Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (15 page)

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

To regulate the potentially savage
business of eating meat,

To bring people together in a
community,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I now knew exactly what he meant. Ed and I
had spent one of the laziest, most desultory afternoons I can remember, standing and
sitting around the cookers, getting as close to doing absolutely nothing as you can get
while still ostensibly “cooking.” We were “letting that meat
cook,” low and slow, and there really wasn’t much to do while it
happened.

But now that the guests had arrived and Ed
had taken the stage, things were speeding up—getting a tad frantic, in fact. Before me
on the chopping block was an entire steaming half of a pig. While Ed explained the
procedure to the audience, seasoning his rap with tales of Bobby Flay and the Food
Network throwdown, I picked out the
ribs and other bones with my
cartoony black propylene fingers, and pulled the meat from the carapace of pigskin. Now,
wielding a cleaver in each hand, I went to work on the pile of pig parts, reducing it to
a roughly chopped mass of pork, leaving some of the belly in reserve so I could adjust
for fat and moisture content. The cleavers were heavier than they looked, and the
repetitive motion soon exhausted the muscles in my forearms. Aubrey’s chop had
looked like pork hash, uniform and fine. I decided to go for something a little rougher,
partly because I preferred the texture and partly because my arms were about to fall
off. Now, as Ed narrated what I was doing and the crowd watched, I seasoned the great
mound of pork. First the gallon of vinegar, then the handfuls of sugar, salt, and
pepper, black and red, all of it sown like seeds across the sprawling heap of meat.

A voice in the crowd erupted: “Now,
don’t you go forgetting the skeen!” Then another: “Yeah, give us some
of that nice crackling!” Fortunately, Ed had crisped a side’s worth of skin
before he took the stage, because, from the sound of it, this hungry crowd might not
have waited for me to do it now. I shattered the brittle skin with my cleaver and
scooped several big handfuls of crackling onto the mound of pork. The rest I piled on
trays for the servers to pass around plain, since the crowd seemed mad for the stuff,
their energies focused less on the beer and wine now flowing than on these mahogany
shards of hog skin. I don’t want to think what would have happened if I had left
out the crackling or—God forbid!—burned it beyond a crisp.

A few weeks after my star turn in Wilson, I
got a chance to join the barbecue road show one last time, but now on a much bigger
stage. Ed and Aubrey and their crew from The Pit were driving up to Manhattan for the
eighth annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, and Ed invited me to come to New York and
lend a hand. After Wilson, North Carolina, this sounded like opening on Broadway.

Manhattan has never been much of a barbecue
town, something the restaurateur Danny Meyer realized soon after he added an upscale
barbecue joint called Blue Smoke to his roster of successful Manhattan restaurants. New
Yorkers just didn’t get it, and those who actually knew something about barbecue
were skeptical such a place could possibly be authentic. So Meyer and Blue Smoke’s
executive chef, Kenny Callaghan, hit on the idea of bringing America’s best pit
masters to New York City for a weekend in June. The event would teach New Yorkers, who
probably own the smallest number of grills per capita in America, about “authentic
barbecue,” and at the same time showcase Blue Smoke’s own pit master in the
company of such barbecue luminaries as Chris Lilly (Decatur, Alabama); Jimmy Hagood
(Charleston, South Carolina); Joe Duncan (Dallas, Texas); Skip Steele (St. Louis,
Missouri); and Ed Mitchell (Raleigh, North Carolina). The idea was for some of the
authenticity of these pit masters to rub off on Blue Smoke. In exchange, the visiting
pit masters would sell a ton of barbecue and get some national media exposure. Seven
years later, New York City has evidently discovered a taste for barbecue. One hundred
twenty-five thousand people were expected in Madison Square
Park for
this year’s event, coming to hang around the pits and sample barbecue over two
days, at $8 a sandwich.