Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (16 page)

When I showed up early Saturday morning, Ed
and his crew had already set up their tents, cookers, and chopping blocks on the south
side of 26th Street just off Fifth Avenue. Parked around the corner on Fifth, taking up
nearly half a city block, was a white eighteen-wheel tractor trailer with a
billboard-sized image of Ed Mitchell’s smiling face painted on the side. The night
before, the truck had disgorged eight 275-gallon cookers, sixteen pigs, several tables
and chopping blocks, cleavers, shovels, bag upon bag of Kingsford charcoal, and
countless gallons of (premixed) barbecue sauce. Ed and Aubrey had put the pigs on the
fire at six the night before, and a couple of guys from the restaurant had stayed up all
night looking after them. Madison Square Park had never smelled so good, the smoke of
fifteen different barbecue pits mingling in the soft air of an early-summer evening.

The guys were running two chopping blocks
simultaneously, and Aubrey invited me to take over one of them, working next to
Ed’s grown son, Ryan. It was only 11:00 a.m., but a crowd had already begun to
gather, drawn by the auspicious smoke as well as Ed’s reputation. Since the first
Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in 2003, Ed Mitchell has been its biggest draw. He is the
only pit master doing whole-hog barbecue, and the only black pit master at the event.
You could almost see, floating over the crowd forming at Ed Mitchell’s corner of
Madison Park, the thought bubble: “Authenticity.”

By now I knew the drill, or thought I did,
and got right to work pulling pork from a nicely browned side of pig that Aubrey had
delivered to my chopping block. There was something unexpectedly powerful about the
sight of a whole hog cooked on the streets of Manhattan, a collision of realms or times.
Yet there is nothing Manhattan cannot absorb, and the scene didn’t take long to
feel almost normal. I flattered myself into thinking I knew what I was doing, but
it soon became clear I wasn’t in Wilson, North Carolina,
anymore—and in fact was in way over my head. At 11:00 a.m. sharp, The Pit crew had begun
selling sandwiches, and they sold out the first batch so quickly that the
sandwich-making crew began calling, with mounting insistence, for more pork. I was
chopping as fast as I could, but there was a limit to how fast you could go. Not only
were my arms growing rubbery, but I wanted to be sure there were no little bones or bits
of cartilage left in the meat before I released another pile of barbecue to the servers.
What if someone chomped down on an overlooked vertebra? Manhattan might have the lowest
number of barbecue grills per capita, but surely it has the highest number of lawyers.
Yet the clamor from the sandwich crew wouldn’t let up. “More pork, please!
We need more pork up here!”
I was chopping pork as fast as my arms would let
me, then pouring gallons of sauce over the pile, all the while scanning and sifting the
meat for suspicious bits of white. As soon as I passed a sheet tray heaped with barbecue
to the sandwich crew, Aubrey deposited another steaming pig on my chopping block, and
the process started all over again.

(What about the crackling? Sorry you asked.
Our assembly line was moving so quickly now that there simply wasn’t time to crisp
the skin and add it in. But, luckily for us, only a handful of people in this crowd knew
enough to ask for it, and even they didn’t want to wait. So: no crackling
today.)

The few moments I could steal to look up
from my chopping block, I spotted the big round black-and-white head of Ed Mitchell
schmoozing with the crowd, which looked to be happy but also, it seemed to me,
collectively insatiable. Behind the velvet rope line snaking down 26th Street, there
must have been several thousand people waiting to get their barbecue sandwich, more
people than we could ever hope to feed. I redoubled my chopping, working now at a
furious pace that (among other problems of quality control) spattered my
clothing with hot fat. And then, all at once, I noticed that my feet,
of all things, felt simultaneously wet and on fire. I looked down to see that the
scalding-hot juice from the pigs was streaming off the chopping block and soaking my
sneakers and feet. So it came as sweet relief when Aubrey offered to spell me.

Gratefully, I stepped away from the blazing
heat of the cookers, putting some cool air between myself and the smoke and spatter of
chopped pig, as well as the hunger of the crowd and the clamor of the sandwich makers.
(“More barbecue! We need more barbecue up here!”) I could see Ed moving
serenely through the sea of New Yorkers, giving interviews, but couldn’t get close
enough to say good-bye. He was charming the congregation with his shtick, which surely
never gleamed so brightly as it did in Manhattan. Ed was clearly enjoying himself,
playing the role of the barbecue rock star in New York City, but I found the whole happy
scene also just a little harrowing. There was obviously not going to be enough barbecue
for everyone, and I wondered how the crowd would react when the disappointment
dawned.

