This article is about the cuisine. For the cooking appliance, see Barbecue dates and bacon tapas. The various regional variations of barbecue can be broadly categorized into those methods which use direct and those which use indirect heating. A barrel-shaped smoker on a trailer.

Pans on the top shelf hold hamburgers and hot dogs. The lower grill is being used to cook pork ribs and “drunken chicken”. The English word barbecue and its cognates in other languages come from the Indigenous Taíno word barbacoa. After Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, the Spaniards apparently found Taíno roasting meat over a grill consisting of a wooden framework resting on sticks above a fire.

Traditional barbacoa involves digging a hole in the ground and placing some meat—usually a whole lamb—above a pot so the juices can be used to make a broth. It is then covered with maguey leaves and coal, and set alight. The cooking process takes a few hours. Linguists have suggested the word was loaned successively into Spanish, then Portuguese, French, and English.

As early as the 1730s, New England Puritans were familiar with barbecue, as on 4 November 1731, New London, Connecticut, resident Joshua Hempstead wrote in his diary: “I was at Madm Winthrops at an Entertainment, or Treat of Colln or Samll Brownes a Barbaqued. While the standard modern English spelling of the word is barbecue, variations including barbeque and truncations such as bar-b-q or BBQ may also be found. The spelling barbeque is given in Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionaries as a variant. Because the word barbecue came from native groups, Europeans gave it “savage connotations”.