'A Whole Hog Barbecu'd!'

I was surprised to see that Alexander Pope was familiar with the most popular cuisine served in Texas: barbecue. You’ll find his reference in “The Second Satire in the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased”:

“Oldfield, with more than Harpy throat endu’d,

Cries, ‘send me, Gods! a whole Hog barbecu’d!’”

 

In a note to the poem, Pope writes of Oldfield that “this eminent glutton ran through a fortune of fifteen hundred pounds a year in the simple luxury of good eating.” In Texas, barbecue is a religion. I am not observant though I’ve witnessed heated arguments over what constitutes the proper preparation of barbecue, Texas style.  The magazine Texas Monthly has a barbecue editor. The word is a borrowing from the Spanish barbacoa and in the late seventeenth century originally referred in English to the framework or grill holding meat over a fire. In his dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines barbecue as both a noun and a verb:

 

“A term used in the West-Indies for dressing a hog whole; which, being split to the backbone, is laid flat upon a large gridiron, raised about two foot above a charcoal fire, with which it is surrounded.”

 

The couplets that follow Pope’s reference to barbecue are worthy of his scatologically minded friend Jonathan Swift:

 

“O blast it, South-winds! till a stench exhale

Rank as the ripeness of a rabbit’s tail.

By what criterion do you eat, d’ ye think,

If this is prized for sweetness, that for stink?

When the tired glutton labours thro’ a treat,

He finds no relish in the sweetest meat.”