Yup! That's a start! Barbecue involves digging a barbecue pit, starting a slow fire, putting in the meat, covering it, and
leaving it alone for the next 12 to 24 hours!
The blunders I thought of were:
- Pound for pound, barbecue is the least labor-intensive way to cook meat.
- Building a barbecue pit is no more labor-intensive than building any other kind of cooking fire, and less so than most because it doesn't require constant maintenance.
- Slave labor was not cheap; far too valuable to have a slave spend an entire day watching the smoke from a barbecue pit.
- At the start of the Civil War, there were more slaves in the North than there were in the South, so if slavery had anything to do with it, barbecue would have been invented in the North first.
- No one knows for sure who built the first barbecue pit in America but it was most likely the hillbillies in western Virginia, not slaves in South Carolina. That's why it moved west with the Scots-Irish and became identified with Kansas City and Texas.
- Barbecue probably became popular in the South because the South had much stronger traditions of sharing large community meals while the North was carved up into tiny little farms where the meat people ate was mostly salted beef and fish, and they didn't eat meat every day. The only analog in the North that I can think of was the New England clam bake; but the clam bake was a seasonal special event rather than a daily tradition.
- The climate probably played a role, too. In the North, meat could be preserved by storing it in cool places, especially in winter. The North had ice houses; the South did not. In the South, if you butchered a steer, you ate him right away.
- The South had the large open ranges suited to maintaining large cattle herds. In the North, cattle were much more labor-intensive, requiring growing fodder on farms where the acreage could be more profitably invested in growing vegetables for human consumption. Hence, Southrons ate a lot more fresh meat.