Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (14 page)

The second important reaction working on our
pigs during the night was caramelization. The heating of odorless sucrose until it
browns generates more than a hundred other compounds, with flavor notes reminiscent not
just of caramel but also of nuts, fruits, alcohol, green leaves, sherry, and
vinegar.

Together these two reactions produce a vast
encyclopedia of scents and flavors. The question that arises is, why should it be that
we prefer this complexity to the comparatively monochromatic flavor of uncooked meat?
Richard Wrangham would say it’s because evolution has selected for humans who
happened to like the complex flavors of cooked foods; those who did ate more of it and
produced more offspring. Harold McGee, the food-science writer, proposed another
intriguing theory in his 1990 book,
The Curious Cook
. He points out that many
of the aromatic compounds generated by the two browning reactions are similar or
identical to compounds found in the plant world, such as the flavor notes that we think
of as nutty, green, earthy, vegetal, floral, and fruity. It might be expected that
caramelizing sugars would produce some of the same compounds found in ripe fruit, since
fruits contain sugars; however, it is curious to find so many phytochemicals—plant
compounds—showing up in something like roast meat.

“The mingling of the animal and
vegetable, the raw and the cooked, may seem like a remarkable coincidence,” McGee
writes, and it is. But it makes sense that this particular canon of scents would move
us, since it is the one we encountered every day in the world of edible plants long
before we discovered how to cook. In that uncooked world, this particular group of
aromatic compounds amounts to a kind of universal interspecies language, one of the
principal systems of communication between plants and animals. Already familiar,
those plant scents and flavors were precisely the ones you did well to
pay attention to, since they could direct you to good things to eat and away from
bad.

Plants have become, by necessity, the great
masters of biochemistry in nature. Rooted in place, they evolved the ability to
manufacture these aromatic compounds because chemistry can do for the plants what
locomotion, vocalization, and consciousness do for animals. So the plants produce
molecules that warn and repel and poison some creatures, and others that attract them,
whether pollinators to assist them with reproduction or mammals and birds to move their
seeds over distances. When their seeds are ready for transport, plants summon mammals
with the strong scents and tastes of ripe fruit, a sensory language to which we have
become particularly sensitive, since it alerts us to the presence of food
energy—sugars—and other plant chemicals we need, like vitamin C. But all animals learn
to operate in the information-rich chemical environment that plants create. Fluency in
the molecular language of plants would have been particularly important for humans
before the advent of agriculture reduced our diet to a small handful of domesticated
species. When we still ate hundreds of different plant species, we relied on our senses
of smell and taste to navigate a far more complicated food landscape.

So it is no wonder that those types of
cooking (such as meat over fire) that happen to generate scents and flavors borrowed
from the plant world’s extensive chemical vocabulary (and perhaps especially from
the rich dialect of ripe fruit) would stimulate us as much as they do. They recall us to
a time before agriculture, when our diet was far more diverse, not to mention more
interesting and healthy.

“Our powerful response to [these]
odors may in part be a legacy of their prehistoric importance for animals, which have
used them to recall and learn from their experiences,” McGee writes. That these
plant scents and flavors provoke us is no accident. Cooked food, he
suggests, is Proustian through and through, offering a rich trove of sensory
evocations that take us off the frontier of the present and throw us back on the past,
our own and, possibly, our species’. “In a sip of coffee or a piece of
crackling there are echoes of flowers and leaves, fruit and earth, a recapitulation of
moments from the long dialogue between animals and plants.” The fact that we are
omnivores, creatures who need to consume a great many different substances in order to
be healthy, might also predispose us to complexity in the scent and taste of our food.
It signals biochemical diversity.

It may also be that, quite apart from any
specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked
food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We
gravitate toward complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat, or
fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and,
specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and
now. This sensory metaphor—
this stands for that—
is one of the most important
transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pigskin becomes
a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe
fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child.
As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined.

These particular pigs were still somewhat
underdetermined, however. The plan was to finish them at the barbecue, which was taking
place in a parking lot downtown across from the old vaudeville theater for which the
event was raising money. Aubrey and I rolled the pigs onto the hotel pans—they were
considerably lighter now, much of the water having evaporated and the fat rendered
out—and then
carried them outside to a flatbed truck. Chained to the
flatbed were three big pig-cookers, the same kind that had elicited gales of derision
from the pit masters assembled in Oxford, Mississippi. These were simply 275-gallon
steel oil tanks that had been laid on their side, cut in half, and hinged. A short
chimney stuck out of the top of the thing; an axle with two wheels had been welded to
the bottom on one end, and a trailer hitch on the other, so the cooker could be
towed.

The business district of downtown Wilson
consists of a small grid of handsome streets, dominated by a handful of restored Beaux
Arts buildings. These stolid limestone banks and office blocks were built in the first
decades of the twentieth century, the city’s heyday. For a time, Wilson was one of
the biggest tobacco markets in the region, but downtown today seems underutilized, at
least on a Saturday, and our barbecue inconvenienced nobody. A big white tent had been
erected on the empty parking lot; we rolled out and arranged the cookers along one side
of it.

