The caveman grilleth

CHAPPAQUIDDICK -- Moroccan-style lamb ribs turn round and round on a gas rotisserie, getting darker by the minute, as the sound of crackling fat competes with birdsong. Wood chips bathe Caribbean pork ribs in smoke inside a huge charcoal grill, and the smell of dry-rubbed beef wafts over from yet another, smaller grill and mingles with the sea breeze.

Meat on the bone and over (or at least next to) the fire: It doesn't get any more old-school than that, as barbecue guru Steven Raichlen knows so well. Man's discovery of cooking led to nutritional -- and therefore evolutionary -- advantages, even the development of speech and the expansion of the brain. ``As I like to say, barbecue began civilization," he quips.

It's been, oh, a few hundred thousand years since man needed to rub two sticks together to spark a fire, and barbecue begins at the Raichlen summer place on Martha's Vineyard with matches, charcoal, paraffin, and chimney starters, or perhaps even with the pushing of a button. Nonetheless, the author, TV host, and teacher thinks the universal appeal of this style of cooking lies in our ``ancestral memory."

When it comes to barbecue, nothing brings out the inner caveman like a rib, the subject of his newest book, ``Raichlen on Ribs, Ribs, Outrageous Ribs" (Workman Publishing). ``Cut into a steak or a kebab, and somehow you can still deny that you're eating another animal," Raichlen says. ``But with ribs, it's carnivoria in all its glory."

The most flavorful meat is closest to the bone, which explains why ribs are so delectable to anyone but a vegetarian. And few among us can resist the appeal of finger food.

With such love for ribs, you'd think Americans would be rib-cooking experts to a person. Not so. People are ``terrorized" by them, Raichlen says: ``They don't know how to do it. Should I boil them, or not?" The question raises the ire of any barbecue aficionado, Raichlen included. ``I'm just telling you what I hear on the road," he says. ``On the one hand you have this food that everybody should know how to do, and on the other hand hardly anybody can make good ribs."

In other words, it was the perfect subject for Raichlen's no-nonsense approach to cookbook writing. His two dozen books include ``Barbecue! Bible," ``How to Grill," and others in a series that has more than 3.5 million copies in print in 10 languages, surely a testament to the rising popularity of outdoor cooking. According to the NPD Group, outdoor grill usage has climbed steadily over the last 20 years, and in 2005, 56 percent of Americans owned a gas grill and 30 percent owned a charcoal one.

While his books are known for their step-by-step details, glossaries, anatomy lessons, and equipment guides (not to mention the recipes), Raichlen's heart is in what lies behind a dish. He writes, for example, of how Caribbean pirates turned into ``the first European pit masters in the New World" after learning an Indian smoke-roasting technique they called boucan, which gave them their name: buccaneers.

``What makes my books interesting to me is using the food as a window into culture and history," he says, after putting down his BlackBerry as the three types of ribs sizzle on the three grills. ``Now if I wrote books that only did that, I would sell six copies, and that would be that. So I try to piggyback the message onto the actual food."

In the rib book, he sets out to teach a crash course on grilling and smoking them, and offers a primer on their global variations. Raichlen includes recipes for Korean and Texan takes on beef ribs; Mediterranean and Australian versions of lamb ribs; and Chinese- and Caribbean-style pork ribs.

His preferred method of cooking ribs is indirect grilling, in which the coals are piled on the sides and the meat goes in the center. It's a slower technique than grilling directly over the fire, but a departure from the ``low and slow" approach advocated by die-hard smokers. Raichlen keeps a grill's temperature at 325 to 350 degrees. ``When you work at a slightly higher heat like that, you melt the fat and sizzle the meat fibers so you get a little crusty chew, some nice crispness," he says.

Raichlen revels in playing the teacher, showing in his easygoing way how to easily remove the membrane from a beef long rib: Pry with a skewer or the tip of a meat thermometer, grab with a paper towel, and pull. But he prefers that his students get their hands dirty. ``Want to try one?" he asks. ``Let's make the food writer walk the walk and talk the talk."

He's a stickler for safety: On an island with only a single volunteer fire department, that's particularly crucial. Never light a gas grill with the lid closed, and check the burners to make sure they're lit before proceeding. Raichlen does depend on his big Vieluxe propane grill, especially since it includes a rotisserie attachment perfect for his lamb rib recipe (based on the ``mechoui" of Northern Africa), but he is under no delusions about its lack of smoking ability. Even if you rig up smoker boxes or trays inside a gas grill to add much-needed flavor, most of that smoke flies right out of the big vents in back, unless you block them with wadded-up aluminum foil -- and you should never do that without first turning off the burners.

