Grill your guests with some barbecue trivia:

• The most popular grilling and barbecuing days are: July Fourth, 75 percent of U.S. families cook out, followed by 65 percent on Memorial Day and 55 percent on Labor Day.

•The average U.S. household owns 1.2 grills and 89 million Americans own at least one grill. This means that there are approximately 107 million grills in our country.

• There are several theories about the origin of the word “barbecue.” One that has a lot of documentation is that it is derived from the French term, barbe a queue, which means that the whole animal has been cooked “from whiskers to tail.”

• Henry Ford was not only instrumental in the automobile industry, he also came up with the idea of charcoal briquettes. Being a waste not, want not kind of guy, he decided to burn the scraps left over from making the wooden parts of his cars and grind them into powder. He added a starch binder, then compressed them into small pillow-shaped pieces. Originally they were used for campfires. His buddy Thomas Edison designed the first charcoal briquette manufacturing plant.

Sources: “The Great Food Almanac,” Irena Chalmers.