Barbecues
The first thing which presented itself to Sancho's sight was a whole bullock spitted upon a large elm. In six huge pots around, entire spitted upon a large elm. In six huge pots around, entire sheep were swallowed up, and floated like so many pigeons. Hares ready flayed and fowls ready plucked hung upon the branches; infinite were the wild fowl and venison hanging about. Sancho counted three skins, each holding about twenty-four quarts, full of generous wines; hillocks, too, he saw of the whitest bread, and cheeses were piled up in the manner of bricks. Naturally, the feast being a Spanish one, there were "two cauldrons of oil, larger than dryers' vats," which stood ready for frying purposes.
FROM THE MARRIAGE OF CAMACHO, IN Don Quixote CANCEL'S Culinary Encyclopedia says there are just two kinds of barbecue, the pit one we know best, where the meat is broiled over red hot coals, and Mexican style, in which the meat is "highly seasoned with aromatic herbs, put in small bags (the palm leaf petates) and cooked in the ground." But there are two well defined Mexican styles, too, the other being Barbacoa Serrana, that mountain or hillside festival in which the highly seasoned meat is encased in thick dough instead of leaves the kind of dough used in making tortillas and enchilladas. This is pure American Indian, of course, and a great improvement over the hunter's style in which salmon or wood pigeons are daubed with mere clay before being consigned to the fire pit, for with the dough method you have the hot biscuit covering ready to eat with your roast, and in spite of the fact that you'll eat your peck of dirt before you die, nobody intentionally gnaws on a clay pigeon. Of this whole savory subject the Mexicans say: "Man has invented no method of cooking meat that's comparable to the barbecue. In this fashion it cooks in the steam of its own juices and none of its savor is lost by direct contact with the fire."