Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation Read online

  It may well be that animals are “pre-adapted” to prefer the smells, tastes, and textures of cooked food, having evolved various sensory apparatus to steer them toward the richest sources of energy. Attractive qualities such as sweetness, softness, tenderness, and oiliness all signify abundant, easy-to-digest calories. A hardwired preference for high-energy foods would explain why our evolutionary ancestors would immediately have appreciated cooked foods. In speculating as to exactly how early humans would have discovered all the good things fire does to food, Wrangham points out that many animals scavenge burned landscapes, enjoying particularly the roasted rodents and seeds. He cites the example of chimpanzees in Senegal, who will eat the seeds of the Afzelia tree only after a fire has passed through and toasted them. It seems likely that our ancestors would also have scavenged among the remains of forest fires, looking for tasty morsels and, perhaps occasionally, getting lucky enough to have the sort of transformative experience that Bo-bo, the swineherd’s son in Charles Lamb’s story, did when he first touched that bit of crackling to his tongue.

  Like any such theory—indeed, like evolution itself—the cooking hypothesis is not subject to absolute scientific proof. For that reason, some will no doubt dismiss it as another “just so” story, Prometheus in modern scientific garb. But, really, how much more can we expect when trying to account for something like the advent of ourselves? What the cooking hypothesis gives us is a compelling modern myth—one cast in the language of evolutionary biology rather than religion—locating the origins of our species in the discovery of cooking with fire. To call it a myth is not to belittle it. Like any other such story, it serves to explain how what is came to be using the most powerful vocabulary available, which in our case today happens to be that of evolutionary biology. What is striking in this instance is that classical mythology and modern evolutionary theory both gazed into the flames of the cook fire and found there the same thing: the origins of our humanity. Perhaps that coincidence is all the confirmation we can hope for.

  III.

  Intermission: A Pig’s Perspective

  I can attest from personal experience to the fact that animals are just as attracted as humans and gods are to the aroma of food cooked over a fire, barbecue included and perhaps especially. This story is hard to believe, but it is true in every particular. The first particular is that, as a teenager, I briefly owned a pig, a young white sow by the name of Kosher. My father gave me the pig; he also gave the pig its perverse name. I’m still not entirely sure why my father gave me a pig. We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment on the eleventh floor, and I certainly hadn’t asked for one. But ever since reading Charlotte’s Web, I had liked the idea of pigs, and collected pig books and pig figurines and such. Yet as is sometimes the way with even mild predilections like mine, other people take them far more seriously than you do. Before long, I found myself with a bedroom-full of pig paraphernalia to which, at least by the time I was sixteen, I was more or less indifferent.

  But my father got it into his head that a real live pig was just what I wanted, so he had his secretary track down a piglet on a farm in New Jersey and one evening brought it home in a shoe box. This was not a pot-bellied pig, not a miniature pig of any kind. No, Kosher was a standard Yorkshire sow, destined to grow to a quarter of a ton or more if nothing was done to stop her. At the time, we lived in a doorman building, a co-op on the Upper East Side; the co-op allowed pets, but I was fairly sure a full-grown pig didn’t qualify.

  Luckily, for most of the time I had Kosher, it was summer and we were living in a cottage on the beach. The cottage stood on stilts in the sand, and Kosher lived beneath the deck; pigs are susceptible to sunburn (one of the reasons they like mud so much), so I fenced in the shaded area beneath the house as her pen. Kosher was the size of a football when I got her; she could, and did, fit in a shoe box. However, that didn’t last very long. To paraphrase Galen the Physician, she was a voracious animal, feeding constantly and eliminating incessantly. Often in the middle of the night, Kosher would empty her bowl of pig chow, flip it over with an expressive clatter, and then unleash a chorus of deep guttural grunts to alert me to her hunger. When that didn’t produce a biped at her gate with a bucket of lunch, Kosher would take to butting the wooden posts with her powerful snout until the seismic shaking of the cottage woke me. Some nights, having run out of pig chow, I was forced to empty the entire contents of the refrigerator into her bowl, not just the produce and leftovers, but everything, down to the eggs, milk, soda, pickles, ketchup, mayonnaise, and cold cuts, including once (I’m ashamed to admit) a few slices of Virginia ham. Kosher ate it all, with a gusto that never failed to impress me. She ate like a pig.

  But that isn’t the story. The story is of the evening Kosher’s Falstaffian appetite got us both into trouble with the neighbors. Every now and then, when Kosher was feeling peckish or had caught a whiff of something good to eat, she would make a break for it, forcing her snout under the fencing and squeezing her muscular body through the gap. Usually she would head for the nearest garbage can, topple it, and feast on its contents. The neighbors were getting used to this sort of thing, and I was getting used to apologizing, cleaning up after her, and then corralling her back into her pen with the promise of a tasty morsel. But on this particular summer evening, just before sunset, Kosher must have raised her snout into the breeze and detected a few molecules of something even better than garbage: the scent of the smoke of meat on the grill. She made her escape and began working her way up the line of cottages along the beach, until she had located the source of the aroma.

