The Old-School Cooking Method Utilized By Pirates

Ever wonder why pirates are sometimes referred to as "buccaneers"? The reason is more rooted in food history than you might think, and it has to do with a cooking method they used known as boucan. Pirates, generally speaking, ate pretty feeble rations of hard bread, dry biscuits, and salted meat (as well as, of course, a lot of alcohol, including ones with origins in the Caribbean circa the 17th century, like rum).

However, many of them also learned how to be master grillers before choosing a life of piracy. In the 1600s, Europeans hunters sailed to the Caribbean, specifically to the island that is now Haiti and the Domincan Republic, to hunt big game animals that had taken over the area. It was here where they learned how to cook the meat for sale in the same technique used as the native people of the island: on a grill called a boucan. The boucan was a wooden framework for slowly smoking and drying meat over a fire — essentially a modern-day barbecue.

Hunters who utilized the boucan to grill their meats eventually were given the nickname of boucaniers. And unfortunately, their time on the island was cut short when the government decided that there were simply too many of them and their settlements on the island. The boucaniers themselves were now what the island was overrun with, and so they were driven out — and, for many of them, this meant a new life of piracy, raiding ships, before leaving for the new base of Tortuga, an island that was close by. Thus, the word buccaneer was born, associating the cooking method with piracy itself, forever fusing the culinary and pirate worlds.

Makeshift boucans are still utilized today by campers and survivalists who show off their skills constructing DIY grills for cooking meat in the wild. One Redditor explained how they constructed a makeshift boucan using a bunch of sticks stacked together over a low fire, letting their meat cook for up to five hours. This may not be an authentic boucan of centuries past, but it's what left of the simple beginnings of barbecuing, generally. So next time you're barbecuing meats on the grill like a master, you can actually say to yourself, "I'm sort of being a pirate right now," and really mean it.