Barbacoa, barbakue, barbecue.... Anyhow, something good to eat.

You got to have friends! My old friend Dan Huntley, known as Dan the Pig Man in the Kingdom of Barbecue and throughout the Charlotte area, gave me the lowdown.

So we certainly have our fusses in the Carolinas about politics and religion and college sports and all the usuals, but if you want to see the glares get steely and the gloves come off you start talking barbecue. In the eastern part of North Carolina they season their shredded pork with a vinegar-based sauce, as they believe God intended, while in the west they base the sauce with tomato, as they imagine any civilized person would do. South Carolina further complicates matters by mixing in mustard. It's mostly good-natured, but people care. A lot.

So when I could no longer ignore the fact that Lawson mentions barbecue, I went looking for the story of barbecue, that favored food of the South -- and, it turns out, the Indians.

As early as his visit with the Santee Indians, only a couple weeks into his trek, Lawson describes how they Santee "made us very welcome with fat barbacu'd Venison, which the Woman of the Cabin took and tore in Pieces with her Teeth, so put it into a Mortar, beating it to Rags, afterwards stew[ing] it with Water, and other Ingredients, which makes a very savoury Dish." You want my opinion? That sounds so exactly like the pulled-apart pig or beef we eat today that you could put it in a cookbook.

Dan the Pig Man could not agree more. A onetime journalist and longtime lover of barbecue, he now runs a food truck and catering company and met with me in front of his headquarters off a gravel road near York, SC, built in what you might call the Rural-Palatial style. 

Dan quickly dismissed any of the crazier claims for how the word "barbecue" came into the language. It came with European interaction with Caribbean and Central American native populations, who used the word "barbacoa" to describe a way of cooking that involved placing meat on a lattice of poles above a fire that kept them from cooking too quickly, enabling the heat and smoke to cure as well as cook them.  Lawson spells it "barbacue" and "barbakue, but he's talking about meat smoked on a grill.

This image of Indians barbecuing fish comes from "A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia," by Thomas Harriot, published in 1590. The engravings by Theodor de Bry were fashioned after the images of John White, who made them as part of the first attempted English settlement in North America in 1585.

Dan has done enormous research on barbecue, and he sees its history as follows. In the 1500s, either pigs brought by Spanish expeditions found their way to on the island off the coast of Georgia now known as Ossabaw or they were left there purposely to remain there as a food source when the men returned. They never did, but the hogs remained and still remain. De Soto was thus responsible for the introduction of old-world hogs into the new world, which Dan sees as significant. "Old world pigs have fatback two inches thick," he says. This meant you could take the entire pig, lay it on its back on a pit of coals, and cook it. Its own hide and fat would serve as skillet and grease, enabling the entire animal to be prepared, not just the primal cuts -- the ham, the loin, the butt, and so forth -- that the Europeans would have been used to preparing. "The whole deal about barbacoa is they would gut them and use the whole animal, as opposed to the Europeans," Dan told me. Most important, says Dan, you could cook the animal without any kind of grill or other iron implement -- making this pit method of cooking perfect for pre-iron age cultures like those of the American Indians.

Barbacoa was the Caribbean word for the stilt platforms and grids of green sticks used for cooking and especially smoking the food, which rendered it safe for storage by dehydrating it and killing bacteria. Plus it made it taste good. "I talk about barbecue coming up with the pirates along the East Coast," Dan says, and it may be so. "The tradition wafted inland like hickory smoke."

Speaking of smoke, of course, that's the point: the smoke contains elements that kill bacteria and, along with the fire drying out the meat, which meant an animal could be eaten for months, rather than days. Turns out the smoke makes it taste good, too -- whether you're plucking pieces off a pit-smoked pig during a nice all-day Carolina pig-picking or eating venison in February that you killed in November. Nowadays many people use professional-grade smokers like the one Dan displays above, but you'll be invited to plenty of parties with a pig coming out of a pit -- or on a grill. One of Raleigh's best barbecue restaurants is still called The Pit.

And as much as Dan loves Carolina barbecue and its many approaches, he knows that in reality it's that simplest of things: meat + fire + smoke + time = good eating. "The great food cultures of the world start with poor people getting the poor cuts of mean," he says. "How do you tenderize it? What do poor people have a lot of? Time, wood, smoke.

"When I grew up in Charlotte in the 50s and 60s, barbecue was not an urban white thing at all," he says. It was something you went out to the poorer quarters for, and bought there. What's more, if you get right down to it, "It's meat and fire. It's animals and lightning. Barbecue started when the first wooly mammoth fell in the campfire." 

Still, he sees Lawson as playing an important role with barbecue like he does with so much of Carolina and Southeastern culture. "The significance of Lawson is he didn't hang around the coast. He went into the backwoods." He witnessed all the ways Indian cultures barbecued their meat, and "I would argue that it was Lawson who first took that tradition back over the Atlantic." I didn't see a trace of barbecue when I visited Lawson's botanical specimens at the Museum of Natural History in London, but Lawson did return to England in 1709 and stay for a year. I expect he ate with some tastemakers, and if he didn't carry the message, surely his book did when it came out that year.

You can bet we'll be arguing about barbecue in the Carolinas for at least another 300 years. But as ever when it comes to the Carolinas, Lawson helped set the terms of the discussion.