Recipes from the American West: The Birth of Backyard BBQ

In 1938, Sunset Magazine—one of the best-known magazines in the American West—published its Barbecue Book, a first of its kind in American culinary history. Not only was Barbecue Book the first book from a major publisher dealing exclusively with outdoor cookery, but it also helped to inaugurate one of the great food fads in twentieth-century America: the backyard barbecue.

For Sunset Magazine, the idea of a book dedicated to promoting outdoor cookery reflected its mission. The magazine began in the late nineteenth century as a promotional tool of California’s Southern Pacific Railroad. In the following decades, it grew to become the great popularizer of the American West.  Men and women across the country turned the magazine’s pages to read about Western environments, institutions, peoples, and cultures.

At the same time, Sunset was also where many Americans learned about Western foods. In the 1920s and 1930s, the magazine explored ingredients from artichokes and asparagus to halibut and shrimp, foods more or less unknown in the rest of the country.  Sunset’s most lasting cultural legacy came in its promotion of outdoor barbecuing—something the magazine contended was integral to the Western lifestyle. By the late 1920s, the magazine ran frequent features on this type of cookery, calling it a way to “lead the rugged outdoor life—without ruining either our clothes or our tempers... For those of us who haven’t the time or money to go camping, the barbecue satisfies our desire to get away from the hectic daily routine.”

The Barbecue Book represented the culmination of a decade-long campaign by Sunset to encourage Americans in all parts of the country to eat like Westerners.  It helped to convince many Americans that “the flicker and warmth of an open-air fire awaken in us impulses that hark back to pioneer days and put us right with the world. The aroma of sizzling steaks…whets even the dullest appetite and gives us a fresh zest for life.”  The book assured readers that, despite what they might have heard, “There’s nothing to it…There’s no reason why your barbecue suppers shouldn’t be famous fun among your circle of friends.” Making this style of cooking easy, the book quickly went through several printings, and it remained in print through the 1980s. (It’s still fairly easy to get a used copy of a later edition through an online bookstore.)

Before the days of mass-produced grills—the famous Weber Grill was not invented until 1952—the book had to instruct its readers in the craft of barbecue grill building. Some of the cooking surfaces the book recommended were quite elaborate, with complicated masonry work, ornate chimneys, large fireplaces, and extensive preparations.  If cooks felt intimidated by such labor, the cookbook suggested simply digging a small pit in the back yard and surrounding it with stones.  At the same time, prepared charcoal was not yet available to most Americans, making the authors spend significant time explaining the pros and cons of different hard woods. The authors noted that most Western BBQers preferred oak, which remains the favored wood of many in Texas.

As for food, the Barbecue Book promoted a quasi-Western cuisine that was at once tied to older culinary traditions of that region while simultaneously being an invention of the magazine’s home economics editor, Virginia Rich.  As one might expect, meat courses took center stage. Rich featured large cuts of beef, salmon, venison, and lamb on her menus—the last three beasts were less popular outside the West.  Pork was conspicuously absent. It still represented a staple exclusive to the American South and Midwest, as pigs had a hard time living in the arid climates of the West.  Concurrently, Virginia Rich had little problem adopting modern gastronomic ideals.  She advocated, for instance, the pre-cut, pre-portioned meats popular in the new supermarkets of postwar America. Hamburgers were just becoming popular at this time—although nothing like them would have been available to Western pioneers, she also encouraged her readers to broil hamburgers on their newly-made grills.

By the mid-1950s, the craze for cooking outdoors had swept the country. Authors of all regions published hundreds of books in that decade divulging the secrets of cooking over an open flame. But none did so before Sunset. Inside and outside the American West, men (mostly suburban and largely white) took to their grills to recapture a lost world of cowboy cookery and to reaffirm their ties to the country’s pioneer roots, however imagined such roots might be. Even today, every time Americans light charcoal, tie on an apron, and sear meat in their backyards they engage a culinary ritual that became popularized by a magazine most have forgotten.