Barbeque starts here
by Simon Handby in At home on 06.05.08
After spending the last month or so getting wrong-footed by unseasonably cold spells and even a surprisingly enthusiastic bit of snow, it’s a nice change to be caught entirely off guard by a blast of glorious sunshine, and over the Bank Holiday weekend too.
Still, the supermarket shelves were looking pretty depleted by the time I’d finally convinced myself that it was barbeque smoke rather than rainclouds gathering on the horizon. After rounding up the usual food suspects and enough ketchup and mustard to decorate a sizeable pack of veggie sausages, I found myself frowning at the disposable barbeques I was taking to the beach: It’s 2008. Aren’t they a bit more guilt trip than day trip?
Well, yeah, but… OK, you’ve got me. Disposable barbeques come wrapped in polythene and cardboard, and have a metal tray and grille that nobody seems to want to recycle, so probably not great for the environment. But have you ever wondered, as the evening draws in and you huddle around them for heat (well, it is still England), how they make those nice, round little charcoal briquettes?
Nor had I until this weekend, when it occurred to me that wood rarely grows in such convenient shapes. It turns out that the briquette is the chicken nugget of the charcoal world, formed from mashed up charcoal, coal and sawdust, along with additives like starch, borax and sodium nitrate, rather than whole chunks of wood.
Most authorities seem to think that the lack of purity compared to traditional ‘lumpwood’ charcoal doesn’t matter, although some say that briquettes impregnated with lighter fluid leave food tasting funny.
Either way, I have learned that the charcoal briquette was invented by Henry T Ford. It’s presumably the reason you can’t get them in any colour but black, a bit like my barbequed sausages.
IMAGE by Flickr user nutmeg
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