Raichlen prefers using lump charcoal; it doesn't contain all the byproducts of briquettes, which can give food an acrid smell if not properly lit. For Lone Star beef ribs, which get a very simple rub, he pours the charcoal into two baskets in a Weber Performer grill, which uses a little propane tank just for lighting purposes. Once the charcoal in the baskets is lit and ashed over, he moves the baskets to opposite sides of the grill, places a foil pan between them, and lines up the so-called dinosaur ribs (individual beef long ribs) down the center of the grate over the pan.

He's a stickler for detail, too: ``So guys, meat - side up, and why is that? So that the melting fat will baste the meat as it cooks, bone - side down. And if I'm really thinking about this, we'd put the little ones on the inside because they don't take as long," he says. ``I do like to leave a quarter inch between each one, so that they cook on the sides."

To produce smoke, he soaks wood chips and throws them on coals, letting them do their thing for half the cooking time -- in this case 45 minutes for ribs that will take about 90 minutes to cook. To manage the fire, he adds more charcoal if the temperature dips too low and controls oxygen flow through the vents. When the visiting reporter closed the lid of the giant Weber Ranch kettle grill without opening the vents, it wasn't long before he noticed. ``OK, what's wrong with this picture?" he says with a smile. ``We're going to put out our fire."

And then there are the rubs, marinades, mops, and sauces. Raichlen rubs the beef ribs with a simple Texan mixture of mostly salt, pepper, and chili powder, while lamb ribs have been marinated in a Moroccan-style combination that includes ginger, coriander, cinnamon, and cardamom. Pork ribs, meanwhile, have been marinated in Caribbean spices, orange juice, and soy sauce.

Rather than making the rookie mistake of basting the ribs in gloppy, sugary sauces that will burn before the meat is done, Raichlen mops the beef ribs in a mix of beer, vinegar, and coffee. Since they're Texas-style, the barbecue sauce is served on the side. With the pork ribs, he instructs me to paint on a rum-based sauce once they're done, and then I set them onto the hot part of the grill to brown the glaze.

When are they done? There's a built-in pop-up thermometer: The ribs shrink back to expose some of the bone, 1/4 to 1/2 inch for the pork ribs and up to 3/4 inch for the beef long ribs. And there's the twist test: You should be able to tear the meat with your hands. (That's not to be confused with meat that's falling off the bone, which is a misunderstanding of what constitutes a perfectly cooked rib.) ``Ribs should not be fall-off-the-bone tender," he says. ``If they are, they've probably been boiled. And you should boil ribs on pain of death."

The man Oprah calls ``The Gladiator of Grilling" didn't set out to become such a barbecue expert. A French literature graduate from Reed College in Oregon, he studied medieval cooking while on a Watson Fellowship for independent study and travel. (``I conned them out of a year of eating and drinking through Europe," he says.) He trained at La Varenne cooking school in Paris, was restaurant critic for Boston magazine in the 1980s, ran a cooking school in New Hampshire, and moved to Miami when he married his wife, Barbara, in 1990.

He had already written ``Miami Spice" and other books before he ``followed the fire" and decided to study barbecue around the world. What was originally going to be a 100-recipe book for Workman took him to 25 countries and five continents in four years; the result was the award-winning, 500-recipe ``Barbecue! Bible." It was so successful, he considered taking the approach to another subject, i.e. ``Noodle Bible," but lost interest because he couldn't get the smoke out of his eyes, literally or metaphorically.

``There was an evening that may or may not have included a controlled substance, when I thought of all the things one could do with barbecue," he says. ``I thought, I want to have a series of books, I want to have a TV show, and I want to have a school, and I want to have a website, and I want to have a line of products, and I want to have a grill, you know, and a restaurant. In the last 10 years, I've been working through the list."

He's gotten pretty far. He teaches six sell-out sessions a year of Barbecue University at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia; a TV show based on the school, ``Barbecue University with Steven Raichlen," is in its fourth year on PBS. He's rolled out dozens of products, from a chimney starter and grill brush to chips, rubs, and sauces. The only two left are a grill and a restaurant, and he's working on both.

Raichlen is also working on a documentary about the history of barbecue, researching among prehistorians and even traveling to Marseilles to watch a man show how to make a fire the old-fashioned way: with a bow and spindle. It was a long way from Martha's Vineyard and all the paraphernalia that helps Raichlen and his wife easily grill their favorite food of the season.

Which isn't ribs, by the way. When one local market's boat pulls up for a delivery to the Chappaquiddick ferry dock on certain mornings, at least one of the Raichlens is waiting -- to pick up some just-harpooned swordfish.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.