Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Read online

  “Our powerful response to [these] odors may in part be a legacy of their prehistoric importance for animals, which have used them to recall and learn from their experiences,” McGee writes. That these plant scents and flavors provoke us is no accident. Cooked food, he suggests, is Proustian through and through, offering a rich trove of sensory evocations that take us off the frontier of the present and throw us back on the past, our own and, possibly, our species’. “In a sip of coffee or a piece of crackling there are echoes of flowers and leaves, fruit and earth, a recapitulation of moments from the long dialogue between animals and plants.” The fact that we are omnivores, creatures who need to consume a great many different substances in order to be healthy, might also predispose us to complexity in the scent and taste of our food. It signals biochemical diversity.

  It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate toward complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat, or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor—this stands for that—is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pigskin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined.

  These particular pigs were still somewhat underdetermined, however. The plan was to finish them at the barbecue, which was taking place in a parking lot downtown across from the old vaudeville theater for which the event was raising money. Aubrey and I rolled the pigs onto the hotel pans—they were considerably lighter now, much of the water having evaporated and the fat rendered out—and then carried them outside to a flatbed truck. Chained to the flatbed were three big pig-cookers, the same kind that had elicited gales of derision from the pit masters assembled in Oxford, Mississippi. These were simply 275-gallon steel oil tanks that had been laid on their side, cut in half, and hinged. A short chimney stuck out of the top of the thing; an axle with two wheels had been welded to the bottom on one end, and a trailer hitch on the other, so the cooker could be towed.

  The business district of downtown Wilson consists of a small grid of handsome streets, dominated by a handful of restored Beaux Arts buildings. These stolid limestone banks and office blocks were built in the first decades of the twentieth century, the city’s heyday. For a time, Wilson was one of the biggest tobacco markets in the region, but downtown today seems underutilized, at least on a Saturday, and our barbecue inconvenienced nobody. A big white tent had been erected on the empty parking lot; we rolled out and arranged the cookers along one side of it.

  I was surprised to see propane tanks mounted on the trailer hitches of the cookers. Ed lit them, and we put the pigs on to finish. Propane had somehow gone from barbecue abomination to convenience overnight. When I asked him about it, Ed explained, somewhat defensively, that he was using the gas not to cook the pigs but merely to keep them warm.

  The barbecue was still several hours off, but the sight of the big cookers, and the fine smells already emanating from them, began drawing people as if out of thin air almost right away. Already it seemed clear that the mere sight of Big Ed in the company of a smoking pig cooker put the people of Wilson in an exceptionally good mood. It was Saturday and there was going to be a barbecue.

  Actually, there were going to be two barbecues: a lunch and a dinner. Fifteen dollars bought you barbecue, coleslaw, rolls, and sweet tea. By noon, a crowd of two hundred or so had gathered for the first seating. When a critical mass of eaters had settled in, Aubrey and I opened the cookers and, wearing heavy black fireproof gloves, lifted off the first pig and brought it to the chopping block. Ed was shmoozing with the crowd that had gathered around us. We were going to be doing our cooking in public.

  Aubrey gave me the front half of the animal to work on while he went to work on the back. The first step was to pull all the meat from the skin, which we would later put back on the cookers to crisp. The fat fingers of the gloves permitted only the crudest manual operations: pulling big hunks of pork off the bones and blades in the shoulder, digging out chunks of cartilage, extracting the ribs, and removing various tubular structures and other anatomical anomalies present in the meat. Even through the big fat gloves, the steaming meat was almost unbearably hot, and I had to stop and remove them every so often to let my hands cool. Mostly, the meat fell easily off the bone, and before long we had before us a big pile of various pork parts—hams, loins, shoulders, bellies.

  It was time for Aubrey to start chopping. He wielded a big cleaver in each hand, and the knock-knock-knocking sound of steel on chopping block brought more people around to watch us. When the pile of meat he was chopping seemed too dry, Aubrey would ask me to toss in some shoulder or belly, and when it seemed too fatty, he’d call for more ham or loin, until the mixture seemed about right. Seasoning came next. Aubrey continued to mix the pork with his gloved hands while I added whatever ingredient he called for: nearly a gallon of apple cider vinegar, followed by fat handfuls of sugar, salt, and pepper, both red and black. I sprinkled the dry ingredients over the pork with an even, wrist-flicking motion that Ed had taught me: just like sowing seeds. Aubrey kneaded the seasoning into the mass of meat, pushing it back, then folding it forward, over and again, until he nodded at me to taste it. It tasted a little flat, which meant more vinegar. I splashed on another third of a gallon or so, and another handful of red-pepper flakes, which I figured couldn’t hurt since I knew Ed liked some spice in his barbecue. This did the trick.

