Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (11 page)

It’s a pretty good racket. Or at least
I thought it was until someone let me in on the secret that many women play dumb around
the whole subject of fire, in order to make sure that men do at least
some
of
the cooking.

But that barbecue sandwich at the Skylight
Inn had persuaded me that my definition of barbecue was faulty and that there was a lot
more involved in cooking over a fire than I knew—which was, basically, how to throw meat
on a blazingly hot grill and then, after a while, poke at it knowingly. What I needed
was a pit master willing to let me work as his sous chef, or whatever the barbecue
cognate of that role was. James Howell was clearly too taciturn and inaccessible to be
that mentor, and the Joneses didn’t seem inclined to let me get my hands dirty (or
burned) in their cookhouse.

As it happened, the pit master I was looking
for would appear in my life the very next day. That’s when I had an interview
scheduled
with a celebrated North Carolina barbecue man who had a
restaurant in Raleigh called The Pit. Ed Mitchell is his name, and I had heard a great
deal about him before flying out to North Carolina—in fact had seen his picture on the
front page of the
New York Times
, after he had wowed the crowd with his
whole-hog barbecue at the first Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City in 2003.
By now Ed Mitchell was nationally famous, had been all over television, had had his oral
history taken by the Southern Foodways Alliance, among others, and been profiled over
the years in several national magazines, including
Gourmet
.

None of this boded well for eliciting more
than a few well-sanded sound bites from the guy, who in the pictures looked like quite
the showman, a big black Santa Claus in denim overalls and a baseball cap. Of concern,
too, was the fact that his barbecue joint served wine and had valet parking, and that a
wag on one of the restaurant blogs had dismissed the place as “a barbecue
zoo.” But I had learned that over the following weekend Mitchell would be cooking
a pig at a benefit barbecue in Wilson, his hometown, some distance from the putative zoo
in Raleigh. So I decided that I would call Mitchell, and if he seemed even remotely
amenable, I would ask him if I might tag along and assist.

Ed Mitchell just might be the first pit
master in history to have handlers. Before I could talk to him I had to go through his
people at Empire Eats, the Raleigh restaurant group that owned The Pit, or 51 percent of
it anyway. The backstory, I quickly learned, was complicated. Ed Mitchell had lost his
original restaurant, Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue, in Wilson, after a
legal tussle with the bank and the State of North Carolina, which in 2005 had charged
him with
embezzlement for his failure to remit various state taxes.
(Later, I would hear Mitchell refer to his legal and financial difficulties as a case of
“orchestrated turbulence.”) The charges against him were eventually reduced
to tax evasion, but Mitchell spent some time in jail and the bank foreclosed on his
restaurant. After his release, Mitchell was approached by Greg Hatem, a young local
real-estate developer who’d made a reputation revitalizing Raleigh’s faded
downtown district. The key to luring people back downtown, Hatem had figured out, was to
open some good restaurants there. Now, in Ed Mitchell, he recognized a rare opportunity:
one of the most famous barbecue men in the country down on his luck and without a stage.
Hatem proposed a 51–49-percent partnership; Ed would run the pits and the front of the
house, while Greg’s people would manage the business side—evidently Ed’s
Achilles’ heel. The Pit would be a whole new kind of barbecue restaurant, an
upscale place with good lighting, a wine list, and valet parking.

To many in the barbecue world, this seemed a
dubious concept at best, the most withering appraisal being the one I’d read
online suggesting the South’s greatest black pitman had been caged in a barbecue
zoo. Someone else said Ed Mitchell had become the Colonel Sanders of barbecue. The Pit
seemed to put the whole question of authenticity, never far from discussions of barbecue
and always vexed, in deeper doubt than ever. Yet there was no denying the dubious
concept was working. The Pit was packed for both lunch and dinner, and the barrier of
the $10 barbecue sandwich had been successfully breached.
^*

When I finally got Ed on the phone, I had
the feeling I often did
when talking to an experienced pitman—that
I’d opened the spigot on a hydrant of barbecue blarney. This one positively
gushed. Mitchell was evangelical on the subject of whole-hog barbecue, and strict in his
construction of it. He dropped the word “authentic” into every third or
fourth sentence, something that I was getting used to here in North Carolina but which
raised an uncomfortable question. To wit, can authenticity be aware of itself as such
and still be authentic?

I was beginning to suspect that barbecue had
become something of a hall of mirrors. Mitchell himself seemed to embody the culture of
Southern barbecue as reflected back at itself in the celebration of Southern barbecue by
Northern food writers, professors of cultural studies, and the Southern Foodways
Alliance, which had gotten behind Ed Mitchell in a big way. This possibly explained his
habit of speaking of himself in the third person (“And that’s when the story
of old Ed Mitchell really began to spiral ever upward …”). Mitchell talked
about The Pit as his new “stage,” and how he and Greg Hatem were taking
whole-hog barbecue upscale, and making it “a little bit more trendy” while
“keeping it real.” The Pit had an executive chef, and I got the feeling Ed
was doing a lot more talking than cooking nowadays.

Delivering his practiced patter, Ed was
upbeat in the automatic mode of the salesman or evangelist. And yet I also detected a
real sweetness in the man, a passion for cooking for people, and, somewhere deep down
there beneath all the talk about authenticity, the kernel of something that felt a lot
like … authenticity.