  What happened next I learned from the neighbor in question within a few minutes of his visit from Kosher. When it happened, this fellow was sitting on his deck, sipping a gin and tonic, and taking in the last pastel light of the summer day as his dinner sizzled on the grill. Like just about everyone on our strip of beach, this man was a well-to-do New Yorker or a Bostonian, maybe a lawyer or businessman, but likely not a person with much experience of hogs, except perhaps in the form of hams, chops, and strips of bacon. Hearing the clatter of hoof on wood, he looked up from his summer reverie to find a pinkish-white creature the size of an extremely short-legged Labrador bounding up the steps to his deck, grunting furiously. This was no dog. Kosher had evidently locked on to the scent of grilling meat, and when she arrived at last at its source, she worked with the efficiency and speed of a commando, knocking over the barbecue and making off with the man’s steak.

  Only a few minutes earlier, I had stepped outside to feed Kosher and discovered she had gone missing. I tracked her movements up the beach—most of the neighbors were on their decks, and had spotted her heading north—and arrived at the scene of the crime only a few minutes after Kosher had scurried off with a partially grilled steak clamped between her jaws. To my great good fortune, either Kosher’s victim had an excellent sense of humor or his gin-and-tonic had put him in particularly high spirits, because he was doubled over with laughter as he recounted what Kosher had done. I apologized profusely, offered to drive to town to replace his dinner, but he waved me off, declaring the story was worth far more than the price of any steak. The man was still cracking up when I left him to go track down my fugitive hog.

  It was long overdue: the Pig’s Revenge on Barbecue. I have to think that if hogs had their own mythology, in which they passed down tales of heroism from one generation to the next, the daring achievement of my pig would figure prominently in it: Kosher, the porcine Prometheus.

  IV.

  Raleigh, North Carolina

  Now, of course, to a Southerner, Kosher’s theft wasn’t a theft of barbecue, not really: Only a deluded Northerner would ever refer to a steak grilled over an open fir
e as “barbecue.” Southerners will argue without end about the precise definition of the word—and in fact any comprehensive definition of barbecue would have to include the fact that it is a food the definition of which is endlessly being contested—but to qualify for the term this cooking must include at a minimum meat, wood smoke, fire, and time. Beyond that, the definition of barbecue changes state by state, and even county by county. I have a map over my desk called “The Balkans of Barbecue.” It purports to depict the different barbecue regions of the Carolinas, and superimposed over a map of the two states are the outlines of five distinct barbecue cantons: whole-hog here, shoulders there, strictly vinegar east of this line, tomato-based sauce to the west, mustard-based sauce to the south and east.

  And that’s only the Carolinas. The map stops before you get anywhere near the ribs of Tennessee or the smoky briskets of Texas, which, because they’re beef, no Carolinian would deign to call barbecue. Every one of these barbecue nations regards the practices of every other as an abomination. As you might expect, the trash talking among pit masters is endlessly inventive. Damning with faint praise is one common rhetorical strategy. Once, when I asked someone in Texas to assess the quality of a fellow Texan’s barbecued brisket, he allowed, in a drawl, that though his brisket was “goooood, it wasn’t knock-your-dick-in-the-dirt good.”

  Perhaps the most generous definition of barbecue I’ve come across attempts to bridge all these regional differences. Put forward by a black pit master from Alabama named Sy Erskine, this definition diplomatically elides the whole vexed issue of sauce; it also hints at the sacramental quality of barbecue. Barbecue, he told a writer, is “the mystic communion among fire, smoke, and meat in the total absence of water.”* I suspect most Southerners could rally under that broad banner. But the other thing they could agree on? That my own Northerner’s conception of barbecue—which wasn’t even clear as to whether the word referred to the cooking process or the apparatus used in that process or the resulting food or the accompanying sauce—was just wrong. I had been in North Carolina long enough now to know at least this: “Barbecue” is a noun (not a verb) that refers either to a social event or to the kind of food prepared and served at that event.

  Thus far my own experience of Southern barbecue had been limited to observer and eater. Though I had now tasted the food, I had not yet been to a real barbecue. So I left Ayden with an aspiration: to see if I could learn at least a few of the secrets of barbecue, by apprenticing myself to one of its masters, and not in a kitchen but at a barbecue. I didn’t want to watch anymore. I wanted to do.

  Before I came to North Carolina, I thought I had done and knew something about how to barbecue; I do it all the time at home. As for most American men, the cooking of meat outdoors over fire constitutes one of my most exalted domestic duties. And like most American men, I do a fine job of mystifying what is at bottom a very simple process, such a fine job, in fact, that my wife, Judith, is by now convinced that grilling a steak over a fire is as daunting a procedure as changing the timing belt on the car.

  Indeed, North or South, it is remarkable how much sheer bullshit seems to accrete around the subject of barbecue. No other kind of cooking comes even close. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but it may be that cooking over fire is actually so straightforward that the people who do it feel a need to baste the process in thick layers of intricacy and myth. It could also be that barbecue is performed disproportionately by self-dramatizing men. For my own part, I made much of my special talent for determining the doneness of a chunk of grilled meat, which involved touching the meat on the grill and then, with the same finger, touching various sectors of my face. If the meat responds to pressure like my cheek does, that means it is rare; if it feels more like my chin, it’s medium; if like my forehead, then it’s well done. I’d seen some chef demonstrate the technique on television and it seemed to work, not just as a handy metric but, much more important, as a further aid to mystification. Judith has come to doubt her own face could possibly work as well.

