What counts as real barbecue?

It depends on who you ask, and you might start a fight before you get an answer.

Some swear by the tangy, vinegar based sauce of Eastern North Carolina, while others insist that if it isn't a Texas brisket smoked for 18 hours, you're just having a cookout.

But here's the thing.

Humans have been tossing meat over fire since we lived in caves.

So how did a cooking method with so many different traditions and definitions become so central to American food culture?

Today, we're tracing the smoky soul of America, from the Caribbean islands to the Great Migration, to find out how necessity, entrepreneurship, and cross-cultural curiosity created one of the most diverse food traditions in the world.

What we know as American barbecue is actually a delicious collision of three worlds: Indigenous, European and West African.

Long before colonization, Indigenous communities throughout the Americas were using roasting techniques to both prepare and preserve meats like bison, deer, and small game.

In fact, the word barbecue likely comes from the Taino people of the Caribbean.

They called their wooden smoking grates barabicu, which was documented by Spanish explorers as barbacoa.

Europeans contributed the livestock, specifically pigs and cows, and the sauce.

British colonists introduced the habit of basting meat with butter or vinegar to keep it from drying out over the flames, creating the ancestors of our modern barbecue sauces.

But much of the flavor we associate with barbecue was shaped by African traditions.

Enslaved people brought sophisticated flavor profiles to the Americas, involving warming spices like black pepper, cardamom and ginger, and adapted those techniques with new ingredients like chilies.

By blending Indigenous smoke pits with African seasoning and European livestock, they forever changed the American palate.

Enslaved people were often tasked with cooking and became pitmasters on plantations.

Wealthy plantation owners hosted barbecues as large social events, relying on the labor and expertise of those they enslaved.

Being a pitmaster wasn't just a job, it was an exhausting 24 hour feat of engineering.

They had to manage heat, wood and smoke without modern thermometers.

Because barbecues were generally thrown for large gatherings, the tradition called for cooking the whole animal.

And though beef and chicken were used, pork became king of the pit.

In fact, before the Civil War, Southerners were eating an average of 5 pounds of pork for every 1 pound of beef.

That's because pigs were very low maintenance, free range, and the best part?

Almost every part of them was edible.

Pitmasters could literally go whole hog.

Slavery and barbecue are closely intertwined, which is why the cooking style proliferated in the South.

However, over time, regional styles started to emerge.

In North Carolina, there's the eastern style, often called the purest form of barbecue, since it sticks with the traditional minimalist way of cooking the whole hog, only using vinegar and red pepper flakes as the source.

As you move west, there's the Lexington or Piedmont style.

Influenced by Bavarians who settled in the region in the 1700s, it uses pork shoulder with a sweet and sour vinegar sauce that has a little kiss of ketchup.

South Carolina's mustard based sauce was also influenced by German immigrants, who brought their love of the tangy yellow condiment to barbecue.

Similarly, Czech and German immigrants in central Texas influenced the holy trinity of brisket, pork ribs, and sausage.

East Texas gets its thick, sweet, tomato based sauce from the newly emancipated people who arrived in the late 1800s.

And in South Texas, barbecue is deeply influenced by Mexican cuisine, served with guacamole, salsa and a sweet molasses based barbecue sauce.

Memphis is known for its tangy ribs, which can be served two ways.

Wet, where a mostly tomato based sauce is added to the ribs before and after cooking, and dry, which calls for the use of dry rubs.

And of course, in Alabama, you can dip your barbecue chicken into a zesty, creamy, mayonnaise based white sauce.

But barbecue didn't stay in the South.

During the Great Migration, millions of Black Americans moved north and west, carrying their regional pit traditions in their suitcases.

This was a massive moment for black entrepreneurship.

Starting a business required a lot of capital, but if you could dig a pit in your yard and had a recipe, you had a storefront.

This allowed the smoky gospel of barbecue to spread to other parts of the United States and change along the way.

Kansas City imported its barbecue from a Memphis native named Henry Perry, known as the father of Kansas City Barbecue.

He sailed the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, picking up different barbecue styles along the way before arriving in Kansas City in 1907.

But because Kansas City was a hub for stockyards, he had access to everything not just pork, but beef, mutton and chicken.

Leading to the everything-is-barbecue menu Kansas City is known for today.

Because black American barbecue is rooted in cooking the entire animal, pitmasters are resourceful and skilled in the art of making what would normally be discarded into prime cuts.

This has created new kinds of barbecue dishes.

Henry Perry's protege, Arthur Bryant, used to hand out charred bits of brisket to customers while they were waiting in line.

Burnt ends, as they were called, are now a Kansas City favorite.

Saint Louis's signature style is defined by the cut of their spare ribs.

The Saint Louis cut is when the butcher removes the rib tips to give the rack a rectangular shape.

Wholesalers would often throw the backside of the rib cut away, or sell them for a dramatically discounted price.

However, Leon Finney of Chicago took those rib tips and spawned an entirely new regional style of barbecue in the process.

His famous rib tips, rubbed with seasoning and marinated for two days before barbecued, is the cornerstone of Southside Chicago barbecue.

Chicago was also home to another barbecue innovation: aquarium smokers.

Because the Windy City was too cold for outdoor pits, Black pitmasters built steel framed chambers with glass windows that trapped the smoke inside so they could cook indoors.

Just like the United States itself, barbecue continues to change as more cultures add their traditions to the genre.

There's Fikscue in California, which prides itself in serving Indonesian Texas barbecue, featuring a halal menu of brisket rendang, spicy stew with smoked brisket, and kale curry with a side of slaw in a peanut dressing.

Egypt meets Austin at KG Barbecue, where pork ribs are glazed with pomegranate molasses and rubbed with za'atar, and brisket shawarma is served in pita bread.

And then there's Arlington's Smoke 'N Ash Barbecue, which blends American barbecue with Ethiopian flavors to make tibs with Berber spiced ribs.

As we look toward the future, the definition of real barbecue is only going to get broader, spicier, and more inclusive because at its heart, barbecue has always been about taking what you have, adding a little smoke, a lot of time, and sharing it with the community.