Firing up the grill and cooking a meal outdoors is one of the few primal pleasures still left to the modern cook. No pots, no pans, no electricity, no complicated techniques--it's just you, some fire, and some food.
Oh, plus the grill you're cooking on. And the charcoal briquettes you might be burning, or the can of propane you picked up last week. And the metal grill itself, forged in some giant factory, and even the newspaper you might use to light your charcoal chimney. Even though it might seem pretty primitive, grilling involves as much technology as anything else we do--even fire counts as "technology," when you get right down to it--and most modern cookout equipment was only invented in the 20th century. Heck, even the idea of cooking outside on a regular basis only became popular once people started living in the suburbs en masse, after WWII.
While culinarily distinct from grilling (BBQ is all about low, slow, indirect cooking), the all-day outdoor party aspect of most early barbecue is essential to how Americans celebrate cookouts today. At first, the word "barbecue" came into English as a word referring specifically to the wooden rotisseries and smoking platforms (like a rotisserie) that Native Americans would use to cook meat over fire pits, but by the 1660s, Englishmen were publishing accounts of hanging out at barbecues, referring to the slow, pit-cooking style that we know as barbecue today.
Barbecue then spread to the American South, where roasting up a couple hogs became a standard way to spend a holiday. George Washington's diary entry for May 27, 1769, notes that he "went in to Alexandria to a Barbecue and stayed all Night," winning eight shillings from a card game, and barbecues became a favorite for political events (nothing like free food to bring out the vote) throughout the 19th century. Andrew Jackson even planted two groves of "barbecue trees" on the White House grounds during his administration, to use as fuel for Presidential pig roasts. Private citizens would hold barbecues, too, but only as community shindigs, like the 1898 party that one writer went to in Louisiana, where they cooked up "a whole beef" and "three muttons."
In the early 1950s, when backyard grilling really took off in the newly suburban America, Kingsford increased production by 35 percent to keep up, and even limited advertising "for fear of not being able to meet the demand," according to one historian.
By 1957, you could get a LAZY-MAN Open Fire Charcoal Type Gas Broiler for $59.50 (as advertised above in Popular Mechanics), featuring little walnut-sized nuggets of porcelain that the company called "permanent coals," which the gas burners would heat up to mimic the spread-out effect of charcoal grill's heat. For an extra $70, though, you could pick up the LAZY-MAN Model AP (on the right), the first gas grill to use the cart-style setup that's become standard today. Both used propane tanks that the LAZY-MAN's manufacturer, Chicago Combustion Corporation, had modified from plumbers' 20-pound propane cylinders.
Traditional Japanese ceramic kamado cookers started coming over to the US after WWII, brought by servicemen who had tried them out while overseas, but it wasn't until 1974, when Ed Fisher (himself a Navy vet) started the Big Green Egg company, that the style really took off in BBQ purist circles. Equally good at both grilling and low-and-slow smoking, the BGE has built up a serious cult over the years, and is fast becoming a standard part of the American cookout landscape.
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