Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

Notes

notes Introduction 1. Ferguson, “Smithsonian’s Mitsitam Café.” 2. Web site of the National Museum of the American Indian. Accessed 30 Nov. 2006 at http://www.nmai.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=dc&second=visitor&third=in side#museumcafe. 3. For a good discussion of how, in the immediate wake of the Great Migration, “food came to represent the resilience of the African American people in the South,” see Poe, “Origins of Soul Food,” 97. 4. Zibart, “Caribbean Islands,” 333. 5. S. Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, n.p. 6. Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Traditions,” 268. 7. Pleck, “Making of the Domestic Occasion,” 774. 8. O’Leary, To Die For, 100. 9. Dudley, “Taking the Slow Road to Perfect Barbecue,” 5. 10. Web site of the National Museum of the American Indian. 11. Fiddes, Meat, 2. 12. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen,” part 2, West Wing 2:2. 13. Reed, “Barbecue Sociology,” 79. 14. Quoted in G. Ward, Jazz, 78–79. 15. Burns, preface, vii. Chapter One. From Barbacoa to Barbecue 1. Flint, Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, 118. 2. Kurlansky, Cod, 22–23. 3. Fernández-Armesto, Columbus, 73. 4. Kurlansky, Basque History of the World, 352–53. 5. Martire d’ Anghiera, Decades of the newe worlde, 41. 6. Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, 15–17. 7. Indeed, synthetic capsaicin is used in antimugger sprays. See Davidson, Penguin Companion to Food, 204. 8. Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, 89. 9. Ibid., 181. Present scholarly consensus suggests that Babeque refers to the Baha- { 173 } man island Great Anagua, while Bohío refers to Hispaniola. See Lemos, “Voyages of Columbus,” 699. 10. Flint charts these shifts in Columbus’s attitudes well in Imaginative Landscape, 123. 11. Lemos, “Voyages of Columbus,” 704–12. 12. Bernáldez, “History of the Catholic Sovereigns,” 120–22. Washington Irving did much to popularize this anecdote, amending it for American tastes in his Life and Voyages of Columbus (Works of Washington Irving 3:1–460, 418). 13. Nader, “Andrés Bernáldez,” 64–65. 14. Lemos, “Voyages of Columbus,” 709. 15. Castillo, Performing America, 23. 16. Quoted in Bucher, Icon and Conquest, 4. 17. In this intriguing chronicle Caribbean Indians are said to “patiently endure hunger, [so] that after they are returned from fishing they will have the patience to broil their fish over a soft fire on a wooden frame made like a Gridiron, about two foot high, under which they kindle so small a fire, that sometimes it requires a whole day to make ready their fish as they would have it: Some of the French affirm, that have eaten some of their dressing, they have lik’d it very well: It is observable generally in all their meat, that they dress all with a very gentle fire” (Rochefort, History of the Caribby-islands, 297–98). 18. Hale, Civilization of Europe, 504. 19. Calloway, New Worlds for All, 11. 20. Rouse, Tainos, 5. For Columbus’s early attitude to the Caribs, see Journal of the First Voyage, 169. 21. Flint, Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, xi. 22. Mazumdar, “Impact of New World Food Crops,” 61. 23. Steingarten, “Going Whole Hog,” 262. 24. Tylor, Researches into the Early History, 262. In Anahuac, Tylor describes barbacoa as “a native Haitian word” (335). 25. Gray, “Captivating Animals,” 522. 26. Elie, Smokestack Lightning, 86. 27. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 16–17. 28. Purchas, Purchas his pilgrims, 1534. 29. Hakluyt, Discovery and Conquest of Terra Florida, 39–41, emphasis added. 30. Shubert, Death and Money in the Afternoon, 7. 31. Walcott, “Muse of History,” 40–41. 32. Warnes, Hunger Overcome?, 42–44. 33. Stedman, Narrative, of a five years’ expedition, 114–15. 34. Sollors, “Introduction,” xx. 35. Petersen, “Taino, Island Carib, and Prehistoric Amerindian Economies,” 129. 36. See Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed, 7. Wild Majesty, Peter Hulme and Neil Whitehead’s definitive anthology of writings on the Caribs, offers no basis for Marvin Harris’s assertion, stated in Cannibals and Kings, that “barbecue . . . comes from the { 174 } notes to chapter one Carib word babricot” and from the first referred to their “cannibal feasts” (132). Wild Majesty demonstrates that colonial attacks on the Caribs were likelier to emphasize the rawness of their cannibal victims. Fire, when mentioned, tends to encourage colonial commentators to lapse into biblical rhetoric rather than to parrot indigenous words. Far more compelling evidence seems to surround the Carib derivation of the word tamale. Interestingly...