I found out later we sold out by 1:00 p.m.,
eight whole hogs and two thousand sandwiches snapped up in something less than two
hours. Ed would likely have promised the crowd there would be more barbecue tomorrow,
eight more pigs, and eventually they must have drifted off to other stands, other
sandwiches. But I was long gone by then, eager to escape the crowd and the heat.

I made a slow circuit of Madison Square
Park, checking out the other pits and pit masters. It was a United Nations of barbecue,
with all the important denominations represented: South Carolina with its eccentric
mustard-based sauce, Memphis with its ribs, smoked links and brisket from Texas. All the
pit masters were men, all had a gleaming rap, and many of them also had an equally
gleaming rig. But by far the best of these was Jimmy Hagood’s fire-engine-red
double-
decker barbecue-joint-on-wheels, up from Charleston: a
full-scale kitchen with a half dozen pig cookers at street level linked by a circular
stairway to a deck with tables upstairs. Chatting up Jimmy, I learned he had been an
insurance agent in Charleston, bored with life until he discovered his inner pit master.
This struck me as still a work in progress, with something of the indoors—the office,
even—not yet completely expunged. “You’ve got to work your persona,”
he explained. “It’s called marketing.”

The second-floor platform on Jimmy
Hagood’s rig commanded a fine treetop view of the whole festival. I sat myself
down for a few minutes to sip a cold drink and catch my breath. Barbecue, barbecue as
far as the eye could see, tens of thousands of people wending their way among the
fragrant curls of hickory smoke, carrying their cardboard trays of pork ribs and
barbecue sandwiches. How many years had it been since Manhattan had seen so many pigs—I
guessed that more than three hundred hogs had been sacrificed to feed the
weekend’s crowd—or so many wood fires?

Manhattan these days is a world capital of
gastronomy, but these barbecue men cut figures that could hardly be more different from
that of the typical New York chef. In a place where chefs regard themselves as artists,
and diners prize novel tastes and experiences, the world of the pit master seems
premodern, almost epic in its directness and lack of shading or irony. Getting it right
counts for more than making it new, which to these men is an utterly alien concept. How
could you improve on barbecue? Theirs was an outdoor and completely externalized world,
everything in it brightly lit and foregrounded, with plenty of smoke, sure, but no
shadows—no subtleties or shades of gray. The pit masters worked exclusively with the
ancient, primary colors of cooking—wood, fire, smoke, and meat—and strove not for
originality or even development but for faithfulness.

Compared with the contemporary chef, the pit
masters present themselves less as artists than as priests, each with his own
congregation and distinctive liturgy, working, scrupulously, in forms passed down rather
than invented. What chef would ever boast, as Samuel Jones, trotting out one of his most
cherished sound bites, did to me in Ayden, “Our barbecue is like the King James
Bible”? In their work and their food as much as in their patter, the pit masters
are as formulaic as Homer. They present themselves as outsized, heroic characters, but
full of themselves in the specific way epic heroes are—boastful rather than merely
egotistical. They’re allowed to boast, because they don’t stand for
themselves so much as for an ideal or, better yet, a tribe—the community defined by
their style of barbecue. “I am the old keeper of the flame,” Ed Mitchell
told the oral historian from the Southern Foodways Alliance, putting more than a little
of the King James into his diction. “And I don’t want anyone to forget that
you did not take sausage out of the hog and barbecue those sausages and call it
barbecue, you did not take ribs out of that hog and call it barbecue, you did not take
the shoulders out of that hog and call it barbecue. You first cooked the whole hog, and
everything derived from cooking the whole hog.”

It’s almost as though these men fixed
their personae at a time before novels were invented. So could there possibly be a
better stage for such brightly drawn characters, or for the elemental drama of pig meets
wood fire and time, than twenty-first-century Manhattan? From my perch atop Jimmy
Hagood’s shiny red barbecue rig, I gazed across Madison Square Park and caught my
last glimpse of Ed Mitchell, his great round head rising out of the crowd like a
black-and-white moon, lighting up a whole sea of New Yorkers.

