Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 5

Ed spoke of the tobacco harvest as if it had been part of his own childhood, but his nostalgia was for a world that was already fading into myth by the time he was a boy. (His parents left the land in 1946, the year he was born.) Yet such memories don't necessarily have to be in the first person to shape our lives. For Ed, the mural underscored what was most meaningful to him about barbecue: that it brought people together as a community, and that, even if only temporarily, it transcended race. As far as he is concerned, it still does.

"There's something about cooking a whole animal that makes people feel happy. It's usually a special occasion, a celebration of some kind, and it never fails. Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn't matter who you were.

"Only two things in my experience have had the power to transcend race: Vietnam and barbecue. There's no other dish that powerful. And don't ask me why, because I don't know."

Ed appeared to grow melancholy as he showed me around the building, much of which felt hastily abandoned. I asked him to tell me how he'd lost Mitch.e.l.l's Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue.

Though it wasn't something he could prove, Ed was convinced that his outspokenness on the subject of industrial hog farming had led directly to his troubles.

"We held a press conference here in Wilson in 2004, and John T. came up and spoke. We announced the A&T project with the farmers, and my plans for bringing natural pigs back into barbecue. I didn't think anything of it at the time, but two men I didn't recognize stood up and asked me, very grumpily, 'Are you trying to start something?'

"'No, I'm not trying to start anything.'

"'Oh yes, you are. You're getting ready to tell people not to buy my product, and that isn't good.'"

Thus began what Ed refers to as a period of "orchestrated turbulence." Within weeks of the press conference, he claims, the state launched an audit of his books, which quickly turned into an investigation. Then the bank suddenly notified him he was in foreclosure. Soon after that he was charged with embezzlement. True, Ed had fallen behind on his payments, both to the bank and the state, but the speed and severity of the actions taken against him seemed suspicious.

"In less than thirty days of my press conference, I had my business closed and was charged with embezzlement. The arraignment was all over the television and newspapers. I can only think it was an orchestrated effort to ruin Ed Mitch.e.l.l's reputation, because I had become a viable spokesman for an alternative kind of product." Ed Mitch.e.l.l had become a threat to one of the state's most powerful industries-industrial hog farming-and was raising uncomfortable questions-questions of authenticity-about one of its proudest traditions: whole-hog barbecue.

But is this really what happened? I talked to people in Raleigh who don't buy Ed's version of events, and believe that his troubles stemmed from his business failings, nothing else. Others aren't so sure. John T. Edge, for his part, thinks it entirely plausible that Ed was the victim of a campaign to discredit him. "Here was a black man in North Carolina telling people he was cooking the best barbecue in the state and promoting an alternative to the commercial hog industry. I'm sure there are some people in North Carolina who thought Ed Mitch.e.l.l had gotten uppity and needed to be taken down a peg."

Since the time of his troubles, Ed has taken pains to tone down his rhetoric about the commercial hog industry. He speaks more about "the chef's personal taste" in pork and less about the evils of agribusiness. But he has also received a partial vindication: A judge ruled that the bank had improperly foreclosed on Mitch.e.l.l and did not have "clean hands." The ruling came too late to do Mitch.e.l.l much good, however. Mitch.e.l.l's Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue is no more, and it may be that Ed's travails will stand as the exception to the lovely rule that barbecue never fails to bring people together.

When we got back to the kitchen, the coals were ready, glowing red and dusted with white ash. Ed handed me the shovel again and explained how to properly bank the coals: You arrange them in the rough outline of your pig, a six-inch-wide line of coals all around except at the top and bottom, beneath the b.u.t.t and shoulders, which, being thicker, need more fire. There, you want more like twelve inches of coals. Ed then took an oak log that had been soaking in vinegar and tossed it on the coals. That one log would supply all the smoke the pig would need. Now Aubrey and I each took one end of the big grates, placed them over the pits, and then lifted the split hogs onto the grates, skin side up; we would flip them in the morning. I began to lower the covers over the pigs, but Ed stayed my hand.

"This is where I like to stop and salute the pigs. They've given the ultimate sacrifice so that people can eat, and we should at least acknowledge that." He gave them each a fond little pat on the ham, the kind of affectionate b.u.t.t-pat athletes give one another. Then he lowered the steel covers over the pigs and closed down the vents, and that was it. We were done for the night.

Over the course of our conversations, Ed had gone back and forth on the relative difficulty and mystery of his art. More than once he had alluded tantalizingly to "trade secrets," but other times he disclaimed there were any such thing. This was one of those times. "It's hard work, but there's really nothing all that complicated about making good barbecue." Which might be the deepest, darkest secret of all.

When the three of us reconvened in the kitchen at seven the next morning, you could tell immediately that something had changed. The chemical scent of lighter fluid was gone, replaced by the seductive aromas of roasting meat. Something very good was going on under those stainless-steel pit covers. I lifted one of them and marveled at the transformation: What had been a flabby white carca.s.s was now a considerably smaller side of pork with a deep, rich color and some muscle tone. Its skin was gorgeous: lacquered brown, the color of strong tea. The animal was still leathery to the touch, though now its flesh put up some resistance, like cooked meat. It wasn't quite done, but I couldn't wait to taste it.

