Lansing honors inventor of chicken barbecue

As the flowers begin to bloom and the weather begins to grow warmer, a staple of the spring and summer seasons has returned to Lansing: chicken barbecues.

On Friday morning, Lansing honored the inventor of the chicken barbecue, Bob Baker, who helped to create many intangible memories of community gatherings and great chicken barbecue dinners.

Baker died in 2006 at 84. Friday, a barbeque chicken pit was designated in his name next to the Lansing Community Library. He was honored for inventing chicken barbecue sauce and the concept of a community coming together for a fundraising barbecue while he was teaching at Cornell University in the early 1950s.

The idea for a chicken barbecue sauce came when Baker was a graduate student at Penn State University in the late 1940s. At the time, chicken was not the common staple it is today.

Dale Baker, son of Bob Baker, said a broiler system was established after his father arrived at Cornell following his graduate studies. That system allowed chicken to be ready for the market earlier than normal.

It gave Bob an idea: with the sauce he had produced at Penn State, there was potential for a community gathering where people could enjoy fellowship around barbecued chicken and the sauce he had developed at Penn State.

“Chicken up until that time was a fairly expensive meat — you would eat it rarely for Sunday dinner or something like that,” Dale said. “All of a sudden, they had a source of chicken that was much less expensive, and that’s when they started the idea of the barbecue.”

On a brisk morning, in the parking lot that serves both the Lansing Community Library and the Lansing Parks and Recreation fields, a sign and a pavilion from the William C. Pomeroy Foundation were dedicated, memorializing Bob.

The Savage Club of Ithaca hosted a drive-through chicken barbecue as a fundraiser for the club. President Jack Roscoe said the club was proud to be part of the event.

“[Bob] invented the chicken barbecue for two reasons: to increase chicken sales, which was his main mission at Cornell, and to combine with the perfect fundraising opportunity for local fire departments and things like that,” he said. “We’re very happy to memorialize Bob Baker’s involvement in the nonprofit and chicken world for the last 70 years.”

When Bob first invented the sauce that accompanies so many chicken barbecues in Lansing and other communities, it was met with little excitement.

It was the late 1940s, and he was a graduate student. Poultry sales were low throughout the country. After he arrived at Cornell, it became clear to him that there was something he could do to help poultry farmers and the community.

He decided to start hosting chicken barbecues, where the chicken breasts were blanketed with the sauce he had developed at Penn State, to raise money for local organizations.

During the initial barbecues, he used the pork roast method of spinning the piece of chicken over an open flame, but after getting on his hands and knees to turn the chicken, he knew there was a more efficient way.

As a result, the barbecue chicken pit that is a fixture of many rural community centers and fire halls was born.

“Fortunately for him, he worked on the agricultural side of the university, so he worked with economists and people in agricultural engineering, poultry science, food science,” Dale said. “He had a lot of help from other people to do the design work.”

Once the design for the barbecue pit was formed, it became Bob’s mission to spread the concept of the chicken barbecue across New York state.

In the 1950s, he worked with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County to spread the idea of building barbecue pits in different towns throughout New York. Dale said his father estimated that he served roughly 1 million chickens during the 1950s.

Not only did Bob help spread awareness about what a chicken barbecue pit could do for organizations trying to raise funds, but he also helped organizations build those pits.

“He was very much a land-grant sort of guy,” Dale said. “He saw his role as working with the poultry industry within the state and working with people to have a food that was healthy and inexpensive. He thought it was a key issue.”

While teaching at Cornell, Bob continued to change the poultry industry by creating different uses for chicken. In addition to starting the concept of the chicken barbecue, Bob also invented the chicken nugget and the chicken hot dog.

“It tastes like a beef hot dog,” Dale said. “Product development was something he spent a lot of time on throughout his career, but the chicken barbecue idea was really near and dear to him.”

Dale said after the 1950s, much of the poultry industry in the United States moved south to Maryland and Virginia.

What Bob never stopped believing, according to Dale, was that poultry was important to New York farming. Dale said his father looked to beef to try to understand how to create different ways to use chicken.

“If you go back a couple generations, [chicken] was not accessible, and there was not a lot of it,” Dale said. “One of the things he used to tell me about all the beef products out there is that he used it as a model to develop his chicken products.”

Upstate New York has been home to many food inventions. The chicken spiedie was founded in Binghamton, and the chicken wing was founded in Buffalo. Thanks to the Bob Baker Memorial barbecue pit, Lansing now has its celebration of its own food invention.

The dedication, Dale said, is more than just a pavilion and a sign. Both of those celebrate the legacy of a person from Lansing who changed communities in upstate New York more than 70 years ago.

The plaque, according to Dale, is well earned.

“It’s something he deserves,” he said. “I think it’s great and excellent.”

Lansing at Large appears every Wednesday in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@VizellaMedia.com.