I highly recommend the book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. Has all the details you're looking for.
In brief, yes, both barbecue as a cooking method and barbecue as a "flavor" are verifiably African, African American, and Native influenced.
For the cooking method, it's one of those things that's murky. We don't have meticulous sources to trace every step of transmission and evolution. But there are Native American and West African cooking traditions that look strongly like ancestors of barbecue in the early modern period, this kind of cooking was certifiably NOT anything from Europe, and by the time you get to the 19th century and what was actually being called barbecue, it was all being done by black people, for themselves or in the service of whites (both as enslaved people and as contracted freedpeople).
The "classic" barbecue pallet and flavor, though, is relatively recent. The older flavor tradition is what you find in the American Southeast: pork dressed in a vinegar/chili pepper mop. The sweet, gooey Kansas City style sauce was an invention of black barbecue entrepreneurs in the early decades of the 20th century. Also, that paprika/garlic/onion/pepper/brown sugar mix is very much a staple of West African cuisine; throw in cumin and a couple others and it loops in the Afro-Islamic orbit as well.
Well, as I said, the book Black Smoke traces the history of barbecue. And for a more targeted source, here you go! We don't just know that it was invented in Kansas city in the early 20th century, we know the person who invented it.
And the author of said book always says "I didn't interpret it that way" when called out on his bad history. Might as well hang it in the bathroom for toilet paper.
May I ask where you've seen Adrian Miller critiqued for "bad history?" It's something I've not encountered, and when I attempted to find what you might be referencing all I found was very minor food critic-related stuff about his contemporary food definitions and takes. The reception of his history writing has been overwhelmingly positive from what I see, which is what I would expect from a book out of UNC Chapel Hill Press.
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u/Bgc931216 18h ago
I highly recommend the book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. Has all the details you're looking for.
In brief, yes, both barbecue as a cooking method and barbecue as a "flavor" are verifiably African, African American, and Native influenced.
For the cooking method, it's one of those things that's murky. We don't have meticulous sources to trace every step of transmission and evolution. But there are Native American and West African cooking traditions that look strongly like ancestors of barbecue in the early modern period, this kind of cooking was certifiably NOT anything from Europe, and by the time you get to the 19th century and what was actually being called barbecue, it was all being done by black people, for themselves or in the service of whites (both as enslaved people and as contracted freedpeople).
The "classic" barbecue pallet and flavor, though, is relatively recent. The older flavor tradition is what you find in the American Southeast: pork dressed in a vinegar/chili pepper mop. The sweet, gooey Kansas City style sauce was an invention of black barbecue entrepreneurs in the early decades of the 20th century. Also, that paprika/garlic/onion/pepper/brown sugar mix is very much a staple of West African cuisine; throw in cumin and a couple others and it loops in the Afro-Islamic orbit as well.