Written By: Ben Cosgrove
If there’s one consolation during the scorching, often unbearably humid days of summer, it’s the prospect of being outdoors with friends and family, swapping stories and enjoying a cold beverage as a huge variety of food cooks on a nearby grill, filling the air with the mouthwatering aroma of a good old-fashioned barbecue.
Here, LIFE.com offers up a selection of photographs celebrating one of the season’s time-honored traditions: the picnic and barbecue, or barbeque, or BBQ. However you spell it, it still translates as “delicious.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
Backyard barbecue, 1953
Gordon Parks Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
One of only thirteen American women — known as the Mercury 13 — to participate in NASA’s Mercury space program, Jerrie Cobb (left) barbecues in 1959.
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Jerrie Cobb keeps watch over the grill, 1959.
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictrues/Shutterstock
Barbecue, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Family barbecue, 1960
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Family barbecue, 1960
Ralph Crane TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Beach barbecue, Massachusetts, 1953
Eliot Elisofon TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Beach barbecue, Florida, 1956
Lisa Larsen TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
UCLA fraternity picnic and barbecue, 1940s.
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Florida barbecue, 1961
Lynn Pelham Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Vermont barbecue, 1957
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Vermont barbecue, 1957
Walter Sanders TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
John D. Lodge (in the suit), the governor of Connecticut from 1951-55, surveys the scene at a salmon barbecue in 1953.
Ed Clark TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Fairfield County barbecue, Connecticut, 1949
Nina Leen TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
