Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 2

The vestibule of h.e.l.l: The pit room was in fact an infernal chamber, and not a place likely to stimulate an appet.i.te for cooked pig in many people. The residues of fires big and small were everywhere, blackening the bricks, charring the ceiling, puckering the plywood walls. While Samuel and I talked, I could see over his left shoulder a spectral presence emerging out of the smoke, the figure of a slightly bent black man slowly pus.h.i.+ng a wheelbarrow topped with a sheet of bloodstained plywood on which the splayed pink carca.s.s of a hog precariously balanced. I could see the hog's eyeless head, bobbing slightly on the lip of the wheelbarrow, and, as it drew closer, the face of the man carefully inching it forward. It was deeply lined, leathery, and missing several teeth.

Samuel introduced me to James Henry Howell, the Skylight Inn's longtime pit master. Howell made it instantly clear he would be leaving all the talking to the Joneses. He had work to do, and indeed it appeared that the lion's share of the physical labor performed at the restaurant-putting on the hogs late in the afternoon, flipping them over first thing the next morning, carrying them, quartered, into the restaurant kitchen for the lunchtime rush, and then chopping and seasoning them on the big wooden block-was work that James Henry Howell did himself, leaving the Jones men free to hold forth. Which was fine by me, except it meant I probably wouldn't be getting any hands-on experience or how-to instruction here in Ayden. That was going to have to wait.

Back and forth across the pit room Mr. Howell slowly wheeled his hogs, melting into the haze to fetch another carca.s.s from the walk-in cooler, then emerging again with his load, which he would tenderly tip onto the iron grates. Howell worked slowly and deliberately, and when he was done putting the hogs on, he had created an arresting tableau: a smoke-dimmed conga line of splayed pink carca.s.ses, laid out skin side up and snout to b.u.t.t. The interior of the cookhouse now looked like a bunkroom, the sleeping hogs bedded down for the night. Of all the animals we eat, none resembles us more closely than the hog. Each the size of a grown man, hairless and pink, its mouth set in what looks very much like a sly smile, the half dozen pigs laid out in this smoky crypt made me think of many things, but definitely not lunch or dinner.

It was difficult to regard this pit room, filthy and littered with cinders, as a kitchen, but of course that is what it is. And that is why the state of North Carolina has been forced to choose between the equitable enforcement of its health codes and the survival of whole-hog barbecue. Sacred local tradition that it is, barbecue has won, at least for the time being. But this is a most unusual kitchen, one where the princ.i.p.al cooking implements are wheelbarrows and shovels, and the pantry, such as it is, contains nothing but hogs, firewood, and salt. In fact, the entire building is a kind of cooking implement, as Samuel explained: We were inside a giant low-temperature oven for the gentle smoking of pigs. Just how tightly the cookhouse is sealed-even the pitch of its roof-all influence the way the meat cooks.

After the hogs are on, Howell begins shoveling wood coals underneath them, transferring the smoldering cinders, one spade-full at a time, from the hearths, now glowing a deep red, across the room to the pits. Carefully pouring the incandescent coals between the iron bars, he arranges a line of fire roughly around the perimeter of each hog, a bit like the chalk line silhouetting the body at a crime scene. He puts more coals at the ends than in the middle, to compensate for the fact that the different parts of the hog cook at different rates. "That's just one of the challenges of whole-hog cooking," Samuel explained. "Cooking just shoulders, like they do over in Lexington, now, that's a whole lot easier to control." Samuel snorts the word "shoulders" derisively, as if cooking pork shoulders was like throwing frankfurters on the grill. "'Course, that's not barbecue in our view."

After he's arranged the coals to his satisfaction, Howell splashes water on the backs of the hogs and sprinkles a few generous handfuls of kosher salt-not to flavor it, Samuel said, but to dry out the skin and encourage it to blister, thereby helping to effect its transubstantiation into crackling.

It is a long, laborious way to cook. Mr. Howell will shovel a few more coals around the drip line of each pig every half hour or so until he leaves for the evening at six. Several hours later, around midnight, co-owner Jeff Jones, whom everyone seems to call Uncle Jeff, will have to stop back in to check if the pigs need any more heat on them. The idea behind the line of perimeter fire is to build a lasting, indirect source of heat, so that the hogs cook as slowly as possible through the night. Yet at the same time you want those coals close enough to the pig's drip line so that when its back fat begins to render, some of it will have some nice hot coals on which to drip. The sizzle of those drippings sends up a different, meatier kind of smoke, which adds another layer of flavor to the pork. It also perfumes the air in a way that a wood fire alone does not.

That perfume is what I could smell from the road, and what I was beginning to smell again. Even now, standing here in the middle of this sepulchral chamber slightly starved for oxygen, hemmed between these two serried ranks of the porky dead, I was more than a little surprised to register somewhere deep in my belly the first stirrings of ... an appet.i.te!