  Now Ed showed me how to crisp the skin, which was nicely browned on one side but still rubbery and white with curds of fat on the other. I sprinkled several handfuls of salt on the fatty side, and threw the skin on the grill, while Ed cranked up the heat. “Keep flipping it or it’s liable to burn,” he warned. “When it won’t bend anymore and begins to blister, that means it’s ready.” Using a long pair of tongs, I flipped the broad page of skin, first this way then that. It took awhile, and the heat—of the day but especially of the hellish exhalation that hit me full in the face every time I lifted the lid on a cooker—was getting brutal. And then, all at once, the skin lost its pliability and turned to glass. Crackling!

  I moved the skin to the chopping block and, after it had had a moment to cool, took a cleaver to it. People were swarming us now—they knew all about crackling and didn’t want to wait for us to serve it. “Can I get me some of that skeeeen?!” became the question of the hour; we would hear it a hundred times before it was all over. “It’s coming, don’t worry, it’s coming.” The crackling shattered at the mere touch of the cleaver. I added handfuls of the brittle little shards into the meat. Another taste: perfect! Aubrey concurred; the barbecue was ready.

  By now I was drenched with perspiration, struggling in fact to keep the sweat beading on my brow from raining onto the meat, but this was fun, an adrenaline rush. These people were treating all three of us, and not just Ed, like we were some kind of rock stars. They really loved barbecue, we had the barbecue (plus the precious skeen) and we were in a position to give them what they craved. The man who mediates between the fire and the beast, and the beast and the beast eaters, has projected onto him a certain primal power: This is basic stuff, Anthro 101, but now I could actually feel it, and it felt pretty good.

  In my room at the Holiday Inn the night before, I had put myself to sleep reading a
book called The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, by a French and a Belgian classicist. The word “barbecue” never appears in the book, but the more I read about the role of the sacrificial feast in ancient Greece, the more it seemed to unlock what Ed had called “the power of this dish.” I became convinced that even today wisps of the smoke of ritual sacrifice linger over barbecue—indeed, shadow us, however faintly, whenever we cook a piece of meat over a fire.

  I don’t know about you, but I always skipped over the big eating scenes in Homer, barely even stopping to wonder why there were so many of them, or why Homer took the trouble to spell out so many seemingly trivial details: the ins and outs of butchery (“They flayed the carcass … and divided it into joints”), fire management (“When the flame had died down, [Patroclus] spread the embers, laid the spits on top of them”), the parceling out of portions (“Achilles served the meat”), table manners (“Face-to-face with his noble guest Odysseus … he told his friend to sacrifice to the gods”), and so forth. But according to The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks, there was good reason for Homer to dwell on these ritual meals. The sharing of cooked meat constituted the communal act among the ancient Greeks, as indeed it has done in a great many other cultures before or since. And doing it right takes some doing. Quite apart from its spiritual significance, the ritual sacrifice had three worldly purposes, purposes that will seem familiar to anyone who has cooked at a barbecue:

  To regulate the potentially savage business of eating meat,

  To bring people together in a community,

  And to support and elevate the priestly class in charge of it.

  Eating animals is, at least for humans, seldom anything less than a big deal. Being both desirable and difficult to obtain, meat is naturally bound up with questions of status and prestige, and because killing is involved, eating it is an act steeped in moral and ethical ambiguity. The cooking of meat only adds to the complexity. Before the advent of cooking over fire, “the meal” as we think of it probably didn’t exist, for the forager of raw food would have fed him- or herself on the go and alone, much like the animals do. Surpluses were probably shared, but what you found was yours, and you ate it when you got hungry. The cook fire changes all that, however.

  “The culinary act is from the start a project,” according to Catherine Perlès, the French archaeologist. “Cooking ends individual self sufficiency.” For starters, it demands collaboration, if only to keep the fire from dying out. The cook fire itself draws people close together, and introduces the unprecedented social and political complexity of the shared meal, which demands an unprecedented degree of self-control: patience while the meat is cooking, and cooperation when it is ready to be divided. Competition for cooked meat needs to be carefully regulated.

  This might help to explain why, in both ancient Greece and the Old Testament, the only time meat is eaten is as part of a carefully prescribed religious observance. It was either a ritual sacrifice, or more nuts and berries for dinner. And though the rules governing the ritual differ from culture to culture, even from occasion to occasion, one of them is universal. And that is simply the rule that there must be rules for cooking and eating meat, ideally a whole bunch of them. Rules, like salt, are the proper accompaniment for meat. For shadowing the eating of meat is always the horrific imagery of animals eating animals: lawlessness, unbridled greed, savagery, and, most frightening of all, cannibalism.

  Writing about the kashrut, or kosher rules, Leon R. Kass, the doctor and philosopher, points out, “Although not all flesh is forbidden, everything that is forbidden is flesh.” The rules spell out which kinds of animals must not be eaten, which parts of the permissible animals must not be eaten, and what foods can’t be eaten in the company of the permitted parts. Yes, there are kosher rules governing the consumption of plant foods, but none of them are outright prohibitions. The Greeks were equally legalistic about eating meat: Only domestic species could be sacrificed, the consumption of blood was forbidden (as it is in the kashrut), and elaborate protocols governed the apportioning of the different cuts.

