Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (17 page)

But whether or not fire is constitutive of
physical reality, we can say—and science now seems prepared to accept—that the control
of fire is constitutive of us, of our humanity. “Animals need food, water, and
shelter,” Richard Wrangham writes in
Catching Fire
. “We humans need
all those things, but we need fire too.” We are the only species that depends on
fire to maintain our body heat, and the only species that can’t get along without
cooking its food. By now, the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter not
merely of human culture but of our very biology. If the cooking hypothesis is correct,
it is fire that—by unlocking more of the energy in food and partly externalizing human
digestion—fed the spectacular growth of the human brain. So, in this sense at least,
Bachelard is correct to credit fire with
the invention of philosophy.
He might have added music, poetry, mathematics, and books about fire itself.

The cook fire in particular, the kind of
fire I’m tending in my front yard, also helped form us as social beings.
“Fire’s power of social magnetism,” as the historian Felipe
Fernández-Armesto puts it, is what first drew us together, and in doing so probably
shifted the course of human evolution. The cook fire selected for individuals who could
tolerate other individuals—make eye contact, cooperate, and share. “When fire and
food combined,” writes Fernández-Armesto, “an almost irresistible focus was
created for communal life.” (In fact, the word “focus” comes from the
Latin word for “hearth.”) The social gravity of the cook fire seems
undiminished, as I’m reminded every time my guests drift outdoors to watch their
dinner sizzle and brown, or when the neighbor’s children drift over into my yard
to find out what it is that smells so good.

As fire’s presence in our everyday
lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have
only grown more powerful. One way to tell the history of cooking is as the story of the
taming of the cooking fire followed by its gradual disappearance from our lives.
Contained first in stone fireplaces and brought indoors, it was then encased in iron and
steel, and in our time replaced altogether by invisible electric currents and radio
waves confined to a box of glass and plastic. The microwave oven, which stands at the
precise opposite end of the culinary (and imaginative) spectrum from the cook fire,
exerts a kind of
anti
gravity, its flameless, smokeless, antisensory cold heat
giving us a mild case of the willies. The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is
communal. Who ever gathers around the Panasonic hearth? What reveries does its
mechanical whir inspire? What is there even to look at through the double pane of
radiation-proof glass, except the lazy rotation of the “single-serving
portion” for the solitary eater? To the extent there has been a
revival of fire cooking in recent years, it may be the microwave we have to thank, for
driving us back outdoors into the fire’s orbit and once again into one
another’s company. …

… But back to this particular cook fire,
the one now burning in my front yard.

I wait for the flames to subside and the
logs to crumble before I even think about putting on the meat. This is true whether
I’m grilling in the open air or slow cooking barbecue under cover. The smoke of
wood coals is much gentler than the smoke of burning woods. All but invisible, this
“second smoke,” as I’ve come to think of it, has none of the tarry,
acrid compounds that the initial combustion of wood releases, and therefore imparts a
subtler set of woody flavors.

For barbecue, what seems to work best is to
build a fire in the pit and then shovel the coals into a kettle grill that can be
covered. I keep the vents almost completely closed, aiming for a temperature somewhere
between 200˚F and 300˚F—much hotter and the meat will sear; much cooler and it
won’t cook through. Ideally, you would keep the original “mother fire”
going, because you may need to add more coals later. Before I put the meat on the fire,
I clear just enough space in the bed of coals to place a disposable tinfoil tray
directly beneath it in order to catch the dripping fat. I pour an inch or so of water
into the tray to prevent flame-ups and help keep the atmosphere in there moist.

Now comes the time—and there will be plenty
of it—for doing nothing, except keeping one eye on your roast. (Which is why you
can’t leave home.) This is where, if alone, you launch your reverie, or, if with
friends, some conversation and drinking. Inevitably, I find that
at
some point in the afternoon I have either too much fire or not enough fire. The key, as
every pit master I’ve ever met has told me, is control, but control is easier to
achieve than it is to maintain for any sustained period of time. Opening or closing the
vents may do the trick, but if it doesn’t, you’ll have either to add or to
remove hot coals, which can be a messy, dangerous business.

