Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Read online

  In Hesiod’s Theogony, Prometheus first incurred Zeus’s wrath by playing a trick on him during the ritual sacrifice of an ox at Mecone. Prometheus hid the best cuts of beef inside a nasty-looking ox stomach but wrapped the bones in an attractive layer of fat. Prometheus then offered Zeus his choice of sacrificial offerings, and the Olympian, deceived by the “glistening fat,” opted for the bones, thereby leaving the tasty cuts of beef for the mortals. This set a new precedent for animal sacrifices—henceforth men would keep the best cuts for themselves, and burn the fat and bones for the gods, as indeed is the custom observed throughout the Odyssey. (What Henry Fielding called “Homer’s wonderful book about eating.”)

  Infuriated, Zeus retaliated by hiding fire from man, making it difficult, if not impossible, for men to enjoy their meat. Indeed, without the cook fire humans are no better than animals, which must eat their meat raw.* Prometheus then proceeded to steal it back, hiding the flames in the pith of a giant fennel stalk. In retribution, Zeus chained Prometheus eternally to a rock (where his liver became the unending feast—the raw meat—of another creature) and sent down to mortal men a world of trouble, in the form of Pandora, the first woman.

  In Hesiod’s telling, the Prometheus story becomes a myth of the origin of cooking, an account of how animal sacrifice evolved into a form of feasting, thanks to Prometheus’ daring reapportionment of the sacrificial animal to favor man. It is also a story about human identity—how the possession of fire allowed us to distinguish ourselves from the animals. But the fire in question—the fire that elevates us above the beasts—is specifically a cook fire, and what had been strictly a religious observance—a burnt offering of an entire animal to the gods in a gesture of subservience—becomes a very different kind of ritual, one with the power to bind the human community together in the sharing of a tasty meal.

  The dining room of the Skylight Inn could not be much less ceremonial: wood-grain Formica tables scattered beneath fluorescent lights; a sign over the counter with old-timey snap-in plastic letters listing your options; faded newspaper and magazine clippings about the establishment, and portraits of the forefathers, decorating the walls. By the door, a glass case proudly displays the restaurant’s James Beard Award from 2003.

  But there is one ceremonial touch: Directly behind the counter where you place your order sits an enormous chopping block, a kind of barbecue altar where one of the Joneses, or their designated seconds, officiates at lunch and dinner, chopping with heavy cleavers whole hogs in full view of the assembled diners. The maple-wood block is nearly six inches thick, but only at the perimeter. So much pork has been chopped on it that the center of the block has been worn down to a thickness of only an inch or two.

  “We flip it over every year or so, and then, when that side wears down, we have to get a new one,” Samuel told me, with the glint I’d learned to recognize as a sign that a tasty BBQ sound bite was fast approaching. “Some customers look at our chopping block and say, Hey, there must be a lot of wood in your barbecue. We say, Uh-yeah, and our wood is better than most other people’s barbecue!”

  The dull rhythmic knock-knock-knock of cleaver hitting wood is the constant soundtrack of the Skylight dining room. (“That’s how you know you’re getting fresh barbecue,” says Uncle Jeff.) Above the chopper’s head, the menu board lists a succinct handful of choices: Barbecue sandwich ($2.75); barbecue in trays (small, medium, and large, from $4.50 to $5.50) and barbecue by the pound ($9.50); along the bottom, the sign promises “all orders with slaw and cornbread.” A few soft drinks, and that’s it. The only things on the menu that have changed since 1947 are the prices, and those not by all that much. (The price of a barbecue sandwich at the Skylight Inn undercuts that of a Big Mac—$2.99—at the McDonald’s in Ayden, one of the few instances where slow food beats fast food on price.) The next Skylight sound bite goes like this: “We got barbecue, slaw, and cornbread, that’s all,” Samuel recites. “When you come here, it’s not what you want, it’s how much of it you need.”