  Beyond guarding against various forms of savagery, the rules governing ritual sacrifice are designed to promote community. The Cuisine of Sacrifice Among the Greeks describes the Greek ritual as an act of “alimentary communion.” Eating from the same animal, prepared according to the agreed-upon rules of the group, strengthens the ties binding the group together.* Sharing is at the very heart of ritual sacrifice, as indeed it is in most forms of cooking.

  Many, if not most, modern commentators on the Old Testament regard the specific rules that constitute the kashrut as more or less arbitrary; so do most anthropologists. Contrary to what I was taught as a child, pork is no more dangerous to eat than any other meat. Yet however arbitrary such prohibitions may be, they retain the power to knit us together, help forge a collective identity: We are the people who don’t eat pork. Many of the rules regulating sacrifice in Leviticus make little sense unless understood in this light—as forms of social glue. For example, in one kind of sacrifice, it is specified that all the meat must be eaten before the second day is over, an injunction that ensures it will be shared among the group rather than hoarded by any individual.

  Perhaps this is the best light in which to make sense of the endlessly intricate legalisms of the various schools of Southern barbecue: as rules governing “acts of alimentary communion” that help to define and strengthen the community. Whole-hog barbecue stands out as a particularly powerful form of communion, in which the meat is divided among the eaters according to a notably democratic protocol. Everyone gets a taste of every cut, eating not just from the same animal but from every part of that animal, the choice and the not-so-choice. But at bottom most of the rules of barbecue, spelling out what is and is not acceptable in species of animal, animal part, sauce, fuel, and fire, are as arbitrary as the kashrut, rules for the sake of rules, with no rational purpose except to define one’s community by underscoring its differences from another. We are the people who cook only shoulders over hickory wood and put mustard in our barbecue sauce. Prohibitions multiply like weeds. No propane, no charcoal, no tomato, no ribs, no chicken, no beef.

  “So barbecue is basically like kashrut for goys,” a friend put it as I labored to explain the subtle distinctions between the various denominations of Southern barbecue. The sentence I heard more than any other from the pit masters I interviewed, from the Carolinas to Texas and Tennessee, would have to be the one they wielded when speaking of any other tribe’s cooking rituals: “Okay, but that’s not barbecue.” Whatever else the food in question might be, it didn’t conform to the traditional rules of the group. It wasn’t kosher.

  The third function of ritual sacrifice is to elevate and support the priestly or noble class that performs it. In this, the ritual is no different from any other political institution. It is concerned foremost with the perpetuation of its own power. Great prestige accrues to the man who officiates at the ritual sacrifice, killing the animal, cutting it up, cooking it, and dividing the meat. In ancient Greece, women and slaves did most of the everyday cooking, but when the occasion called for a ritual meal, whether to mark the beginning or conclusion of a military campaign, or the arrival of an honored guest, or a day otherwise made large by history, the men performed the honors. Odysseus, Patroclus, even Achilles man the cook fires themselves, at no cost to their prestige; to the contrary, this sort of festal cooking enhances it. The rules in Leviticus all serve to enhance the authority of the priest performing the sacrifice, taking special care to specify precisely which portion of the animal should be allotted to the priest himself. The commentators suggest that the requirement that ritual accompany all
meat eating was, among other things, a way to make sure the community supported its priestly class—by feeding it.

  The pit master seasoning his barbecue at the altar of the chopping block—indeed, even the husband presiding over his Weber in the backyard—is drawing on whatever remains of this age-old cultural capital. That any such capital endures more than two millennia hence strikes me as both marvelous and slightly absurd. Which is why you’ve really got to hand it to these latter-day masters of fire, smoke, meat, and community. The barbecue men have done a masterful job keeping the old show going.

  My own solo turn on the barbecue stage came that evening, during the second seating in Wilson. Aubrey, it seems, was only being paid for a twelve-hour shift, so when six o’clock rolled around he simply disappeared. I never got to say good-bye. Since part of the event’s draw was supposed to be a barbecue lecture and demo by local hero Ed Mitchell, this meant I would be on my own at the chopping block while he took the microphone. Ed seemed surprisingly unperturbed by this turn of events, and since no one had told me Aubrey had gone off the clock, I barely had time to get nervous.

  It seems to me that authentic whole-hog barbecue (if I may use that term) is not something you ever want to pay someone to do by the hour. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that this method of cooking, which demands so much more time than effort, would ever have taken root in a society where wage labor was the norm. The rhythms of barbecue are much better suited to the premodern economics of sharecropping or slavery. Such an economy, combined with the heat, helped make a certain slowness—as much as pork or wood smoke—a key ingredient in Southern cooking, and Southern culture more generally. “Southerners have been known to be slow traditionally in doing certain things,” Sy Erskine, the Alabama pit master, told a journalist. “It transfers right on to the cooking of the food. They sit down and take their time and let that meat cook instead of rushing things on and off the fire. It is a tradition strictly of the South.”