I was surprised to see propane tanks mounted
on the trailer hitches of the cookers. Ed lit them, and we put the pigs on to finish.
Propane had somehow gone from barbecue abomination to convenience overnight. When I
asked him about it, Ed explained, somewhat defensively, that he was using the gas not to
cook the pigs but merely to keep them warm.

The barbecue was still several hours off,
but the sight of the big cookers, and the fine smells already emanating from them, began
drawing people as if out of thin air almost right away. Already it seemed clear that the
mere sight of Big Ed in the company of a smoking pig cooker put the people of Wilson in
an exceptionally good mood. It was Saturday and there was going to be a barbecue.

Actually, there were going to be two
barbecues: a lunch and a dinner. Fifteen dollars bought you barbecue, coleslaw, rolls,
and sweet tea. By noon, a crowd of two hundred or so had gathered for the first
seating. When a critical mass of eaters had settled in, Aubrey and I
opened the cookers and, wearing heavy black fireproof gloves, lifted off the first pig
and brought it to the chopping block. Ed was shmoozing with the crowd that had gathered
around us. We were going to be doing our cooking in public.

Aubrey gave me the front half of the animal
to work on while he went to work on the back. The first step was to pull all the meat
from the skin, which we would later put back on the cookers to crisp. The fat fingers of
the gloves permitted only the crudest manual operations: pulling big hunks of pork off
the bones and blades in the shoulder, digging out chunks of cartilage, extracting the
ribs, and removing various tubular structures and other anatomical anomalies present in
the meat. Even through the big fat gloves, the steaming meat was almost unbearably hot,
and I had to stop and remove them every so often to let my hands cool. Mostly, the meat
fell easily off the bone, and before long we had before us a big pile of various pork
parts—hams, loins, shoulders, bellies.

It was time for Aubrey to start chopping. He
wielded a big cleaver in each hand, and the knock-knock-knocking sound of steel on
chopping block brought more people around to watch us. When the pile of meat he was
chopping seemed too dry, Aubrey would ask me to toss in some shoulder or belly, and when
it seemed too fatty, he’d call for more ham or loin, until the mixture seemed
about right. Seasoning came next. Aubrey continued to mix the pork with his gloved hands
while I added whatever ingredient he called for: nearly a gallon of apple cider vinegar,
followed by fat handfuls of sugar, salt, and pepper, both red and black. I sprinkled the
dry ingredients over the pork with an even, wrist-flicking motion that Ed had taught me:
just like sowing seeds. Aubrey kneaded the seasoning into the mass of meat, pushing it
back, then folding it forward, over and again, until he nodded at me to taste it. It
tasted a little flat, which meant more
vinegar. I splashed on another
third of a gallon or so, and another handful of red-pepper flakes, which I figured
couldn’t hurt since I knew Ed liked some spice in his barbecue. This did the
trick.

Now Ed showed me how to crisp the skin,
which was nicely browned on one side but still rubbery and white with curds of fat on
the other. I sprinkled several handfuls of salt on the fatty side, and threw the skin on
the grill, while Ed cranked up the heat. “Keep flipping it or it’s liable to
burn,” he warned. “When it won’t bend anymore and begins to blister,
that means it’s ready.” Using a long pair of tongs, I flipped the broad page
of skin, first this way then that. It took awhile, and the heat—of the day but
especially of the hellish exhalation that hit me full in the face every time I lifted
the lid on a cooker—was getting brutal. And then, all at once, the skin lost its
pliability and turned to glass. Crackling!

I moved the skin to the chopping block and,
after it had had a moment to cool, took a cleaver to it. People were swarming us
now—they knew all about crackling and didn’t want to wait for us to serve it.
“Can I get me some of that skeeeen?!”
became the question of
the hour; we would hear it a hundred times before it was all over.
“It’s coming, don’t worry, it’s coming
.
” The
crackling shattered at the mere touch of the cleaver. I added handfuls of the brittle
little shards into the meat. Another taste: perfect! Aubrey concurred; the barbecue was
ready.

By now I was drenched with perspiration,
struggling in fact to keep the sweat beading on my brow from raining onto the meat, but
this was fun, an adrenaline rush. These people were treating all three of us, and not
just Ed, like we were some kind of rock stars. They
really
loved barbecue, we
had the barbecue (plus the precious skeen) and we were in a position to give them what
they craved. The man who mediates between the fire and the beast, and the beast and the
beast eaters, has projected onto him a certain primal power: This
is basic stuff, Anthro 101, but now I could actually feel it, and it felt pretty
good.

In my room at the Holiday Inn the night
before, I had put myself to sleep reading a book called
The Cuisine of Sacrifice
Among the Greeks,
by a French and a Belgian classicist
.
The word
“barbecue” never appears in the book, but the more I read about the role of
the sacrificial feast in ancient Greece, the more it seemed to unlock what Ed had called
“the power of this dish.” I became convinced that even today wisps of the
smoke of ritual sacrifice linger over barbecue—indeed, shadow us, however faintly,
whenever we cook a piece of meat over a fire.