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What is barbecue, real American barbecue? The answer depends on what part of the country you live in and who your parents were. It is one of the most intensely debated topics in American popular culture. At a restaurant in Galveston, Texas, I said to a couple at a nearby table, “Aren’t these ribs great!”

“Well,” said the man, “they’re pretty good. Only there’s a place down in Florida where we’re from. Just a little shack.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “This stuff is okay. But back home, now, that’s what I’d call real barbecue.”

“Real barbecue” is what you keep hearing when you get talking to people about barbecue. Just what does it mean? There are many definitions. The easiest thing is to start by defining what it isn’t. First of all, it isn’t grilling. “You’re not flipping burgers or searing a steak. Instead you’re trying to turn a large, tough, gnarly cut of meat into something tender and succulent,” says one barbecue man I know. And second, barbecue certainly isn’t basting oven-baked chicken or ribs with “barbecue sauce,” the way Mom likes to do for Sunday dinner.

The hard part is to figure out what real barbecue is. The basic definition seems simple enough. It’s meat cooked over a framework, not on a spit, over a low bed of coals, not a brisk campfire, and slowly. It can take 12 hours or even longer, which is one reason barbecue pit masters often wake up very early. David Whitfield, a Mississippian hog cooker, says, “The key to cooking is to start slow, and don’t ever get much faster.” This accomplishes two things. It makes the meat tender and succulent, allowing the protein strands to stay long and supple as they cook and retain the meat’s juices, and it flavors the meat with the alchemical smoke from the coals. The result is addictive, delicious, and impossible to get any other way.

It sounds easy enough. barbecuing is slow cooking over coals. But once you start talking about what kind of meat to cook, over what kind of coals, for how long, and with how much smoke—and then throw in what kind of sauce, if any, you’re going to serve it with—well, the United States is a big country, and there are plenty of big opinions on each of these matters. And, of course, the controversy doesn’t stop there. From “What is barbecue?” you move on to another hotly debated topic, “Where did barbecue come from?” Everyone agrees that natives of the Caribbean had a great deal to do with it. But what about Native Americans? Or African-Americans? Or even European-Americans? What contributions did they make? No one is really sure.

We do know that the Spanish conquistadors reported seeing Taino-Arawak and Carib natives in Hispaniola roasting, drying, and smoking meat (alligator, deer, and maybe even human) on wooden frameworks over small beds of coals. They called the framework a babracot , which the Spaniards turned into a barbacoa . The method appeared ludicrous to many early Europeans. Cooking over coals was not unusual, but over such low heat? An early French traveler noted incredulously: “A Caribbee has been known, on returning home from fishing fatigued and pressed with hunger, to have the patience to wait the roasting of a fish on a wooden grate fixed two feet above the ground, over a fire so small as sometimes to require the whole day to dress it.” Not coincidentally, perhaps, these peoples also invented the hammock, a good place to lounge while waiting for barbecue to get done.