The History of Barbeque Like the exclusive combination of traditional barbecuing styles that make Smokehouse BBQ so unique, the history of barbecue represents the combination of old-world cuisine and the cooking secrets discovered of Native Americans by the earliest settlers. Spanish colonists arrived in South Carolina in the early 1500s. It was the Spanish who first introduced the pig into the Americas. Pigs were an economical and abundant meat source for settlers struggling to survive the cultivation of the New World. The Indians, in turn, introduced the Spanish to the concept of slow-cooking with smoke.

Although the exact origins of the term ‘barbecue’ are widely debated, it is generally accepted that the West Indian term barbacoa, which denotes the method of slow-cooking meat over hot coals, became barbecue in the lexicon of those early Spanish settlers. Some contest that the term we came into popular use after a South Carolina BBQ Shack began advertising their new services: BAR-BEER-CUE, meaning “We’re a bar that serves beer while you play pool.” Whatever the true etymology of the word, the history of barbecue is undisputed: the Spanish supplied the pig, Native Americans showed them how to cook it, and barbecue was born.

Beginning in the 1730s and continuing into the 1750s, the British colony of South Carolina encouraged, recruited, and even paid the ocean passage for thousands of German and Scottish families so they could take up residence in South Carolina. These families were given land grants up and down the coastal rivers as they came in successive waves over a twenty-plus-year migration. These settlers brought with them, among other cultural influences, seasoning traditions that evolved into the sauce variations still a crucial part of modern barbecue.

Scottish families who settled primarily in the South Carolina low country were the first and most famous South Carolina preparers of Vinegar and Pepper sauces, the original barbecue sauce. In contrast, German families added the common use of mustard. South Carolina mustard sauce can be traced to those German settlers and is still in abundant evidence today, even after 250 years, in the names of the families who sell mustard-based sauces and mustard-based barbecue to the public.