Fun Barbecue Facts
The first McDonald's restaurant was a Barbecue
Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was banned from baseball in 1918, after the " Black Sox " scandal returned home and opened
a Barbecue restaurant.
President Lyndon Johnson had two Barbecue's installed on the roof of the White House, he also invited so many foreign dignataries
to his Texas ranch the Washington Post coined it " Barbecue Diplomacy ".
President Jimmy Carter Held the first " Pig Pickin " at the Whitehouse
In Wiltshire, near Bath, England, The George Georgian pub dating back to the 1700s, The kitchen has a dog powered rotisserie where
a terrier would run inside a wheel called a dog tread to rotate the spit.
The first barbecue competition was the Kaiser Foil Cookoff conducted in 1959 in Hawaii, just a few months after Hawaii became a state.
"For Men Only", contestants sent in their main dish recipes, 25 finalists were chosen and with their wives (assuming they were all married)
were flown to the Hawaiian Village Hotel on Waikiki for the cookoff.
In 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko bragged that he made the best ribs anywhere and set
in motion the annual Mike Royko Ribfest in Grant Park on the Lake Michigan lakefront. Almost from the outset vegetarians began
pestering Royko for permission to enter non-meat ribs. The crotchety columnist wrote that he had nothing personal against vegetarians,
"In fact, I occasionally eat vegetables - a tiny onion in a martini or a stalk of celery in a Bloody Mary. Keeps me fit."
On March 25, 1540 a party of about 40 Spaniards led by Hernando de Soto invaded a village in what is now Georgia and found venison
and turkey smoke roasting on a barbacoa-like device. Although the word had not been brought north by Indians yet, DeSoto called it a
barbacoa because he had probably heard the word in Spain. Famished from a 35 hour ride, despite the fact that it was Holy Thursday,
they feasted on the first barbacoa in recorded history.
In the pre-Civil War South, Master got to eat the best cuts of meat. They ate the tenderloin from along the pig's back, "high on the hog"
(yes, that's where the expression came from), while the slaves got the tougher, more gristle-riddled cuts.