I asked Ed about the event in Wilson, which
some of the PR people at the restaurant group had discouraged me from attending. Maybe
it would turn out to be as boring as they promised (“I just have to warn you,
it’s a long hot day in a parking lot with a lot of sitting around”) or maybe
they wanted to keep the focus on the restaurant, but to me it sounded perfect. Ed would
be cooking a couple of hogs
himself in his hometown, assisted by his
younger brother Aubrey. He planned to start the hogs on the pit at his old restaurant
Friday night, and then finish them in the parking lot Saturday on portable cookers. I
asked Ed if I could help out.

“I don’t see why not. Come on
down, we’ll put you to work, show you how old Ed Mitchell cooks whole-hog
barbecue.”

When I showed up at The Pit Friday afternoon
to meet Ed Mitchell for the drive out to Wilson, the pit master was not in the kitchen.
He was in the dining room, getting his picture taken with a customer, something that
clearly happened all the time. Ed was a slow-moving bear of a man with the build of a
linebacker (in fact, he attended Fayetteville State on a football scholarship), but a
sixty-three-year-old linebacker, with a prosperous belly. His complexion was dark as
coal, and his full-moon face was fringed in a nimbus of snow-white beard. Ed had on his
trademark outfit—crisp denim overalls and baseball cap—and after finishing up with the
customer, he asked a server to take a picture of the two of us, with our arms wrapped
around each other’s shoulders like old friends.

On the ride out to Wilson in one of The
Pit’s catering vans, I got “the Ed Mitchell story,” complete with that
title. Listening to him tell his story was very much like déjà vu. More than once, I
could swear I had heard this exact sentence somewhere before. And I had—usually in one
of the oral histories I had read before coming to North Carolina. The version of
“the Ed Mitchell story” that follows draws on both those oral histories
(especially the one done for Southern Foodways Alliance) and my own interviews with
Ed.

Cooking barbecue had never been part of
Ed’s life plan, though
because he was the oldest of three boys
his mother, Doretha, had insisted he learn how to cook. She worked while he was growing
up, first for a tobacco company, and then as a domestic in the home of one of the
tobacco executives who lived in the grand houses on the west side of Wilson. “I
stayed home to cook for my brothers, and I hated it. Hated it! Cooking just wasn’t
something boys did. But I’m a mama’s boy, always been, and Mama insisted on
it.”

Cooking barbecue was different, however. It
was something the men did on special occasions: at Christmastime and other holidays, and
for “the quarterlies”—family reunions. Ed remembers getting to cook his
first pig at fourteen, and how he relished the privilege of spending long hours around
the fire pit with the men of the family.

“Moonshine was always an important
part of barbecue, because, you see, the men were not allowed to drink in the house. So
this kind of whole-hog cooking that had to be done outside and went on all night
long—well, that was just perfect for passing the jar!” To Ed, the great appeal of
cooking a whole pig was not so much the meal as the occasion it provided, for time
around a fire, for talk, and for camaraderie. The food was almost incidental to the
ritual work of producing it.

After a couple of years playing football at
Fayetteville State, Ed was called up to serve in Vietnam, where he spent eighteen
harrowing months. When he got home he finished his degree, graduating in 1972, and was
recruited by Ford Motor Company to join a minority-dealer development program. After
some training in Michigan, Ford sent him to Waltham, Massachusetts, where he worked as a
regional manager in customer service for twelve years, until the day he got word that
his father, Willie, had taken ill. Ed decided to return to Wilson to help his parents
out.

At the time, Ed’s parents ran a
mom-and-pop grocery story on the
east side of town, but after his
father passed in 1990, business took a turn for the worse. Every day, Ed would escort
his mother to and from the store, and he remembers coming by one afternoon to find his
mother looking downcast. He asked her why. “Well, I’ve been here all
day,” she told him, “and I haven’t made but seventeen dollars, and
twelve dollars of that was in food stamps.”

“I wanted to cheer her up, so I asked
her, what did she want to eat for lunch? She thought about it and said, ‘I know
what I want. I’ve got a taste for some old-fashioned barbecue.’ Well, I knew
what that meant, so I went down to the Super Duper and I bought a small little pig,
maybe thirty-two pounds or so, and I bought five dollars’ worth of oak wood to
give it the flavor I wanted. I pulled the old barrel cooker out of the shed, put the pig
on, and gave it about three hours to cook. When the pig was done, I chopped it up, Mama
seasoned it, and she and I sat down in the back of the store for a late lunch.

“While we were enjoying our barbecue,
someone came into the grocery story wanting some hot dogs, which was something Mom and
Dad offered. But when the man saw the pail of barbecue, he said, “Mrs. Mitchell,
y’all got barbecue, too?” Mother looked over at me. I had my mouth full, so
I couldn’t speak, but I nodded, uh-huh. I figured what she needed was to make some
money, so, yeah, sell the man some barbecue! She made the guy a couple of sandwiches and
he left.

“When I came back that evening to
escort her home, Mama was all bubbly, happier than she’d been in all the time
since Daddy passed. I asked her, why the change in mood? ‘I made some money
today,’ she said. ‘I sold all that barbecue.’ Get out of here! But it
seems the man had gone out in the community with his sandwiches and told somebody, and
that somebody told somebody else, and the news got around like wildfire, until all the
barbecue was sold.