Fall BBQ: Sunshine, Suds, and a Super Supper

Goleta Beach County Park is a day-use park (8:00 am to sunset) that features 27 picnic tables, four horseshoe pits, three restrooms, a volleyball court, a children’s playground, a restaurant, a tackle and bait shop, and a major pier, all within a 29 acre area that includes 4,200 feet of beachfront. The park receives about 1.5 million visitors per year, making it the most heavily-used one in the Santa Barbara County Park system (source). Goleta Beach Park also happens to be next door to UCSB, and its proximity, facilities, and free parking make it the most popular venue for the Department of Geography’s biannual barbecues.

The afternoon of October 7, 2011 was balmy with a gentle breeze and the temperature in the 70s—in other words, ideal conditions for Geography’s Fall BBQ! Our “grate chef,” Professor Dan Montello, worked his usual culinary magic with tri-tip and chicken; grad student Amy McNally grilled Portobello mushrooms to perfection; and other friends of Geography donated a myriad assortment of homemade appetizers, salads, side dishes, and deserts. And, yes, the grad students chipped in with assorted beverages, including a case of good wine and a keg of Sierra Nevada beer. The aroma of a barbecue, mingled with booming surf, laughter amongst friends, and a sunset over the Pacific, is hard to beat. As Shakespeare might have said, “It is better to have barbecued and burnt, than never to have barbecued at all.”

On a more academic note, the origins of both the activity of barbecue cooking and the word itself are somewhat obscure. Most etymologists believe that barbecue derives ultimately from the word barabicu found in the language of both the Timucua of Florida and the Taíno people of the Caribbean, which then entered European languages in the form barbacoa. The word translates as “sacred fire pit.” The word describes a grill for cooking meat, consisting of a wooden platform resting on sticks. Traditional barbacoa involves digging a hole in the ground and placing some meat (usually a whole goat) with a pot underneath it, so that the juices can make a hearty broth. It is then covered with maguey leaves and coal and set alight. The cooking process takes a few hours. There is ample evidence that both the word and cooking technique migrated out of the Caribbean and into other languages and cultures, with the word (barbacoa) moving from Caribbean dialects into Spanish, then Portuguese, French, and English. The first recorded English use of the word in the proper form, barbecue, was in the published writings of John Lederer, following his travels in the American southeast in 1672. While the standard modern English spelling of the word is barbecue, local variations like barbeque and truncations such as bar-b-q or bbq may also be found. In the southeastern United States, the word barbecue is used predominantly as a noun referring to roast pork, while in the southwestern states, cuts of beef are often cooked (source).

Editor’s note: Many thanks to Dylan Parenti and Jose Saleta for providing the photographs of the event, all of which will soon be posted on our Event Photos web page.