Barbecuing is, of course, a beloved American culinary pastime based around cooking foods on the grill (or, historically, right over a fire).
Shrimp prepared this way can be the highlight of any cookout, but there's a version of "barbecue shrimp" hailing from New Orleans that never sees the flickering flames or smoldering coals of a grill at all
Instead, the regional specialty gets cooked the same way it always has -- sauteed in a pan -- since its creation at Pascal's Manale, a family-run restaurant near the Big Easy's Garden District neighborhood.
The "barbecue" in question refers not to an actual barbecue grill but to the color of the sauce that the shrimp are tossed and cooked in, which ends up somewhere between a ruddy beige and a rusty brown, depending on the spices used.
And while barbecue sauce has a history that precedes America's founding, the ubiquitous, sweet Kansas City-style stuff, at least, didn't start tantalizing taste buds nationally until the last quarter of the 20th century.
That makes the base for this sauteed shrimp dish one of the first renowned American barbecue sauces. The lack of a grill allows the shrimp to soak up as much of the highly seasoned sauce as possible.
New Orleans kitchens are famous for a range of robustly flavored foods, but perhaps none so much as their seafood dishes. Gumbo, crawfish étouffée, jambalaya -- it's a long list, and barbecue shrimp is absolutely a part of that heritage.