  As I waited at the counter to place my order (a barbecue sandwich and an iced tea), I watched Jeff chop and season barbecue. Seasoning consists of salt and red pepper, a generous splash of apple cider vinegar, and a few dashes of Texas Pete, a red-hot sauce that, curiously, is made in North Carolina. (I guess “Texas” is a superior signifier for spicy and authentic.) Wielding a cleaver in each hand, Jeff roughly chops big chunks of meat from different parts of the hog. This is what makes whole-hog barbecue special.

  “See, you got your ham, which is lean meat but can be a little dry, and then you got your shoulder, which is greasier [pronounced greazier] but more tender and moist, and of course there’s the belly meat, which is probably your juiciest cut. ’Course, there’s always some nice bark here and there.” Bark is BBQ terminology for the singed outer edges of the meat. “And then you got your skin [skeen], which lends some nice salty crunch. Chop them all together, not too fine, throw some seasoning on there and mix it in good, and that’s it right there: whole-hog barbecue.”

  Uncle Jeff insisted that I also take a tray of unseasoned barbecue, so I could see for myself that what’s going on here at the Skylight Inn does not in any way, shape, or form depend for its flavor or quality on “sauce.” This is a word he pronounces with an upturned lip and a slight sneer, suggesting that the use of barbecue sauce was at best a culinary crutch deserving of pity and at worst a moral failing.

  I tried the unseasoned barbecue first and it was a revelation: moist and earthy, with an unmistakable but by no means overpowering dimension of smoke. In fact, the meat had a flavor far subtler than what you would think could ever have issued from the smoking inferno of oak wood and hog out back. The variety of textures was especially nice—ham, shoulder, belly, bark—but it was the occasional mahogany shard of crackling dispersed through the mixture that really made the dish extraordinary: a tidy, brittle, irreducible packet of salt, fat, and wood smoke. (Bacon gives you some idea, but only an idea.) I suddenly understood, at a deep level, exactly what had overcome young Bo-bo when he touched the irresistible substance to his tongue: There is something life-altering about pork crackling.

  Though I think I enjoyed the seasoned barbecue in the sandwich even more. The sharpness of apple cider vinegar provides the perfect counterweight to the sweet unctuousness of the fat, of which there was plenty melted right into the meat, and also balances out the heaviness of the wood smoke. Together, the acid and red pepper brightened and elevated a dish that otherwise might have seemed a little too earthy.

  So this was barbecue. Right away I realized I had never before tasted the real thing, and I was converted. This was easily one of the tastiest, most succulent meat dishes I had ever eaten, and certainly the most rewarding $2.75 I’d ever invested in a sandwich. Barbecue: My first bite made me realize, with a cringing pang, that, as a Northerner, I’d already spent more than half of my life as a serial abuser of that peculiar word, which is to say, as a backyard blackener of steaks and chops over too-hot fires—over flames!—with a pitiable dependence on sauce. Even before I had finished my sandwich, I resolved to figure out how to make barbecue like this, to try to redeem that noble word, at home.

  There was so much going on in this sandwich. It wasn’t just all the different cuts of pork, which kept things interesting bite after bite, but also all that wood and time and tradition. This was the way barbecue had been prepared for generations here in eastern North Carolina, and, having done my reading in BBQ history, I could appreciate what an accurate reflection of this place and its past this sandwich offered. If a sandwich can be said to have terroir, that quality of place that the French believe finds its way into the best wines and cheeses, this sand
wich had it, a sense of place and history you could taste.

  Since the Europeans first set foot on these shores, the pig has been the principal meat animal in this part of the country. Indeed, the words “meat” and “pork” have been synonymous for most of Southern history. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto brought the first pigs to the American South in the sixteenth century. For centuries, the descendants of those hogs ranged freely in the Carolinas, feeding themselves on the abundant mast produced by the oak-and-hickory forest. This means that, at least before pigs were confined to farms, the flavors of the Eastern hardwood forest could find their way into their meat by two routes: first as acorn and hickory nuts and then as wood smoke. (Three ways, if you count the wood contributed by the chopping block.) These feral hogs were hunted as needed, or rounded up in the fall by the porcine equivalent of the cowboy. Hogs were so abundant that even slaves could enjoy them from time to time. And because a single animal yielded so much meat, to “cook a pig” in the South has always implied a special occasion, a gathering of the community.

