Episode 1 - Pirate Food

Welcome to Thinking Backwords.

I'm your host, Clark H Smith.

We're diving into the distant ancestors of modern words.

Today’s words are beard, barb, barber, and barbeque. They all arise from an ancient root word – bhardha – meaning beard.

Beards, come in all shapes and sizes – ranging, from Shakespeare to Duck Dynasty.

There are even bearded iris and bearded turkeys.

Barbs vary, too. If you look at the business end of a fishhook, you actually see a little beard – a whisker of metal set off from the form of the hook. That's a barb.

Barbed wire has the same sense – strands of wire with whiskers on them… sharp, pointy, don’t-mess-with-Texas kind of whiskers.

Do you remember this: “Shave and a haircut, two bits?” In days long gone by, when a man wanted a clean shave, he visited his local barber. The barber groomed the whole head - top and bottom.

The Foodies tell us Wordies that "barbeque" is a term used by the native folks of Central America and the Caribbean Islands. Local culture shaped what kind of meat and what seasonings were fused together in their favorite barbeque.

Barbeque methods evolved over time based on local preferences and local resources so it is really not plausible to say there is only one way to prepare barbeque.

How do we get from beards to burnt ends?

Meat + Heat + Time is the holy trinity of barbeque.

The word “barbeque” comes to us from the Caribbean word barbacoa – which means just what you think… slow smoked, seasoned meat.

When you barbeque meat, you want to keep the meat and the heat source at a reasonable distance from each other so the meat can cook longer – there’s the trinity. Even in our modern rigs, meat is suspended on a rack at some distance above the source of the rising heat and smoke. 

In the native home of the barbacoa, the preferred wood for separating the meat from the fire was the branches of a tree scientifically named ficus barbata – commonly known as the Bearded Fig. And yes, ficus barbata is a close cousin of that ubiquitous office plant, the ficus tree.

The wood of the bearded fig is dense and pretty heat resistant. It’s great for standing strong between meat and fire.

The Spanish word for this ficus barbata is Los Barbadoes.

Yes! Barbados, an island in the Caribbean, is named specifically for that tree.

But why would a tree be described as having a beard?

The ficus barbata grows aerial roots, dangling from the lower limbs... like a beard.

The tree got its name because it literally looks like it’s growing a beard.

Barbacoa is the word for the TRINITY -  meat cooked low and slow over heat and smoke on a rack of bearded fig wood.

BONUS WORD

Now about that Pirate Food… Just as in merry old Pirate Times, our modern barbeque rigs have a device that holds the meat up over the smoke, away from direct heat.

We usually call that a grill or grate. But centuries ago there was a word that referred specifically to the rack of the barbado wood that the meat was placed on. That rack of wood was called a buccan. Yes, buccan, as in buccaneer.

The apparatus for cooking barbeque lent its name to those festive young men who enjoyed a hearty meal of smoked meat before venturing out on a wee bit of pillaging and piracy around the Caribbean.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburg Pirates (who are nicknamed the Bucs - short for "buccaneer") carry on the lore and legend of fish hooks, barber shops, bearded trees, and tasty, tasty meat.

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