The reason is the awe inspired by my barbecue. Squatting on the patio is a gleaming marriage of stainless steel and black enamel that is not much smaller than a Smart car but looks much smarter. It looks as if it could put you in orbit and deliver you safely back. This is the £1,999.99 burger grill, and the fact that it is available from your nearest discerning barbecue seller illustrates how our attitudes to cooking outdoors have changed in Britain.
We have long lagged behind other countries — other countries with better weather — when it comes to barbecuing. Especially America. The great Australian barbecue tradition, it turns out, is something of a myth. In a recent survey of 30 countries, Aussies were found to spend less time entertaining friends than anyone else. The barbie credentials of the US, however, are unimpeachable.
Across the Atlantic, if it can be hunted or farmed it can be tossed on an outdoor grill. It’s the cowboy thing. John McCain pledged that if he reached the White House he would cover the putting green with grills. Now his vanquisher is engaged in barbecue diplomacy. The Obama Administration has told ambassadors around the world to invite Iranian diplomats to Independence Day barbecues on July 4.
We have been slow to import barbecue culture but we are catching up fast. Global warming may have played a part. Improved technology has certainly helped. Cooking outdoors no longer takes all afternoon, so you don’t need to wait for a guaranteed dry day.
Weber, the American barbecue behemoth, sells as many barbecues in a week in Britain as it did in a year a decade ago. We have overcome our unease with outdoor cooking to the extent that the Met Office, in issuing its long-term forecast, said that this would be a “barbecue summer”.
This is more exciting for men than women. Let’s face it, barbecuing is a bloke thing. Man. Flesh. Fire. It is almost embarrassing how simple we are really, how little we have evolved. We want to hunt it, throw it on the fire, serve it to our womenfolk, then stand back and admire how we did it. The hunting is tricky these days, so we focus on the fire and the showing off.
If we were purists, we’d be cooking over wood. But again, this is tricky in a suburban garden. For years I insisted that I was doing the next best thing using charcoal. My first encounter with a gas barbecue came on my first visit to meet my future wife’s parents in New Jersey. It was January and the snow lay deep on the ground. As we sat having a drink before dinner, I became somewhat perturbed that every time I opened my mouth to try to make a good impression, her father leapt up, pulled open the sliding doors and stepped out on to the frigid deck. Only when he returned and set before me the biggest steak I had ever seen did I realise that he was barbecuing out there.
I remained sceptical about gas barbecues, however, even when I lived in the US. I stuck with coals and vast quantities of lighter fluid and was not satisfied unless I served the food with singed eyebrows and fingernails caked in charcoal. A few years later, back in Britain, my now father-in-law gave us a gas-fired barbecue and, after initial reluctance, I realised that it made sense. You see, I had laboured under a delusion that somehow charcoal was a pure way of cooking, choosing to ignore the fact that the briquettes are doused in accelerant.
Barbecued food tastes so good because the juices drip down through the grill on to the heat source, are vaporised and become part of the smoke that flavours your meat. With a gas grill, where the heat source is metal bars, you are getting a purer taste than with much chemically enhanced charcoal. And there is nothing more off-putting on a summer’s day than the stench of barbecue lighter fuel.
I know this because I can smell it at this party. Next to my top-of-the-range Weber Summit gas barbecue and intercontinental ballistic missile launcher, I have erected, in the interests of research, a B&Q Thunder Bay charcoal barbecue (cost: £23.26).
With the use of several noxious fire-starters I got a good blaze going and now, an hour later, we are ready to cook and the garden smells only a bit like Robert Duvall’s napalm-drenched beach in Apocalypse Now.
I flit between the charcoal barbie and the two-grand beast. Weber, the Chicago-based kings of the lid-on barbecue, claim that the Summit is the Aston Martin of the barbecue world. But really it is a top-of-the-range Chevy Suburban — a gas-guzzling, hulking brute that you would never consider driving until the very moment you are offered the chance. Then, as I did once with a Suburban, you hop gingerly, guiltily, behind the wheel and find yourself thrilled by its tank-like size and power. “I shouldn’t be driving a car like this,” you say, utterly thrilled.
I would never have considered that I needed a high-end barbecue — especially one that changes the dynamic of your home so that you no longer have a barbecue in your garden but a garden attached to your barbecue. The idea of cooking on such a thing just wouldn’t enter my head.
Until it did. I was asked to write about barbecues, a press release about the Summit arrived on my desk that very day and I was overcome by covetousness. “I must have that! In my garden! Now!” Quicker than you can say barbabraggadocio, I was on the phone securing one on loan.
It was delivered in a 40-tonne truck. Mark Drummond, Weber merchandiser for the South East and Midlands, spent half an hour putting it together. It took two of us to drag it to the patio, where it sat looking gleamingly absurd.
Mark ran me through the basics: the six burners, the side burner for frying while you grill, the “Flavorizer” heat bars, the woodchip smoker, the motorised rotisserie and its infrared burner. It is like having an oven in your back garden. Mark cooks his bacon sarnies on his.
For this first party, I have, rather boldly, invited 17 people. Nothing too fancy: two dozen burgers and the same number of sausages, with some asparagus also on the grill and onions sizzling in the side burner.
After years of cooking on gas I still find it hard to resist lifting the lid to poke the food — but fortunately there are no incinerations today, on either barbecue. This is probably because I recruit a mate to take over the charcoal grill.
We both receive compliments. In a blind taste test of burgers, my guests can either detect no difference or are evenly divided between those who prefer the beast’s burgers and those who favour those from the charcoal grill.
But as I swig from my beer, brag that I will be using the infrared rotisserie for tomorrow’s lunch and gently deflect attempts by other males to get hold of the tongs as I lay down bananas stuffed with chocolate on the smoking grill, I reflect that there is more to barbecuing than mere taste.
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