If you can’t stand the heat, head back to your air-conditioned kitchen. Otherwise, welcome to “Planet Barbecue!,” a flaming hot and smoky place populated by people who are dead serious about grilling.
This 638-page book is barbecue guru Steven Raichlen’s grandest tour yet of cooking over fire around the globe. It’s a world of sizzle and grill marks, charcoal and pine needles, communion and good food.
It’s also a world that goes back about 1.8 million years, over which, fortunately for us, starting a fire has gotten easier, and the sauces have only gotten better.
A talk with Raichlen about barbecue and grilling — and there is a difference — means starting at the very beginning.
“Homo robustus was a tool-maker, but really didn’t know how to make or harness fire,” Raichlen says of a hominid that roamed southern Africa 2 million years ago. “And if you look at the skull, what do you see? You see a giant, bony plate at the top of the skull, giant bony ridges, you see huge jaws, huge teeth, tiny brain pan.
“Basically what you’re looking at is a chewing machine.”
The better to masticate raw meat.
And then, almost half a million years later, lightning struck, anthropologists posit, and with it came fire — possibly in a forest — and with that, Homo erectus — Upright Man — had his first taste of, perhaps, roasted steer or a small predecessor of the horse.
NOW we’re cookin’.
From that happy accident, a cascade of developments flowed: smaller jaws, larger brains, more agile tongues (the better to articulate words), a social structure in which some went out to get meat while others stayed home to cook it, and everyone gathered around the fire.
Long story short: “Barbecue begat civilization.”
And wherever Homo erectus went, so did barbecue. In his latest book (he has written 29), Raichlen, a self-described “food anthropologist,” follows lovingly in that early ancestor’s footsteps: to Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas.
He traveled to more than 50 countries to assemble this encyclopedic book of history, stories, recipes and how-tos. “Planet Barbecue!” (Workman, $22.95) is the eighth in a series of Raichlen works on the subject that began with “The Barbecue Bible” in 1998.
“This book is deeper and broader than anything I’ve written,” he says. “There’s much more field reporting.”
Raichlen, 57, who lives part of the year in Coconut Grove, Fla., is a household name among grillmasters and weekend amateurs around the world. His books have been translated into, among many other languages, Swedish, Japanese, Czech and Italian.
He is gracious in person at the start of what will be a busy day before he heads out on a national book tour. He is gracious, too, in his book, in which he gives an international coterie of grillmasters center stage, putting their techniques and personal stories in the spotlight.
The raw material placed over the fire may differ: simple salted bistecca — Porterhouse steak — in Florence, Italy; prawns grilled in the shell in Kuwait; a salt-crusted beef tenderloin in Colombia; peanut-crusted lamb kebabs in Burkino Faso; kangaroo kebabs in Australia; marinated blowfish in Korea; sheep spleen stuffed with garlic in Morocco; a whole hog in Bali; skewered mashed potatoes in Azerbaijan (Raichlen called it “Knish on a Stick”).
The cooking methods may be distinct: an underground pit in Australia and New Zealand; a vertical clay barbecue pit in Morocco; an “asado al disco,” a grill fashioned from a large metal disk, in Chile; a tandoori oven in India; a wet log in Canada.
And those marvelous sauces range from fiery habanero salsa in the Yucatan to ginger-wasabi dipping sauce in Guam to lemon chile sambal in Indonesia.
But here’s what unites them all: the smiles on the faces of the grillmasters and grillmistresses, radiating both pride and passion for what they do.
“I think that every time we light a grill, whether we are in Malaysia, whether we are in Texas, whether we are in South Africa, we are re-enacting an act and tapping into a primal memory of the discovery and event that made us human,” Raichlen says.
“I think that’s why there’s such a passion and religious and emotional connection to grilling in a way that we don’t have with other methods of cooking.”
See ‘related items,’ above, right, for recipes
