No one is quite sure of the exact date of the first hog roast. My best guess would be about the same time our ancestors discovered beer. Now I'm not saying that you have to drink adult beverages to enjoy a hog roast...but a roasted hog is the ultimate centerpiece! My idea of a perfect summer night is a bunch of friends, a few cold ones and a golden brown hog ready to carve, steaming hot in the carving pan. Hogs have been cooked various ways over the years. I'm going to list only three.

• The Hawaiians cook hogs buried in the ground in a pit lined with lava rock and red-hot coals.

• In Mississippi they build a block pit above the ground (no, it's not that they're too lazy to dig a hole...the clay is just too hard) and cook the hog butterfly style on top of a steel grate.

• Most folks roast their hogs on custom built cookers. These cookers are constructed out of everything from 55 gallon drums to mass produced custom roasters costing tens of thousands of dollars.