  The practice of grilling whole pigs over wood fires came to the American South with the slaves, many of whom passed through the Caribbean, where they observed Indians cooking whole animals split and splayed out on top of green branches stretched over fire pits. Along with this technique, which the Indians called barbacoa (or at least that’s how it sounded to African and European ears), the slaves brought with them from the islands seeds of the red chili pepper, which became a key ingredient of barbecue seasoning.

  In the Carolinas the tradition of whole-hog barbecue has long been bound up with the rhythms of the tobacco harvest, which enlisted the entire community for a few crucial weeks every fall. After the men hauled the tobacco into the curing sheds, the women sorted and “poled” the big leaves on frames, and oak-wood fires were burned through the night to slowly dry them. Retrieving the hot coals produced by these fires and shoveling them into a pit to barbecue a whole hog became an autumn tradition, a way to celebrate the completion of the harvest and thank the workers for their labors. The patient rhythms of hanging and curing tobacco meshed neatly with the rhythms of slow cooking a pig over wood coals. I met black pit masters in North Carolina whose own childhood reminiscences of barbecue are tightly braided with memories of bringing in the tobacco in the fall, one of the rare occasions when blacks and whites worked, and feasted, side by side.

  Though barbecue is largely an African American contribution to American culture, it has always been equally prized by white Southerners, most of whom will freely acknowledge that the best pitmen have always been black. (And were called “pit boys” until uncomfortably recently.) The arrangement in place at the Skylight Inn—a white-owned establishment with a black pitman out back—is not atypical. But “good barbecue” has always been one subject on which black and white Southerners could agree, as the salt-and-pepper composition of the clientele here at the Skylight Inn attested. Even during the darkest days of segregation, blacks and whites patronized the same barbecue joints, despite the fact that, prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, they could not eat their barbecue in the same dining room. If the best barbecue in town happened to be at a black establishment, whites would line up at the take-out window; if it happened to be at a white joint, then blacks would line up at the window. Nowadays, barbecue restaurants are, in the words of John Shelton Reed and Dale Voldberg Reed, the preeminent historians of North Carolina barbecue, “a good deal more integrated than most other places of worship.”

  A large weight of significance for any one plate of food to bear, it is true, but there it all was: the beloved pig, the smoky traces of the local forest, the desultory rhythms of Southern life and labor, and the knotted strands of race—all that, and probably more I didn’t know, seasoning this most delicious and democratic sandwich, one that just about anybody could afford.

  And yet. I’m sorry to report that all was not sweetness and light here at the Skylight Inn. Well, sweetness, maybe: The slaw, finely ground and snowy white, was tooth-achingly sweet; so was the tea. The cornbread, steeped in grease, was imposingly leaden, albeit tasty. (Lard will do that.) But there was something else that threw a shadow over my meal, tasty as it was, something I was forcibly reminded of by Jeff Jones when he told me a little story about the lard in the cornbread. It made me realize that the Joneses’ proud efforts to stand their ground against the tide of modernity had failed in one important respect. Something had changed since 1947, and though it wasn’t so easy to see, it could not be overlooked.

  While we were in the cookhouse, Jeff had mentioned how in the old days he could put a pan beneath a pig roasting on the pit and by morning have collected all the lard he needed to make his cornbread. Not anymore. Now the pigs had so little fat on them that the restaurant had to purchase the lard for its cornbread. His point was that the hog had been reengineered in recent years to be a much leaner and faster-growing animal, one that, thanks to genetics, modern feed, and pharmaceuticals, is ready for slaughter several months before its first birthday. Jeff didn’t much like the modern hog—it wasn’t nearly as flavorful as the ones he remembered—but he reckoned we were stuck with it.

