Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (13 page)

The four pits, which occupied one long wall
of the kitchen, were built out of brick and resembled the ones in Ayden, except that
they had sleek, stainless-steel covers and a sophisticated system for ventilating the
smoke. Ed was very proud of the kitchen’s design, which included a redundant
ventilation system and sprinklers that allowed him to safely and legally bring
wood-burning barbecue pits into a restaurant kitchen—the first time, he claimed, this
had ever been done in North Carolina.

Ed was happy to give orders and let me work.
I never did figure out whether he had decided I had some potential as a pitman, or was
just happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting. He handed me a shovel and told me
to remove the ashes from the floor of the pits, ashes probably left over from the last
barbecue Ed cooked here, before the foreclosure in 2004. What he instructed me to do
next came as a surprise, and a disillusioning one at that. He asked me to empty two
twenty-pound bags of charcoal into the center of each pit. Ed cooked with
Kingsford!—those little rectangular black pillows of compressed charcoal made from
sawdust and who knows what else. How authentic is
that
? Ed explained that
Kingsford gave him a long, slow burn that “allowed me to get some sleep at
night.” But it was tasteless! What about the wood smoke? “You’ll see
in due course.”

After I mounded the briquettes in the center
of each pit, Aubrey squirted copious amounts of lighter fluid onto them, waited a moment
for it to soak in, and tossed a match that instantly ignited an impressive
conflagration. This wasn’t exactly the primordial fire I’d come in search
of. It was more like the suburban backyard barbecue
blazes of my
childhood. Everyone, it seems, makes his own compromises, whether in the interest of
convenience or cost, but everyone else’s compromises are abominations. Though I
uncovered a reservoir of mutual respect between the Joneses and Mitchells, the former
regards Mitchell’s charcoal as a sad declension, and the latter feels the same way
about the Joneses’ commodity pigs. (“I would say they’re eighty
percent of the way there,” Ed told me.)

While we waited for the briquettes to catch
fire and then mellow, Ed showed me around the building, parts of which had been leased
to a woman who was operating it as a cafeteria. The structure was a somewhat bewildering
warren of rooms that had been added on, piecemeal, to the original mom-and-pop grocery
store. The former store survives as the comparatively tiny, windowless heart in the
middle of what has grown into a sprawling cinder-block complex. Proudly, Ed showed me
the upstairs lecture hall, where he had planned to start a barbecue college for aspiring
pit masters; the “pig bar,” where customers could have a drink while
watching Ed or Aubrey chop barbecue; and the dining room, the walls of which were
covered with a remarkable mural depicting the role of barbecue in Southern history. It
was an ambitious piece of folk art, at least fifty feet in length, and painted over the
course of a few years by an autistic man who worked in the kitchen as a dishwasher. (It
took me the longest time to realize Ed was not saying an “artistic man,”
which seemed self-evident.) “He offered to do the whole thing for ten
dollars,” Ed told me. “That didn’t seem right, so I gave him twenty
dollars and bought the paint.”

Ed made sure I looked at every scene
closely. The mural depicted a myth of the origins of barbecue in the traditions of the
tobacco harvest. Its theme was community. You saw carts laden with tobacco; men
stripping the big leaves, women poling them, then handing the long poles to men to hang
in the barn; wood fires burning in the
barns to cure the tobacco; men
slaughtering hogs outside, hanging their carcasses from trees; women making sausages and
soap from the lard; men digging the barbecue pits, which looked like fresh graves, and
passing jars of moonshine. And then the climactic scene: On a broad lawn in front of a
big white mansion, an improbably long table stretches out in the shade of a great oak.
This is the site of the celebratory feast that marked the end of the harvest.

“Now look at the faces of the people
at that table: black and white.
Together
. This was practically the only time
that happened back then. We needed each other and everyone knew it, even if we went back
to our separate lives afterward. But whether you were picking cotton or putting in the
tobacco, everyone worked together and then everyone feasted together at a
barbecue.”

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 Mitchell’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 Mitchell’s reputation, because I had become a viable spokesman
for an alternative kind of product.” Ed Mitchell 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 Mitchell 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 Mitchell and did not have “clean hands.”
The ruling came too late to do Mitchell much good, however. Mitchell’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
butt 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 butt-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 carcass 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.