a wordpit

The place the cooking happens. First a trench in the ground filled with hardwood coals, the split hog on a rack above; then a wide, shallow container of cinder block, brick or steel above ground, still a pit; then, at many places, a gas cooker, still the pit. The word also names the room, the building — a pit house — and the restaurant, as in Backyard BBQ Pit or Dickey's Barbecue Pit. A smokehouse is a different building: a windowless outbuilding where hams and bacon are cured in cold smoke for weeks, not a place a meal is cooked.

Pit is a Germanic borrowing of Latin puteus, a well; in Old English a hole, a well, a grave and hell. The barbecue pit was that hole: Wikipedia's article on pit barbecue describes meat cooked buried below ground, an earth-oven practice of Indigenous peoples. The whole-hog article has the pit dug into the earth or built above it as a wide, shallow container, usually of cinder blocks, filled with charcoal burned down from wood in a fireplace or a burn barrel; the South Carolina Encyclopedia gives the traditional pit as an open pit fuelled by hardwood coals in a rectangular cement-block structure, the meat suspended above. NCpedia says few commercial pits today are dug in the ground; the whole-hog article says new restaurants mostly use gas-fired pits and many older ones have switched. At the Skylight Inn the pit crew makes its charcoal from oak and hickory logs in fireplaces beside the pits. Ed Mitchell co-founded a Raleigh restaurant called The Pit. Inference — a word that survived the loss of the hole survived the loss of the fire: the pit is wherever the barbecue is made, and the name on the sign says so.