Heave Ho Me Hearties!

I find the most interesting things on this internet thing. Like this, that I found the other day on the site called Gastro Obscura, which has bits about food from all over.  And often, when I eat at a barbecue, I have bits of food all over me, so it all fits.

The island known as Hispaniola, which is where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are found, was where Christopher Columbus landed on December 5, 1492. He called it La Isla Española ("The Spanish Island"), which was soon Anglicized to Hispaniola.  We can thank the Hispanics for many wonderful parts of our lives, and here is one of them: 

By the 17th century, Hispaniola had feral animals running around everywhere. Pigs, boars, cattle, you name it. Hunters came to take what they could, and many Spanish ships, docked in the harbor, had hungry Spanish sailors to feed. The answer for both the hunters and the sailors was to gather, and cook, the bounteous offerings of the island.

Mr Weber had not invented the Bar-B-Q grill by then and what they used was a frame made of wood called a "boucan." The Tupi people of Brazil invented the grill, you might say.  And all that they had to work with was wood, which meant you had to replace your grill often.

Explorers roaming South America and the West Indies brought the boucans to Hispaniola, and the French hunters on the island really took to it, and soon were being called "boucaniers."

They really went for it, and I guess this was before "French cuisine" meant tiny portions with sauce all over it. They boucanned pork, and another favorite was turtle in the shell, which would be popular at University of Maryland Terrapin Club events, if you think about it. The French called this boucan de tortue.

Boucaniers came up with the idea to add marinating the main course prior to throwing it on the grill. A book called "The Sea Rover’s Practice: Pirate Tactics and Techniques, 1630-1730" survives, and from it we learn that these guys were adding salt, pepper, lime juice and crushed pimento to the meat. Salting helped preserve the meat, and that was good because sailors would cook lunch well in advance long before sailing off.  By boucanning the meat, it could be packed away in the days before Frigidaires, and in those days before RadaRanges, they would reconstitute the meat by soaking it in warm water.

BUT! Everything good always comes to an end, just like when they shut down the Old Country Buffet near us. The Spanish officials wanted the French hunters to hit the road, or, more properly, the sea, so they undertook a rather violent campaign to make them leave Hispaniola. The boucaniers, miffed, sailed off, no longer hunters. Some became farmers elsewhere, and many boucaniers took to the seas as pirates, so soon enough, boucaniers became pirates, and "boucanier" became "buccaneer."

But they still had to eat, so as they landed on islands such as as Martinique, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Jamaicans added the boucan to their "jerking" cooking method, which is why we can get jerk chicken at TGIFriday's if we want.

Backyard grillmasters owe a lot to these long-pirates, who taught us to smoke and season meat and cook it on a grill.

I hope this helps out all of us who, until just now, thought "buccaneer" was a high price to pay for corn.