverboat crews and railroad-yard workers.

    The most famous barbecue man of that era, Moss writes, was John H. Mills, an African American entrepreneur who opened a stand on Fourth Street in the late 1920s and had built a brick restaurant by 1932. Mills cooked shoulders and ribs over a charcoal pit, mopped the ribs with a peppery hot sauce, and served extra sauce on the side. According to Moss, his restaurant drew both Black and white customers, and he made Memphis famous for ribs roughly two decades before the Rendezvous began selling its dry-rubbed version. Mills ran the place until his death in 1949.

    The Pork Sandwich

    Moss reports that Leonard Heuberger opened Leonard’s in 1922 and that the restaurant claims to have invented the Memphis-style barbecue sandwich: chopped pork shoulder on a bun with finely diced coleslaw and a red, tomato-based sauce. That is Leonard’s own claim, and Moss presents it as such. He adds that the sandwiches sold two for a quarter in the 1930s. He also notes that Leonard’s served only white customers until segregation ended in the 1960s. Dan Brown, who bought the restaurant in 1993, told the Southern Foodways Alliance that a barbecue is a barbecue sandwich, meaning the word names the finished sandwich rather than the cooking.

    The sandwich is not one thing. At Payne’s Bar-B-Q, which Moss dates to 1972, the Southern Foodways Alliance describes pork shoulders turned over hickory coals in a recessed pit, mild sauce simmering on the stove and bright green coleslaw between the meat and the bun of a chopped pork sandwich. At Cozy Corner, opened in 1977, the sandwiches and plates use sliced rather than chopped pork, and smoked turkey and barbecued Cornish hens are specialties. Moss adds that a popular item right after World War II was the rib sandwich, three or four bone-in ribs between slices of bread with slaw and a little sauce, still found at A&R Barbecue and Payne’s.

    Ribs, Wet and Dry

    Moss credits the Rendezvous’s spice rub, developed in the late 1950s, with creating the Memphis dry-rubbed rib; his account of Mills shows ribs mopped with sauce and served with more on the side in the 1930s. Today a shop can offer both. The Southern Foodways Alliance notes that The Bar-B-Q Shop offers half-and-half ribs, a split portion of dry and wet, for the indecisive or the taste testers. Its profile does not define the terms, and neither does Moss, so this article does not attempt to settle exactly where “wet” begins.

    Many Hands, Many Cultures

    The oral histories show a city that is more mixed than its reputation. Jim Neely, who opened Interstate Bar-B-Que, recalls being served through the back doors of barbecue joints, the Alliance writes. Tom’s Bar-B-Q was founded by a Greek immigrant, Tom Sturgis, whose rub includes oregano, thyme, basil, nutmeg and cinnamon; its current owner, Adam Itayem, is Jerusalem-born and Palestinian-American, and the Alliance says Memphis barbecue incorporates all cultures. Central BBQ, founded in 2002 by Craig Blondis and Roger Sapp, brought a competition-circuit approach and offers vinegar and mustard sauces the Alliance says are not commonly found in the city.

    Competition is part of the modern picture, too: Memphis in May describes its World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest as the largest pork barbecue contest in the world, with a 48th edition scheduled for May 13-16, 2026.

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