So what exactly had happened in the night, to transform these more or less odorless, flaccid hunks of hog flesh into delicious-smelling and -looking meat? How was it that some burning coals and a single oak log had turned something you would never think to eat-dead pig-into something you couldn't wait to eat?

Actually, a great many things had happened in the night, transformations both physical and chemical. The heat had driven off much of the water in the meat, altering its texture and concentrating its flavors. It had also rendered much of the substantial layer of fat directly under the skin. Some of that fat had dripped onto the hot coals and turned into smoke, sending up a whole range of aromatic compounds that rejoined the surface of the meat, adding new layers of flavor. But because the pork was cooking at such a low temperature, much of the back fat had slowly melted into the meat, helping to keep it moist and adding its own rich flavor to the muscle, which in the absence of fat has relatively little flavor of its own. The muscle fibers themselves had undergone a transformation, as the heat broke down the collagen that bound them together, turning it to gelatin, which tenderized and further moistened the meat.

Chemically, what had been simple the fire had rendered complex. According to a flavor chemist I consulted, putting smoke and fire to the proteins, sugars, and fats in meat creates anywhere between three thousand and four thousand entirely new chemical compounds, complex and often aromatic molecules forged from the simple building blocks of sugar and amino acids. "And those are just the compounds we can name; there are probably hundreds more we haven't identified." In this, cooking, even though it may start by breaking things down, is the opposite of entropy, erecting complex new molecular structures from simpler forms.

Several different chemical reactions are responsible for these creations, but one of the most important is the one named for the French doctor who identified it in 1912: Louis-Camille Maillard. Maillard discovered that when amino acids are heated in the company of sugar, the reaction produces hundreds of new molecules that give cooked food its characteristic color and much of its smell. The Maillard reaction is responsible for the flavors in roasted coffee, the crust of bread, chocolate, beer, soy sauce, and fried meats-a vast amount of chemical complexity, not to mention pleasure, created from a handful of amino acids and some sugar.

The second important reaction working on our pigs during the night was caramelization. The heating of odorless sucrose until it browns generates more than a hundred other compounds, with flavor notes reminiscent not just of caramel but also of nuts, fruits, alcohol, green leaves, sherry, and vinegar.

Together these two reactions produce a vast encyclopedia of scents and flavors. The question that arises is, why should it be that we prefer this complexity to the comparatively monochromatic flavor of uncooked meat? Richard Wrangham would say it's because evolution has selected for humans who happened to like the complex flavors of cooked foods; those who did ate more of it and produced more offspring. Harold McGee, the food-science writer, proposed another intriguing theory in his 1990 book, The Curious Cook. He points out that many of the aromatic compounds generated by the two browning reactions are similar or identical to compounds found in the plant world, such as the flavor notes that we think of as nutty, green, earthy, vegetal, floral, and fruity. It might be expected that caramelizing sugars would produce some of the same compounds found in ripe fruit, since fruits contain sugars; however, it is curious to find so many phytochemicals-plant compounds-showing up in something like roast meat.

"The mingling of the animal and vegetable, the raw and the cooked, may seem like a remarkable coincidence," McGee writes, and it is. But it makes sense that this particular canon of scents would move us, since it is the one we encountered every day in the world of edible plants long before we discovered how to cook. In that uncooked world, this particular group of aromatic compounds amounts to a kind of universal interspecies language, one of the princ.i.p.al systems of communication between plants and animals. Already familiar, those plant scents and flavors were precisely the ones you did well to pay attention to, since they could direct you to good things to eat and away from bad.

Plants have become, by necessity, the great masters of biochemistry in nature. Rooted in place, they evolved the ability to manufacture these aromatic compounds because chemistry can do for the plants what locomotion, vocalization, and consciousness do for animals. So the plants produce molecules that warn and repel and poison some creatures, and others that attract them, whether pollinators to a.s.sist them with reproduction or mammals and birds to move their seeds over distances. When their seeds are ready for transport, plants summon mammals with the strong scents and tastes of ripe fruit, a sensory language to which we have become particularly sensitive, since it alerts us to the presence of food energy-sugars-and other plant chemicals we need, like vitamin C. But all animals learn to operate in the information-rich chemical environment that plants create. Fluency in the molecular language of plants would have been particularly important for humans before the advent of agriculture reduced our diet to a small handful of domesticated species. When we still ate hundreds of different plant species, we relied on our senses of smell and taste to navigate a far more complicated food landscape.

So it is no wonder that those types of cooking (such as meat over fire) that happen to generate scents and flavors borrowed from the plant world's extensive chemical vocabulary (and perhaps especially from the rich dialect of ripe fruit) would stimulate us as much as they do. They recall us to a time before agriculture, when our diet was far more diverse, not to mention more interesting and healthy.

"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 a.s.sembled 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 Sat.u.r.day, and our barbecue inconvenienced n.o.body. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s of meat, pus.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.lish 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 gla.s.s. 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 cla.s.sicist. 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 carca.s.s ... 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 n.o.ble guest Odysseus ... he told his friend to sacrifice to the G.o.ds"), 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 const.i.tuted 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 cla.s.s 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 Perles, 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. Compet.i.tion 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. Ka.s.s, 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 const.i.tute 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 ident.i.ty: 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 h.o.a.rded 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 n.o.ble cla.s.s that performs it. In this, the ritual is no different from any other political inst.i.tution. 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 cla.s.s-by feeding it.