Here is when one’s easy condescension
toward those who cook with gas or charcoal will be tested.

And in fact I must confess that the best
results I have achieved to date have involved: propane. A pork shoulder needs at least
six hours, and ideally a couple more, to attain perfection, and it’s hard to keep
a gently smoldering fire gently smoldering quite that long. So, rather than keep a
mother fire burning all that time, and then have to lift up a hot grate and shovel fresh
coals underneath it, I take the meat off the wood fire once the temperature in the grill
has dropped below 225˚F or so. By then, I figure the meat has received most of the
blessing of wood smoke, the flavor of which cooked meat can’t absorb anyway. Now
the meat just needs more heat and time: a couple more hours at 250˚F to 300˚F. And
besides, by now I’ve acquired from Ed Mitchell and his colleagues a much more
supple and forgiving concept of authenticity.

When I move the shoulder onto the gas grill,
its internal temperature hovers around 160˚F, and the skin, which is pulling apart into
little cubes, has a nice wood-toned finish, though it still feels rubbery to the touch.
At this temperature, the meat is cooked through but dry and tough. If I took the
shoulder off now, I would have not barbecue, just overcooked pork.

But a miraculous transformation occurs once
the internal temperature of the meat reaches 195˚F. If you’ve been poking the
shoulder along the way, you will feel it. The muscles, which had earlier felt as though
they had seized up tight, have suddenly relaxed. The slow,
steady heat
has dissolved the collagen into moist gelatin and freed the muscle fibers, which now
separate into tender, succulent, pullable threads. And if everything has gone according
to plan, the skin by now will have crisped into precious little cubes of crackling.

There you have it, all but the chopping and
seasoning: authentic-enough barbecue. It’s not whole-hog, true, but the shoulder,
which consists of a few different muscle groups as well as plenty of fat, is the next
best thing. The first time I achieved delicious, quasi-authentic results—crackling
included—I wanted to call Ed Mitchell with the news, practice my boasting—as indeed I am
now doing—and look seriously into entering a competition. But eventually I settled down.
I called up some friends to come over for an impromptu dinner, and together we enjoyed
one of the tastier sandwiches I had ever made, and without a doubt the very
proudest.

There is one last cook fire I need to tell
you about, one that made me think that, even after some two millions years of practice,
the possibilities of cooking with fire may not be exhausted yet. I found this fire in
the microscopic town of Axpe, in the Basque Country of Spain, high in the rocky hills
between the cities of San Sebastián and Bilbao. This is where, in an undistinguished but
ancient stone house on the town square, a self-trained chef in his fifties by the name
of Bittor Arguinzoniz, a former lumberjack and electrician, has been quietly
and intently reinventing what it means to cook with fire in the
twenty-first century.

I met Arguinzoniz within twenty-four hours
of cooking with Ed Mitchell in Manhattan, and the contrast between the two men and their
worlds could not be starker. Bittor does not like to give interviews, or for that matter
even talk much, at least not while he’s cooking, a process demanding such fierce
concentration that a visitor to his kitchen feels at first like an intruder and then
utterly invisible. He is a modest, ascetic man, tall, slender except for a compact
paunch, and gray as smoke. Bittor likes to work in solitude, seldom leaves Axpe (where
he grew up in a house with no running water or electricity; his mother heated and cooked
exclusively with wood), and is not given to pronouncements, except perhaps one:
“Carbón es el enemigo”
—“Charcoal is the enemy.” He
believes cooking is all about sacrifice, though I soon realized he was referring to the
sacrifice of the chef himself, rather than that of the creatures he cooks.

