It’s a debate that has roots running deep. All the grub is probably gone by now, but what you did when you cooked outside goes by many different names: “cook-out”, “barbeque”, “grill-out”, or maybe even “pig-pickin”.
To be fair, a pig-pickin is really a specific thing that doesn’t normally get confused with those other things. Dig a pit, maybe build a wall, put in a pig, cook, chop, sauce: boom! Hard to confuse that with something else.
You’d be forgiven if you confused it with a barbeque though, because barbeque is what you get at a pig pickin. It’s something we know a lot about here in Charlotte, what with the yearly Barbeque and Brews festival, among countless other events each year. You can call what they do there either “barbequeing” or “pig pickin”. But both of those are entirely different from what most people did today.
When you take things like hamburgers and hot dogs and throw them on a grill, people from the Carolinas call that a “cook out”. You might get some “grilling” tossed in there, but certainly not “barbeque”. That’s what people call it when they’re not from around here.
But to be objective, a lot of people can’t help that they’re not from around here. And yet, that doesn’t mean they should go around calling that outdoor cooking thing something it isn’t. So Rance hit Freedom Park before the show to find out once and for all what it’s called when we cook outdoors in the Carolinas…
