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With a little experience, the cooking process becomes easy, but many people find it frustrating at first. HOMEMADE SMOKERS BARBECUING WAS AMERICA’S ORIGINAL and most popular form of outdoor cooking until grilling surged into the forefront after the Second World War. Equipment was a major reason for the shift. By the 1950s factories were turning out basic, cheap grills faster than Formica, but those who wanted a barbecue smoker for home use had to make it for themselves. That’s still a good option for some people, even with the solid commercial products available today.

These and lots of other reasons that we don’t understand caused a revival of interest in real, smoke-cooked barbecue. The book came out in 1994 and lots of people bought it, probably at the insistence of wives who worried that Dad was going to burn down the neighborhood. Two decades later, barbecue continues to soar in popularity. The kinds of barbecue joints that once thrived only in the “barbecue belt” of the South now pop up in all corners of the country, in almost every town with more than a single stoplight.

Originally the pits were open on top and the meat was hung above the fire or placed on a ground-level grate. Many people still barbecue in a similar style, but around the beginning of the twentieth century, the country’s first commercial Bar-B-Q joints introduced important changes in the technology. Much of the credit goes to immigrant German butchers, who knew little at first about American barbecue but a great deal about old-country methods of smoking sausage and pork. In meat markets from the Carolinas to Texas, they introduced Southerners to the European art of charcuterie and learned in turn from their customers about American smoked meats.