It is a powerful thing, the scent of meat roasting on an open fire, which is to say the smell of wood smoke combined with burning animal fat. We humans are strongly drawn to it. I've had the neighbor's children drift over "for a closer smell" when I've roasted a pork shoulder on the fire pit in the front yard. Another time, a six-year-old dinner guest positioned himself downwind of the same cook fire, stretched out his arms like an orchestra conductor, and inhaled deeply of the meaty-woody perfume, once, twice, and then abruptly stopped himself, explaining that "I'd better not fill up on smoke!"

Apparently the same perfume is equally pleasing to the G.o.ds, whose portion of the animals we sacrifice to them has traditionally been not the flesh of these animals but their smoke. There are two good reasons for this. Humans must eat to survive, but G.o.ds, being immortal, have no such animal needs. (If they did, they would also need to digest and then, well, eliminate, which doesn't seem terribly G.o.dlike.) No, the idea of meat, the smoky, ethereal trace of animal flesh wafting up to heaven, is what the G.o.ds want from us. They can and do fill up on smoke. And besides, if the G.o.ds did demand cuts, how would we ever get their portion of meat to them? The fragrant column of smoke, symbolizing the link between heaven and earth, is the only conceivable medium of conveyance, and also communication, between humans and their G.o.ds. So to say this aroma is divine is more than an empty expression.

People have known that the smoke of roasting meat is pleasing to the G.o.ds at least since the time of Genesis, where we learn of several momentous sacrifices that altered man's relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d and disclosed divine preferences. The first such sacrifice was actually two: the offerings of Cain and Abel. Cain, a tiller of the fields, sacrificed a portion of his crop to Yahweh, and Abel, a shepherd, a choice animal from his flock-and G.o.d made it clear it was the sacrifice of domestic quadrupeds he prefers.* The next momentous sacrifice came after the waters of the Flood receded, when Noah, back on dry land at last, made a "burnt offering" to Yahweh. This is a type of sacrifice in which the entire animal is burned to a crisp-i.e., turned to smoke, and thereby offered to G.o.d. "And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake ... neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done." (Genesis 8:21) If there was ever any doubt about the efficacy of animal sacrifice (not to mention the sheer power of scent), Noah's experience should have put it to rest: The aroma of burning meat is so pleasing to G.o.d that it tempered his wrath and moved him to take the option of worldwide doom completely off the table for all time.

It's striking how many different cultures at so many different times have practiced some form of animal sacrifice involving the roasting of meat over a fire, and just how many of these rituals conceived of the smoke from these cook fires as a medium of communication between humans and G.o.ds. Anthropologists tell us some such practice is very nearly universal in traditional cultures; indeed, you might say it is the absence of such a ritual in our own culture that is probably the greater anomaly. Though it may be that the faded outlines of such rituals can still be glimpsed in something like whole-hog barbecue.

But the prominence of smoke in rituals of animal sacrifice suggests we need to add another myth of the origins of cooking to our growing pile: Maybe cookery begins with ritual sacrifice, since putting meat on a fire solves for the problem of how exactly to deliver the sacrificial animals to their heavenly recipients.

What the G.o.ds have demanded from us in terms of sacrifice has gotten progressively less onerous over time. So what started out as a solemn, psychologically traumatic ritual eventually evolved into a ceremonial feast. Human sacrifice gave way to animal sacrifice, which in turn gave way to partial animal sacrifice in a happy series of dilutions culminating (or petering out) in the modern backyard barbecue, where the religious element is, if not completely absent, then pretty well m.u.f.fled. It's not a big conceptual leap to go from the observation that the G.o.ds seem perfectly happy with a meal of smoke to realizing that maybe we don't have to incinerate the whole animal in a burnt offering in order to satisfy them. The G.o.ds can enjoy the smoke of the roasting animal, and we can enjoy the meat. How convenient!

But keeping the best cuts of sacrificial animals for human consumption is an innovation hard won, at least in cla.s.sical mythology, and the figure responsible for it paid a heavy personal price. The Prometheus legend is usually read as a story about man's hubris in challenging the G.o.ds, the theft of fire representing the human a.s.sumption of divine prerogative-costly yet a great boon to civilization. All this is true enough, but in the original telling, by Hesiod, the story is a little different. Here, it turns out to be as much about the theft of meat as it is about the theft of fire.

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 G.o.ds, 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 ident.i.ty-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 G.o.ds 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sembled 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 [p.r.o.nounced 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 n.o.ble 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 sandwich had it, a sense of place and history you could taste.

Since the Europeans first set foot on these sh.o.r.es, the pig has been the princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 wors.h.i.+p."

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 h.e.l.l 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-fas.h.i.+oned way, and, as I would discover, their meat was 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 a.s.sailed 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 a.s.sent. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ds really want.

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"-tasty, safe, and nutritious-but also, in the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas. Animal sacrifice has been a way to make animal flesh "good to think"-to help people feel better about killing, cooking, and eating animals, which has never been anything less than a momentous, spiritually freighted, and deeply ambivalent occasion. That might explain why, whether in Homer or Leviticus, the work of slaughter, butchery, and cooking all had to be performed by a priest; these were all equally solemn operations. Nowadays, we think of sacrifice as a primitive rite, and snicker at the underlying rationalizations, but the cultures that practiced such rituals before eating were at least acknowledging that something important was going on, something that demanded their full attention. Just because we no longer pay that kind of attention when we eat meat doesn't mean that something momentous-in fact, a kind of sacrifice-hasn't taken place. You have to wonder, who is really the more "primitive" character here? In our failure to attend to the processes that put meat on our plates, we moderns eat more like the animals than the ancients did.