  “Pigs today, they live their whole lives indoors, standing on concrete, and they eat only what they’re fed. No wonder they don’t taste like they used to.” Samuel chimed in: “They’re all bulked up on steroids, too”—the hormones farmers often use to speed their growth.

  The Joneses seemed to know all about the brutal efficiencies of industrial pork production; it would be hard not to, living here on the coastal plain of North Carolina. In the CAFOs that have sprung up around Ayden, hundreds of thousands of pigs live accelerated lives jammed up against one another in gridded steel pens suspended over cesspools of their waste—animals, keep in mind, that are the equal of dogs in intelligence and sensitivity. To make them easier to inseminate, the breeding sows spend their lives in metal crates too small for them ever to turn around in. Following standard industry practice, farmers dock their piglets’ tails—clip them off with a pair of pliers—to create stubs so sensitive that the discouraged creatures will raise an objection when their fellow pigs, driven mad by the stress of their confinement, attempt to cannibalize them. I once paid a visit to such a CAFO—one not too far from here, in fact—and it was a place I won’t soon forget: a deep circle of porcine hell the stench and shrieking squeals of which I can still vividly recall.

  I suppose it is a testament to the Joneses, and all the signifiers of an earlier time they have so lovingly preserved, that I was able to suppress these thoughts and images long enough to enjoy my barbecue sandwich. We moderns are great compartmentalizers, perhaps never more so than when hungry. But there it is, the question I wanted very much to avoid since I’d first learned that the Skylight Inn was serving commodity pork: How authentic could “authentic barbecue” really be if the object of its tender ministrations was now this re-engineered and brutalized animal—the modern creation of science, industry, and inhumanity? Had the Skylight Inn’s elaborate fetish of tradition—the wood fires burning through the night, the smoldering coals so carefully arranged in the pits, the old-timey pitman tending to the pigs—become a cover for something very different, the moral and aesthetic equivalent of barbecue sauce?

  The Joneses didn’t think there was much to be done about the modern pig, and in this they fall very much into the mainstream of modern barbecue men: By now, “commodity pork” is the rule in Southern barbecue, and people old enough to remember something better, people like Jeff Jones, are few and far between. Sure, there are still a handful of farmers in North Carolina raising hogs outdoors the old-fashioned way, and, as I would discover, their meat w
as superior in every respect (yield of lard included). But there was just no way a restaurant could afford that kind of pork and still charge $2.75 for a barbecue sandwich. Today, that most democratic sandwich is underwritten by the most brutal kind of agriculture.

  But I guess that, with enough smoke, time, and maybe a little barbecue sauce, you can redeem any kind of pork, or at least seem to, because that sandwich did taste awfully good. One way to think about cooking, or the cooking of meat anyway, is that it is always doing something like this: effecting a transformation, psychological and chemical, that helps us (or at least most of us) enjoy something we might otherwise not be able to stomach, whether literally or figuratively. Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal facts of the matter (dead animal for dinner) and the dining-room table set with crisp linens and polished silver. In this, CAFO meat may be just an extreme instance of the general case, which has never been pretty. “You have just dined,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

  The problem is not a new one, and we flatter ourselves if we think we’re the first people to feel moral or spiritual qualms about killing animals for our supper. The ancient and widespread practice of ritual animal sacrifice suggests that such qualms have assailed humans for a very, very long time. Before drawing knife against throat, the Greek priests would sprinkle water on the sacrificial animal’s brow, causing it to shake its head in a gesture they chose to interpret as a sign of assent. Indeed, viewed in the coldest light, many of the elements of ritual sacrifice begin to look like a set of convenient rationalizations for doing something we feel uneasy about, but need or want to do anyway. The ritual lets us tell ourselves that we kill animals not for our dining pleasure but because God demands it; that we cook their meat over a fire not to make it tastier but because the rising smoke conveys the offering to the heavens; and that we eat the prime cuts not because they’re the most succulent, but because the smoke is all the gods really want.