How I learned to stop worrying and love barbecue
A few days ago, one of the supplements in The Guardian did a little ‘Barbecues – For Or Against?’ piece that utterly failed to wow me. On the one hand there was the ‘Most barbecues are awful, but…’ argument, which had me sold on pretty much everything before the ‘but’. On the other was a few columns of socially contentious guff about burnt freezer sausages, liberally immolated offer accelerant-laced hell pits, and tended all the while by burly, topless men, fending off the nigh-indistinguishable feral dogs and children snapping at their ankles. I should say something pithy and sympathetic here really, mention my own council estate childhood rather than making me sound like a dreadful sneering twat. But I’m not going to.No, the barbecues I grew up with typified by the gormless, rather vacant confusion with which much of Britain seems to greet food.
Ok, so the Australian solution touted in the article made me throw up in my mouth a little, but there’s only so much parboiling that even a man who likes to cook Mexican can take. Back in Blighty, we take probably our most unusual, certainly our most unfamiliar and seasonally fragile means of cooking, and put it in the hands of a chef selected purely on the basis of body-mass, then scratch our big manly chins over the process of making fire, before liberally littering it with the worst produce available. My parents, bless them, had got a little further, but were wedged firmly in the eighties. Theirs was a land of skewered pork with a mushroom at the end, and oily mustard marinades which smoked like all hell.
It’s no huge surprise, then, that my reaction to an ebullient “Let’s barbecue stuff!” from Mr C (who is, after all, a broad-shouldered man with a beard) followed a rough trajectory from “Thrice-sodomised Moses, have I not put that shit behind me,” through to “Fine [sigh] but I want it in writing that you wont take your shirt off.” Three or four attempts later, all more or less untroubled by pasta salad, bare nipples, or gang violence, I’m ready to recant.
I am, in fact, pleased to announce that “It’s all about the marinade” is no longer how the English ask meekly for a fire blanket. Big prawns, lime juice, lots of garlic: a no-brainer really, and a nice easy start. And what that sentence lacked in main verbs is made up for in simple deliciousness. The same is true of covering a rolled-out lamb shoulder in lots of yoghurt and tahini, with some yoghurt reserved for a mint/citrus dressing, all in thick chunks of bread with grilled halloumi. The revelation at the core of it all was so simple and perfect that I’d totally overlooked it: you cook actual fucking food on these things, and it’s delicious. Oil-brushed aubergine slices, or pork in that pseudo-Mex paste of toasted garlic, coriander, chilli, cumin, allspice, and vinegar – you use anything buff enough to knock some flavour into inexpensive and grillable cuts. See, look at that, it’s still grunting, hairy, masculinity, and you can still drink beer if you want. If in doubt, cover everything in salt, garlic, and paprika.
But we couldn’t let it go without a nod to filth. Beercan chicken, potato salad, and toasted marshmallows. Each stage is a grotesque spectacle in its way, but none more so than torpedoing a pint of cheap lager directly into the anus of poultry. It’s not pretty, and frankly, I half expected the beer to geyser out through the neck flap, but golly was it tasty. Steamed inside, incredibly moist, with a backnote taste of beer, and chock full of comedy. Literally, right up the body cavity. Try it. It’s probably the safest recipe from the faintly laudable volume White Trash Cooking, and certainly one of the few not to list any ingredient as “critter”. While we’re on the subject – use good chicken. Freakishly, for a recipe precisely calculated to divest even a plucked and trussed fowl of its last ounce of dignity, this is really all about simple flavours presented up front. You really do just crack open the can, pour a little out, and jam it up a well-seasoned chicken, then stand it up on the coals like it's steppin' out for a night on the town. I think it’s also in one of the Nigella books, if you want to hear it from a reliable, coffee-table, source rather than sarcasm, or a spiral-bound freakshow.