Barbecue: What is it good for?

Writing about barbecue this week seems a little cruel, as grey clouds have gathered over our little island once again. Was the hazy heat of last week just a dream? Was it real life?

The invitation of an impromptu barbecue was just a text message away, and at the height of the heat last week, it felt like this was how it always is in Ireland. This is our summer. We eat outdoors now. This giddy heat got me thinking about barbecue. Though it’s fair to say that it’s associated with sunshine, we don’t really need the sun to barbecue, as this ancient style of cooking goes beyond a heat wave or a trendy enamel tray of pulled pork.

It’s thought that the word barbecue came from the Caribbean word “barbacoa” or “barabicu”. This is believed to have been the name for the wooden structure of sticks used to grill meat over an open fire. Spanish explorer Gonzalo Fernández De Oviedo y Valdés wrote about the cooking method discovered in the Americas, and this is thought to be the first time the word barbecoa appeared in print.

Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009), is an anthropological look at how cooking with fire is what first brought humans together. Wrangham argues that cooking over fire had a profound effect on the evolution of human beings, giving us the first opportunity to gather around a meal, as opposed to foraging and eating individually, and he believes that cooked meat helped our brains grow. It's a fascinating read that will change the way you view barbecue. If you're an advocate of a plant-based diet, beware. Wrangham has no time for the raw-food movement.

Michael Pollan also references Wrangham's theories in his book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013), and in his Netflix series based on this brilliant book. In the first chapter, Pollan spends time with the pit masters of North Carolina to discover the ancient art of cooking over fire and what the deal with barbecue is. He's quite sensible in his approach to the fables and traditions that surrounds modern barbecue. "It is remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue," he writes. "No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatising men."

Barbecue fatigue I must admit, I suffered from a bout of barbecue fatigue in 2014. This distinctly first world problem came from an over-proliferation of barbecue joints in Dublin city. Though some were (and still are) serving up delicious joints of meat, carefully brined and cooked, we live in such a small city that I get frustrated when food trends mean that our choices as eaters become limited. Pulled pork died in Dublin the day it appeared on the deli-counter menus of convenience stores.

But cooking over fire will never get old. Though perhaps not practical to emulate in a city- centre context in a drizzly country, there is something stirring and romantic about cooking outdoors, over fire. Hartwood is a wood-fired restaurant in Tulum, Mexico, that looks positively swoonsome. Opened by New Yorkers Eric Werner and Mya Henry in 2010, this open-air restaurant is at the edge of a jungle on a beach road, near the Caribbean sea. With a menu that changes daily, it's driven by sustainability and locale, powered by an ancient cooking technique. I want to go there.

Have you seen the Chef's Table episode with Francis Mallmann? It's arguably the most evocative of the first season of this Netflix food series. Mallmann is a bit of a maverick, and the episode captures the German-Argentine chef's love of Patagonian barbecuing methods, which includes burying food in pits covered in coal and letting them cook slowly. At the end of May, Mallman visited the Ballymaloe Lit Fest in Cork, where he set up one of his outdoor cooking pits to cook some Irish meat for festival-goers.

Cliodhna Prendergast, the Connemara-based Chef and Mum behind Breaking Eggs and Lens & Larder put the rest our backyard barbecues to shame last week, when she emulated Mallman's Patagonian cooking style in her back garden. Scroll through her instagram feed to check out the wood-fired set-up she installed for outdoor pollock cooking in last week's heat.

The Big Grill Festival will return to Herbert Park in Dublin 4 on August 11th-14th. This city-centre gathering of grill enthusiasts is a good excuse for a craft beer and a plate of meat blackened over wood or coals, but it's also a good opportunity to discover new ideas, or just old ideas being rediscovered, through one of the world's most fundamental cooking techniques.