From whole hogs to smoked fish and brisket, this all-American smoke-infused cooking style is as diverse as the US itself – and just as rich in history.

In the US, "barbecue" is both noun and verb – a familiar siren, calling from a squat cinder block building with its smoky aroma of meat and char. Depending where it's prepared, it could be a multi-napkin pulled pork sandwich, a tray of hand-sliced brisket or smoked chicken wings tangy with mayonnaise, accompanied by a litany of rib-sticking sides.

The country's wildly diverse barbecue canon evolved from a single style born during the 17th-Century colonial period in slaveholding states. "Barbecue required the hands and minds of enslaved Americans," said Dr Howard Conyers, a South Carolina-based aerospace engineer, pitmaster and barbecue historian. "They took Indigenous, European and African techniques and, through trial and error, put them all together."

While fire and meat are a global phenomenon, it was the enslaved workers in the US South who turned barbecue into something distinct. They dug trenches, filled them with hot coals and slow-cooked whole animals for plantation feasts, basting – or "mopping" – the meat with vinegar sauce.

As is so often the case, their innovation was born of necessity. "You could feed 50 people to 10,000 people in a day at a time when you didn't have refrigeration," said Conyers.

World's Table

BBC.com's World's Table "smashes the kitchen ceiling" by changing the way the world thinks about food, through the past, present and future.

Barbecue morphed from elite-funded banquet fare into everyday food as it spread from east to west with slavery and out of the south through the Great Migration.

And it's never stopped changing. The proteins shifted from whole animals to pork shoulders and ribs as barbecue moved from rural communities to cities, and as the nation's butchery and slaughterhouse industries grew. Sauces followed suit. Vinegar mop worked as a tenderiser, antimicrobial agent and insect repellent, but refrigeration and smaller cuts allowed for sweeter tomato-based sauces. Pits eventually evolved into cinder block constructions, and, in some regions, gave way to offset smokers with their gentle, indirect heat.

Today, a modern wave of chefs and immigrants are putting their own stamp on the tradition. And while there's still no single definition of American barbecue, here are seven iconic regional styles, plus an emerging bonus category, through which you can literally taste the history of the United States.

Ryan Mitchell, son of pitmaster Ed Mitchell, cooks whole hogs just like his father, uncles and his sharecropper grandfather before him: shovelling coals into a pit, laying an unseasoned, butterflied pig on top and cooking it for around 12 hours. Once tender, he chops the meat and seasons it with paprika and an apple cider- and hot pepper-spiked mop sauce.

Where to try it:

Ed Mitchell & Sons (available on Goldbelly)

Skylight Inn BBQ, Ayden, North Carolina

B's BBQ, Greenville, North Carolina

Scott's Bar-B-Que, Hemingway, South Carolina

Shuler's Barbecue, Latta, South Carolina

Sweatman's BBQ, Holly Hill, South Carolina

Rodney Scott's BBQ, Charleston, South Carolina

Using the whole hog is about as close as it comes to the US's earliest barbecue, and the technique survives almost exclusively in farming communities in the South Atlantic states of North Carolina and South Carolina. However, the end product has a few distinctions. Most North Carolina joints no longer apply the vinegar mop sauce during cooking, now using it more like a condiment. In South Carolina, sauce is often added toward the end of the smoke and might include mustard and/or tomato. "My county is a dividing line," said Conyers. "Half of Clarendon County uses vinegar-based sauce, and the half I grew up in introduced tomato and mustard."

And where North Carolina hogs are chopped, South Carolina pigs are smoked until tender enough to pull apart. In both states, plan on piling meat onto a bun or white bread and pairing it with coleslaw, green beans, collard greens and potatoes (boiled and in potato salad). South Carolina specialties include hash, a gravy of chopped meat and innards served over rice.

At first glance, Alabama's barbecue resembles that found in nearby Southern states, like Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, where pork shoulders and butts are doused in a tangy tomato-based sauce. Coleslaw, potato salad and baked beans are a near guarantee, and smoked whole chickens and pork ribs round out menus.

Where to try it:

Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, Decatur, Alabama

Whitt's Barbecue, Athens, Moulton and Decatur, Alabama

Saw's Barbecue, Birmingham, Alabama

Dreamland Bar-B-Que, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Archibald and Woodrow's BBQ, Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Golden Rule BBQ, Irondale, Alabama

Full Moon BBQ, Birmingham, Alabama

But in 1925, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama, radicalised the art of smoked chicken when Robert Gibson smoked his birds for three hours over hickory wood coals then dipped them into a modified mop sauce now known as Alabama white sauce – a combination of vinegar, lemon, salt, pepper and mayonnaise.

The fat in the mayonnaise locks in moisture, according to Chris Lilly, a fourth-generation pitmaster who has run Big Bob Gibson's pits since 1991 and is the winner of 17 Barbecue World Championships. Now, white sauce – which is also applied to smoked........

© BBC