The kitchen at Asador Etxebarri (which in
the Basque tongue means “New House”) combines the gleaming, controlled
geometry of stainless steel—six grills of Bittor’s own design lining one wall—with
the raw power of a raging wood fire. On the opposite wall, at waist height, two open
ovens each hold a stack of blazing logs. Every morning, Bittor and his sous-chef, a
loquacious but protective Australian named Lennox Hastie, begin the day by cooking a
large quantity of the local oak, citrus, olive, and grape logs in the two ovens, to
produce the wood coals with which Bittor cooks exclusively.

Bittor flavors all his food with wood, a
different species and even a different kind of ember (glowing red or ashy white,
intensifying or fading) for each dish. Grapevines, which burn hot and aromatic, he
matches with beef, whereas a single dying ember of oak would be used to more subtly
inflect the flavor of a scallop. A black plunger
jutting from the wall
above each of the wood ovens allows him to precisely control the amount of oxygen
feeding the fire, and thereby the temperature, and the life span, of the wood coals it
produces.

By the kitchen’s screened back door
stands a little lean-to, neatly stacked with different species of firewood and, on top
of the woodpiles, crates of produce—tomatoes, leeks, onions, fava beans, and artichokes.
Most of it has been grown a few miles up the hill, on a plot tended by Bittor’s
eighty-nine-year-old father, Angel, mainly because he could find nothing worth cooking
in the market. (“Everything is prostituted,” he tells me, with a little
snort of disgust. “With chemicals.”) Most of the seafood he cooks—lobsters,
eels, sea cucumbers, oysters, clams, fishes of various kinds—is kept alive in saltwater
tanks (a challenge up here in the mountains) in a room off the kitchen until the
appointed moment when the fire is ready and the creature is pulled from the water to
meet it.

The afternoon I spent in his kitchen, Bittor
had on a black T-shirt and gray slacks. He wore no apron, yet remained spotless: Liquids
of any kind scarcely enter into his cooking. I had planned to ask if I could pitch in
with the cooking, as I had done in North Carolina, but I quickly realized that, here,
that would be tantamount to asking a brain surgeon if I might assist. Lennox made it
clear I was lucky just to get into the kitchen.

Everything at Etxebarri is cooked to order,
not a moment sooner. When the first order came in, I watched Bittor use a small
stainless-steel scoop to retrieve a fist-sized pile of oak embers with which to cook a
sea cucumber. Sea cucumbers are striated, slightly rubbery white sea creatures,
reminiscent of squid, that live on the ocean floor. They require brief but intense heat
to break down their leathery skin. Before he puts one on the grill, Bittor watches his
coals intently, patiently waiting for them to ripen. A stainless-steel wheel above each
grill, and connected to it by a system of cables and counterweights,
allows him to make microadjustments in the distance between food and fire. When Bittor
determines the coals are ready—strictly by eye; I never once saw him pass his hand over
the fire to judge its heat—he places the sea cucumber over them. Now he spritzes it with
a fine mist of oil, which he believes helps the food better absorb the aromatic
compounds in wood. And then he silently waits, staring at the sea cucumber as if lost in
a trance. He’s looking for the slightest suggestion of a grill mark to form across
the striations before flipping it, just once.

Next I watched Bittor “cook” an
oyster, a process that involved choosing a single, perfect ember and placing it beneath
the plump dove-gray ovoid with a pair of forceps, just so. I flashed back to James
Howell, in Ayden, shoveling smoky wood coals under a pig. Here was the same basic
operation, yet could this cooking possibly be more different? Fire, it seems, is
protean; smoke, too. Bittor didn’t actually want to cook his oyster, just wreathe
it in the merest wisp of orange wood smoke, a process that took less than thirty
seconds. The whole time, Bittor looked to be in a staring contest with the oyster. I can
only infer—because he would not speak, and never touched the oyster—that he was watching
for a change in the reflectivity of its surface, a certain shift in the quality of its
glistening, that told him it was done, or, rather, ready for the table. He then passed
the oyster to Lennox, who gently slid it back into its shell. Bittor bent down and
sprinkled several grains of sea salt over it, and then a spoonful of an off-white froth
that Lennox had made by whipping the liquid that the oyster had left behind when it was
shucked a few moments before.