This points to something else ritual sacrifice did for people: It drew sharp lines of distinction between humans and other animals on the one side, and between humans and the G.o.ds on the other. Other animals don't clothe their killing or eating in ritual; nor do they cook their food over fires they control. When people partic.i.p.ate in a ritual sacrifice, they're situating themselves in the cosmos at a precise point halfway between the G.o.ds, whose power over them they acknowledge by making the sacred offering, and the animals, over whom the ceremonial killing demonstrates their own G.o.dlike powers. The recipe for the ritual tells us exactly where we stand.

One way to approach cooking of any kind is as a secular and somewhat faded version of the same operation, helping us to locate ourselves in nature and deal with our ambivalence about eating other beings. Like fire itself, which destroys what photosynthesis has created, all cooking begins with small or large acts of destruction: killing, cutting, chopping, mas.h.i.+ng. In that sense, a sacrifice is at its very heart. But cooking also helps put Emerson's "graceful distance of miles"-or time, or smoke, or seasoning, or chopping, or sauce-between the eaters and the eaten, its various transformations helping us to forget, or suppress, the violence of the underlying transaction. At the same time, the wonderful refining alchemies of the kitchen demonstrate how far we have come as a species, affirming that we have indeed lifted ourselves out of nature red in tooth and claw, achieved a kind of transcendence. Cooking sets us apart, helps us to mark and patrol the borders between ourselves and nature's other creatures-none of which can cook.

"My definition of Man is a 'Cooking Animal,'" James Boswell wrote. "The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and pa.s.sions of our mind, in a certain degree, but no beast is a cook." Boswell was not alone in regarding cooking as a faculty that defines us as human. According to Levi-Strauss, the distinction between "the raw" and "the cooked" has served many cultures as the great trope for the difference between animals and people. In The Raw and the Cooked, he wrote, "Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes." Cooking transforms nature and, by doing so, elevates us above that state, making us human.

If the human enterprise involves transforming the raw of nature into the cooked of culture, the different techniques we've devised for achieving this transformation each embody a different stance toward both nature on the one side and culture on the other. After studying the foodways of hundreds of peoples around the world, Levi-Strauss (who apparently never saw a dualism he didn't like) distinguished two basic methods for turning the stuff of nature into something that is not only more tasty and digestible but more human (i.e., good to think) as well: cooking directly over a fire and cooking in a pot with liquid.

To barbecue or to braise? To roast or to boil? That, apparently, is the question, and much-about who we think we are-depends on the answer. Compared with cooking over a fire, braising or stewing implies a more civilized approach to the transformation of nature. The braise or boil, since it cooks meat all the way through, achieves a more complete transcendence of the animal, and perhaps the animal in us, than does grilling over a fire, which leaves its object partly or entirely intact, and often leaves a trace of blood-a visible reminder, in other words, that this is a formerly living creature we're feasting on. This lingering hint of savagery isn't necessarily a strike against fire cooking, however. To the contrary, some believe a b.l.o.o.d.y slab of beefsteak augments the power of the eater. "Whoever partakes of it," Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, "a.s.similates a bull-like strength." By comparison, the braise or stew-and particularly the braise or stew of meat that's been cut into geometric cubes and rendered tender by long hours in the pot-represents a deeper sublimation, or forgetting, of the brutal reality of this particular transaction among species.

Certainly this kind of forgetting has its advantages, especially in everyday life, where cooking in pots is the norm. Who wants to be confronted with existential questions of life and death and human ident.i.ty on a daily basis? And yet there are times when that is exactly what we're looking for, when we want to be reminded, if only a little, of what's really going on just beneath the thin crust of civilization. This is, perhaps, the same impulse that compels some people to endure the discomforts of sleeping out in the woods, or to go to the unnecessary lengths of hunting their own meat or growing their own tomatoes. All these activities are forms of adult play that also serve as ceremonial acts of remembering-who we are, where we came from, how nature works. (And, perhaps, of a time when men were still indispensable.) Cooking meat over a fire-whether a few steaks thrown on the backyard barbecue or, more spectacularly, a whole animal roasted all night over a wood fire-is one of the most stirring of those ritual acts, usually performed outdoors, on special occasions, in public, and by men. And what, exactly, does such cooking commemorate? No doubt many things, including male power (for isn't the triumph of the hunt at least implied?) and ritual sacrifice (for this is cooking-as-performance, exerting the kind of gravitational force that draws people out of the house to watch). But I suspect that, as much as anything else, grilling meat over a fire today commemorates the transformative power of cooking itself, which never appears so bright or explicit as when wood and fire and flesh are brought together under that aromatic empire of smoke.