Barbecuing with Big Boy (grill-- not the restaurant)

It's officially summer! That means it's time for the Big Boy Barbecue Book (Tested Recipe Institute, Inc., 1963), especially as we head into Independence Day, when people are likely to be firing up their grills.

It's not too surprising that "Big Boy" hews to the traditional idea that barbecue is the one time that gender roles for home cooks get reversed. The cover shows a man cooking up massive hunks of meat while the women look on, admiringly. I doubt he notices tat their admiring expressions seem a bit strained. Maybe the women are having trouble getting excited about a meal consisting of a huge portion of meat that's underdone in the center and burned on the outside accompanied only by 13 pounds of fruit that's been cooking in the sun and covered in flies all afternoon.

The inside cover carries on the theme with a series of cartoons showing the "history" of cooking:

Men started it by intrepidly getting their mastodon steaks close to a fire-- then it was carried on by women with hearths, fuel-burning ovens, and finally electric stovetops as the centerpiece of groovy '60s kitchens-- before it was finally reclaimed by men intrepidly holding supermarket steaks above a backyard flame.

The book's page extolling "The Fun of Barbecuing at Home" even has a section explaining how wives will appreciate a backyard barbecue.

I love the way this discounts all the wives' work, noting that "All they have to do is make the salad and dessert [which are of course so easy that the husband needn't bother to try to do that work himself]. The kitchen stays clean [except, of course, for any dishes needed to make the salad and dessert, plus any kitchenware the husband uses in the grilling process but doesn't deign to wash himself]. The kitchen stays clean [as long as you ignore the fact that it does not]. There is almost no wash-up afterwards [because any work not done by the man is invisible]." Even the illustration seems to suggest that the "no cleanup" line is bullshit. While the plate could plausibly be construed as a paper plate, the mug being thrown in the trash looks distinctly non-disposable. It's funny how a woman who is only an illustration and not a real person feels compelled to play along with the illusion that this is all carefree and effortless.

You may notice that I'm vamping on the illustrations. That's partly because I'm genuinely amused by them and partly because the book doesn't have a lot in the way of recipes, aside from discussions of how and how long to cook various types and thicknesses of meat to reach varying degrees of doneness. There aren't too many scintillating recipes. Still, I'll offer up a quickie menu for your fourth of July (or whenever!) festivities.

First of all, you need some hot dogs. The book has a whole array of Frankfurter Treats, each identified with a different part of the country.

This picture at the top of the page led me to suspect that there might be a recipe for marshmallow-coated hot dogs, but no such luck.

There are the unfortunately named "Dixie Dogs," a treat Elvis would have gobbled up: franks filled with peanut butter and wrapped in bacon before hitting the grill. Wisconsin's Pride made an appearance on our grill once in a great while when I was a kid, but we just called them the hot dogs with cheese and bacon. Boston's Best unsurprisingly feature baked beans (plus mustard and relish). The Coney Island Special sounds very wrong to me. I always thought of Coney dogs as featuring meat sauce, not sauerkraut, ketchup, and mustard. Wikipedia agrees with me, so I don't know what Big Boy was thinking. The South-of-the-Border dogs featuring chili sound closer to Coneys than the Coney Island Specials do!

But let's not get mired in semantics and instead pick out a side dish. Maybe a nice stuffed pepper?

These are easy: fill green peppers with canned chili beans, top with ketchup, wrap with foil, and barbecue! (They don't even sound bad to me-- swap out the ketchup for a sprinkle of cheese and I'm in!)

And finally, we need dessert. For a patriotic holiday, that means apple pie!

This one isn't grilled, so it's probably supposed to be a recipe for mom to make ahead of time in the kitchen. I'm sure all that paring, slicing, rolling out of pie crust, folding, trimming, pressing, fluting, and baking are no real effort and generate no dishes! The part of the recipe that intrigued me the most was the decoration. What are those weird orangey lumps on the top crust?

They are "'apples' cut from slices of processed cheese and sprinkled with paprika." I guess that puts Big Boy right in the apple-pie-and-cheese camp along with Ed Gein.

I hope you have a chance to grill something if you want to! Or don't if you don't! It's a lot of work for something that usually comes out burned anyway, so you do you. I'll be eating sugar snap peas and watching Uncle Sam in the privacy of my own home.