Is there any more indicative smell of summer than of a barbecue in use? (Editor’s note: coconut suntan lotion, chlorine, the sun heating up a wooden deck, morning air at the cottage?) That smell of barbecue sauce when it meets open flame evokes in me the feelings of vacationing, of time suspended, of someone else doing the cooking! The sweet often garlicky aroma when teamed up with the smell of burning charcoal, just whisks me away and all seems right with the world. Summertime at its iconic best!
We live 3 houses down from a terrific deli and if the wind coming from just the right direction, our apartment fills with the smell of whatever they are in the midst of cooking. Inconveniently for us, they prepare and cook their barbecued chicken at 7am on most days, so while regular folks are stumbling around craving coffee or a couple of eggs at that hour, the people who live in my neighbourhood all crave barbecue. We just can’t help ourselves.
How foolish we would seem to our ancestors who had no choice but to cook day-in-day-out over a fire. Our generation eagerly ignores our modern indoor appliances for the chance to scorch, sometimes beyond identification, the ready-to-use meat or vegetables that we primly buy at the grocery store and have been marinating for hours in ready-to-use sauces or spice mixtures in our handy refrigerators. Wouldn’t our attraction to the siren song of open fire cooking (over purchased ready-to-burn charcoal briquettes) seem a bit out of place?
Let’s walk away from our ancestors at this juncture before any sort of thought-provoking life-style examination sends this piece off the rails before we’ve even flipped our first burger.
Is it just how it seems to me or did cooking regularly over a barbecue during the summer’s hottest months gain in popularity at the same time that air-conditioning in the average home came into its own? Why would we finally embrace the idea of how great it is to keep the heat of cooking out of our kitchens, when we at last had the ability to cool them down?
My parents didn’t own a barbecue until the propane version came out (and was proven to not immediately burn down the entire deck and backyard upon lighting) but I have very early memories of the big charcoal-burning pan barbecue that my Aunt and Uncle would load up with impossible amounts and varieties of meat during the summertime visits that we would make to their farm. Charcoal needs some time to get into its groove once it’s lit and my devil-may-care Uncle was not shy about adding in additional squirts of lighting fluid (from the comfort of his lawnchair) if the briquettes weren’t burning as fast as he’d like. He also liked that the resulting sudden flare ups scared us kids and irritated his wife. That’s who he was. You might have had one of those uncles of your own. So, the smell of lighting fluid also prickles my senses and suggests that there is most likely a barbecued meal of epic proportions on my horizon.
My husband and I started out our barbecuing life together using a hibachi that we bought from Canadian Tire and which we would haul to the beach, along with a bag of Kingsford’s, on days that were too hot for us to stay in our top floor apartment in the city. They SAY that it only takes 30 minutes for briquettes to find their sweet spot but sometimes 30 mins can feel like 2 hours, and that sent several of our beachy playdates slowly sliding off the Happy Chart as we hangrily watched the hibachi, willing it to heat to the right temperature.
We moved along to a propane barbecue that we shared with our family of housemates in our next apartment, making life better in so many ways, and then on to the one that we own and love and probably overwork these days.
We have barbecued all manner of meat, fish, and vegetables on our ‘cue and enthusiastically claim whatever meal is the latest to come off of its grilling grates, to be the best we have ever eaten. (We also barbecue rice. It’s not as challenging as it sounds and it works surprisingly well.)
I’m saying “we”, but I’m meaning “him”. I don’t barbecue. I get it ready, I hand it over, and my job is finished. I’ve resisted learning how to so much as turn the thing on, thus guaranteeing that I am never the one in charge of doing the lion’s share of our summer cooking. I am, however, quite passionate about EATING food cooked on that barbecue. We each have our small contributions that we add to our various relationships, am I right?
We are certainly not unique in our love of this sunny season method of cooking, and we know of several people who have stretched their ardent attachment to barbecuing into a year ‘round obsession. We don’t do that for the same reason that we don’t celebrate Christmas outside of the month of December, and don’t support the playoffs dragging on until mid-June—some things are made special to us because the enjoyment of them is limited to a specific period of time.
That, of course, is merely a theory. Catch us on any morning at 7am, regardless of the season, when the wind is rising from the southeast and we will very likely and just as piously recite a rather different set of seasonal eating standards!