  It’s a pretty good racket. Or at least I thought it was until someone let me in on the secret that many women play dumb around the whole subject of fire, in order to make sure that men do at least some of the cooking.

  But that barbecue sandwich at the Skylight Inn had persuaded me that my definition of barbecue was faulty and that there was a lot more involved in cooking over a fire than I knew—which was, basically, how to throw meat on a blazingly hot grill and then, after a while, poke at it knowingly. What I needed was a pit master willing to let me work as his sous chef, or whatever the barbecue cognate of that role was. James Howell was clearly too taciturn and inaccessible to be that mentor, and the Joneses didn’t seem inclined to let me get my hands dirty (or burned) in their cookhouse.

  As it happened, the pit master I was looking for would appear in my life the very next day. That’s when I had an interview scheduled with a celebrated North Carolina barbecue man who had a restaurant in Raleigh called The Pit. Ed Mitchell is his name, and I had heard a great deal about him before flying out to North Carolina—in fact had seen his picture on the front page of the New York Times, after he had wowed the crowd with his whole-hog barbecue at the first Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City in 2003. By now Ed Mitchell was nationally famous, had been all over television, had had his oral history taken by the Southern Foodways Alliance, among others, and been profiled over the years in several national magazines, including Gourmet.

  None of this boded well for eliciting more than a few well-sanded sound bites from the guy, who in the pictures looked like quite the showman, a big black Santa Claus in denim overalls and a baseball cap. Of concern, too, was the fact that his barbecue joint served wine and had valet parking, and that a wag on one of the restaurant blogs had dismissed the place as “a barbecue zoo.” But I had learned that over the following weekend Mitchell would be cooking a pig at a benefit barbecue in Wilson, his hometown, some distance from the putative zoo in Raleigh. So I decided that I would call Mitchell, and if he seemed even remotely amenable, I would ask him if I might tag along and assist.

  Ed Mitchell just might be the first pit master in history to have handlers. Before I could talk to him I had to go through his people at Empire Eats, the Raleigh restaurant group that owned The Pit, or 51 percent of it anyway. The backstory, I quickly learned, was complicated. Ed Mitchell had lost his original restaurant, Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue, in Wilson, after a legal tussle with the bank and the State of North Carolina, which in 2005 had charged him with embezzlement for his failure to remit various state taxes. (Later, I would hear Mitchell refer to his legal and financial difficulties as a case of “orchestrated turbulence.”) The charges against him were eventually reduced to tax evasion, but Mitchell spent some time in jail and the bank foreclosed on his restaurant. After his release, Mitchell was approached by Greg Hatem, a young local real-estate developer who’d made a reputation revitalizing Raleigh’s faded downtown district. The key to luring people back downtown, Hatem had figured out, was to open some good restaurants there. Now, in Ed Mitchell, he recognized a rare opportunity: one of the most famous barbecue men in the country down on his luck and without a stage. Hatem proposed a 51–49-percent partnership; Ed would run the pits and the front of the house, while Greg’s people would manage the business side—evidently Ed’s Achilles’ heel. The Pit would be a whole new kind of barbecue restaurant, an upscale place with good lighting, a wine list, and valet parking.

  To many in the barbecue world, this seemed a dubious concept at best, the most withering appraisal being the one I’d read online suggesting the South’s greatest black pitman had been caged in a barbecue zoo. Someone else said Ed Mit
chell had become the Colonel Sanders of barbecue. The Pit seemed to put the whole question of authenticity, never far from discussions of barbecue and always vexed, in deeper doubt than ever. Yet there was no denying the dubious concept was working. The Pit was packed for both lunch and dinner, and the barrier of the $10 barbecue sandwich had been successfully breached.*

  When I finally got Ed on the phone, I had the feeling I often did when talking to an experienced pitman—that I’d opened the spigot on a hydrant of barbecue blarney. This one positively gushed. Mitchell was evangelical on the subject of whole-hog barbecue, and strict in his construction of it. He dropped the word “authentic” into every third or fourth sentence, something that I was getting used to here in North Carolina but which raised an uncomfortable question. To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such and still be authentic?

  I was beginning to suspect that barbecue had become something of a hall of mirrors. Mitchell himself seemed to embody the culture of Southern barbecue as reflected back at itself in the celebration of Southern barbecue by Northern food writers, professors of cultural studies, and the Southern Foodways Alliance, which had gotten behind Ed Mitchell in a big way. This possibly explained his habit of speaking of himself in the third person (“And that’s when the story of old Ed Mitchell really began to spiral ever upward …”). Mitchell talked about The Pit as his new “stage,” and how he and Greg Hatem were taking whole-hog barbecue upscale, and making it “a little bit more trendy” while “keeping it real.” The Pit had an executive chef, and I got the feeling Ed was doing a lot more talking than cooking nowadays.