I didn’t realize how much I’d
learned in North Carolina about cooking with fire until I got home and ran a few
experiments. I ordered a whole pork shoulder from an Iowa hog farmer I knew named Jude
Becker. Jude raises traditional breeds outdoors and finishes them on acorns in the fall.
I also ordered a cord of wood, oak and almond, and began cooking with it in the fire pit
in my front yard. In fact, I began burning shamefully large quantities of wood, because
I now understood that it was not the fire but the remains of the fire, the smoldering
wood coals, that you really wanted to cook with. (Well, Ed Mitchell’s Kingsford
compromise to the contrary notwithstanding.) I probably could have cured an entire
barn’s worth of tobacco with all the wood I burned before I ever put a piece of
meat on to cook. What I had learned—not only from the Southern pit masters but also from
all the other fire cookers I met in my travels, people working in traditions and places
as far-flung as Patagonia and the Basque Country—is simply this: You have to cook the
wood before you can cook the food.

The pork shoulder arrived in a surprisingly
big box and wasn’t at all what I expected. Say “pork shoulder” to a
butcher, and he’ll wrap you a five- or six-pound cut of meat, a portion of the
shoulder, or top of the front leg, that is sometimes referred to, confusingly, as a
picnic ham or Boston butt. But apparently the same order in the wholesale trade means an
entire front leg of a hog, complete with hide and dainty hoof, and that’s exactly
what greeted me when I pried opened the box. I suppose I could have cooked the whole
thing, but a failure
of nerve (and shortage of eaters) prompted me
instead to call in a chef friend for help butchering it. She showed me how to bone out
the shoulder and cut it into three manageable parts. The good thing about working from
the whole leg is that we could divide it in such a way that each section still wore its
skin. Which meant I could try for crackling. We scored the leathery skin with a sharp
knife in a tic-tac-toe pattern; this would help the fat to render and the skin to
crisp.

My fire pit is an old, shallow hammered-iron
bowl about four feet in diameter; the guy who sold it to me said he found it in India,
where it was used to cook street food. The pit is wide enough at the bottom that you can
build a fire on one side and then shovel the ripe coals under a grill set up on the
other; however, covering such a big area for barbecue is a problem. So far, the best
solution anyone has come up with is something less than elegant: Bend a few pieces of
rebar into an igloo-tent frame and cover that with one of those silvery insulation
blankets people use to wrap their water heaters or engine blocks. The result resembles a
redneck Martian’s spacecraft, but it does the trick when cooking a large segment
of animal.

Cooking barbecue in my front yard involves a
great deal of time staring into a fire, waiting for the flames to subside and the wood
to break down into smoldering coals that I can shovel under the meat. Gazing into the
flames of a wood fire is mesmerizing; the flames seem to take control of your thoughts,
deflecting them from any linear path. Gaston Bachelard, the idiosyncratic French
philosopher, claims that philosophy itself began in front of the fire, flowing from the
peculiar reverie that a fire inspires.

Bachelard offers not a shred of evidence for
his claim, but there is a certain poetic truth to it, and poetic truth is the only kind
he’s interested in. In 1938, he wrote a slim, oddly elusive book called
The
Psychoanalysis of Fire
, essentially to protest modern science’s reductive
understanding of fire.
^*
Fire once obsessed the scientist
as much as the poet. It seemed to be the key to all transformation. But no longer. What
humans have believed since belief began—that fire is a great and powerful thing, one of
the constitutive elements of reality—science now tells us is merely an epiphenomenon:
the visible trace of a straightforward chemical process, also known as “rapid
oxidation.”

But though fire “is no longer a
reality for science,” in our everyday experience, as in our imaginations, it
remains what it was for Empedocles, who more than two thousand years ago counted it,
with earth, air, and water, as one of the elements: the four underived and
indestructible substances from which the world is made. Modern science has long since
replaced the classical quartet with a periodic table of 118 elements, but, as the
literary critic Northrup Frye writes in his preface to Bachelard’s book,
“For the poet, the elements will always be earth, air, fire and water.”