The phrase “odds on for a barbecue summer,” so confidently pronounced by the Met Office this April, has since joined Michael Fish’s “hurricane” forecast in the annals of erroneous British weather predictions. With autumn upon us, Britain can now look back with masochistic pride upon another year of interminable drizzle and sudden deluges. Why, though, does the notion of outdoor cooking exert such a totemic fascination? Both the word and the practice arrived via the Spanish in the 17th century, deriving from the native Caribbean practice of barbacoa—cooking outdoors on a wood frame. It took a while to catch on but, today, it’s a cooking method that combines the most poignant elements of the British character: the miniaturisation of colonial traditions, the cultivation of likely disappointments, a taste for overcooked food. In a nation of modest and easily thwarted ambitions, the dream of a “barbecue summer” comes with the sweetest flavour of all: regret.
