In
the summer of 1919, a Michigan real estate agent named Edward G.
Kingsford was invited on a camping trip by his wife’s cousin, the
industrialist Henry Ford. In addition to Ford, the adventurers included
Thomas Edison, the tire magnate Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John
Burroughs. Although the group called themselves the Vagabonds, they
traveled with chauffeurs and a chef in a convoy of six vehicles, one of
which was a fully equipped kitchen truck.
Link to the article @ NY Times.
The
mill produced plenty of lumber for Ford cars, but it also generated
waste in the form of stumps, branches and sawdust. This irked Ford, who
didn’t like to leave money lying on the ground. The solution came from a
University of Oregon chemist named Orin Stafford, who had invented a
method for making pillow-shaped lumps of fuel from sawdust and mill
waste combined with tar and bound together with cornstarch. He called
the lumps “charcoal briquettes.” Ford, ever efficient, shortened the
word to “briquet.”
Edison
designed a briquette factory next to the sawmill, and Kingsford ran it.
It was a model of efficiency, producing 610 pounds of briquettes for
every ton of scrap wood. At the beginning, the charcoal sold to meat and
fish smokehouses, but supply exceeded demand. By the mid-1930s, Ford
was marketing “Picnic Kits” containing charcoal and portable grills
directly from Ford dealerships, capitalizing on the link between
motoring and outdoor adventure that his own Vagabond travels
popularized. “Enjoy a modern picnic,” the package suggested. “Sizzling
broiled meats, steaming coffee, toasted sandwiches.”
But
the Great Depression might not have been the best time to evoke the
charm of outdoor cooking, which must have called to mind the Hooverville
shantytowns springing up in every city. It wasn’t until after World War
II that backyard barbecuing took off, thanks to suburban migration, the
invention of the Weber grill and the marketing efforts of the
businessmen who bought Ford Charcoal in 1951. They renamed it Kingsford
Charcoal and persuaded the major supermarket chains to carry it. By
1963, barbecues, like cars, were icons of American leisure. As an
article in Reader’s Digest observed, “Cooking with charcoal . . . is
now as deeply ingrained in American life as the long weekend and the
servantless kitchen.”
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