Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (6 page)

Charles Lamb would no doubt be pleased to
know that there are still men in North Carolina upholding the tradition of burning down
whole buildings in order to improve the flavor of pigs.

Samuel is a cheery, round-faced, goateed man
of twenty-nine who has been working in the family business off and on since he was nine
years old. He is abundantly proud of the institution his family has built, and feels a
profound sense of obligation to keep the tradition not just going but uncontaminated by
modern innovations, aka “shortcuts.” Southern barbecue is ever looking only
backward, but over time that gets harder and harder to do. “It’s a fact that
our family cannot ever sell this business,” he explains, perhaps a bit ruefully,
“because, see, we’re grandfathered in. With the health department. Anyone
who bought it who wasn’t a Jones? Well, they would have to bring the place up to
code, and right there, that would be the end of it.”

As we stepped into the new cookhouse, I
could immediately see what he meant. Actually, I couldn’t see much of anything at
first: The room was wreathed in a thick fog of fragrant wood smoke, and
though it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five feet from one end of the
building to the other, I could barely make out the steel door on the far wall. At either
end of the room stands a big, deep brick fireplace, in which a monster-sized grate
fabricated from car axles holds a tall stack of flaming logs. Bright-orange cinders drop
between the axles, where they’re scooped out with a shovel and then fed into the
pits. The pits line both of the long walls: a sarcophagus of brick, maybe three feet
tall, with iron bars running across them to hold up the hogs and, suspended above each
of them by cables, a four-by-eight sheet of black steel, hinged and counterweighted with
cinder blocks, to cover them. The pits can hold as many as a dozen two-hundred-pound
hogs at a time. On the insides, the pits are caked with an oily black grime that would
definitely horrify a health inspector, except perhaps a North Carolina health inspector.
It seems that the state has instituted a special, more lenient health code for barbecue
establishments; that, and the informal grandfather clause to which Samuel had alluded,
is all that stands between a place like this and condemnation.

“Yeah, we clean the pits now and then,
depending,” Samuel offered when I broached the sanitation issue. “But you
don’t want to clean them the whole way out, because then you’re losing all
that good insulation.” The problem is, that cake of grime, which a chemist would
probably say consists of equal parts saturated pig fat and the particulate matter
suspended in wood smoke, is highly flammable. So, it seems, is the smoke we were
breathing, which, to my alarm, Samuel claimed could actually ignite if it got
sufficiently thick and the room sufficiently hot. “That’s called a
flash-over,” he offered. Samuel has become, perforce, a close if not always
entirely successful student of fire. He mentioned he’d joined the Ayden Volunteer
Fire Department. Under the circumstances, this would seem like the politic thing to
do.

The vestibule of
hell:
The pit room was in fact an infernal chamber, and not a place likely to
stimulate an appetite for cooked pig in many people. The residues of fires big and small
were everywhere, blackening the bricks, charring the ceiling, puckering the plywood
walls. While Samuel and I talked, I could see over his left shoulder a spectral presence
emerging out of the smoke, the figure of a slightly bent black man slowly pushing a
wheelbarrow topped with a sheet of bloodstained plywood on which the splayed pink
carcass of a hog precariously balanced. I could see the hog’s eyeless head,
bobbing slightly on the lip of the wheelbarrow, and, as it drew closer, the face of the
man carefully inching it forward. It was deeply lined, leathery, and missing several
teeth.

Samuel introduced me to James Henry Howell,
the Skylight Inn’s longtime pit master. Howell made it instantly clear he would be
leaving all the talking to the Joneses. He had work to do, and indeed it appeared that
the lion’s share of the physical labor performed at the restaurant—putting on the
hogs late in the afternoon, flipping them over first thing the next morning, carrying
them, quartered, into the restaurant kitchen for the lunchtime rush, and then chopping
and seasoning them on the big wooden block—was work that James Henry Howell did himself,
leaving the Jones men free to hold forth. Which was fine by me, except it meant I
probably wouldn’t be getting any hands-on experience or how-to instruction here in
Ayden. That was going to have to wait.

Back and forth across the pit room Mr.
Howell slowly wheeled his hogs, melting into the haze to fetch another carcass from the
walk-in cooler, then emerging again with his load, which he would tenderly tip onto the
iron grates. Howell worked slowly and deliberately, and when
he was
done putting the hogs on, he had created an arresting tableau: a smoke-dimmed conga line
of splayed pink carcasses, laid out skin side up and snout to butt. The interior of the
cookhouse now looked like a bunkroom, the sleeping hogs bedded down for the night. Of
all the animals we eat, none resembles us more closely than the hog. Each the size of a
grown man, hairless and pink, its mouth set in what looks very much like a sly smile,
the half dozen pigs laid out in this smoky crypt made me think of many things, but
definitely not lunch or dinner.

It was difficult to regard this pit room,
filthy and littered with cinders, as a
kitchen
, but of course that is what it
is. And that is why the state of North Carolina has been forced to choose between the
equitable enforcement of its health codes and the survival of whole-hog barbecue. Sacred
local tradition that it is, barbecue has won, at least for the time being. But this is a
most unusual kitchen, one where the principal cooking implements are wheelbarrows and
shovels, and the pantry, such as it is, contains nothing but hogs, firewood, and salt.
In fact, the entire building is a kind of cooking implement, as Samuel explained: We
were inside a giant low-temperature oven for the gentle smoking of pigs. Just how
tightly the cookhouse is sealed—even the pitch of its roof—all influence the way the
meat cooks.

After the hogs are on, Howell begins
shoveling wood coals underneath them, transferring the smoldering cinders, one
spade-f at a time, from the hearths, now glowing a deep red, across the room to the
pits. Carefully pouring the incandescent coals between the iron bars, he arranges a line
of fire roughly around the perimeter of each hog, a bit like the chalk line silhouetting
the body at a crime scene. He puts more coals at the ends than in the middle, to
compensate for the fact that the different parts of the hog cook at different rates.
“That’s just one of the challenges of whole-hog cooking,” Samuel
explained. “Cooking just shoulders, like they do over in Lexington, now,
that’s a whole lot easier to control.” Samuel snorts the word
“shoulders”
derisively, as if cooking pork shoulders was
like throwing frankfurters on the grill. “’Course, that’s not barbecue
in our view.”

After he’s arranged the coals to his
satisfaction, Howell splashes water on the backs of the hogs and sprinkles a few
generous handfuls of kosher salt—not to flavor it, Samuel said, but to dry out the skin
and encourage it to blister, thereby helping to effect its transubstantiation into
crackling.

It is a long, laborious way to cook. Mr.
Howell will shovel a few more coals around the drip line of each pig every half hour or
so until he leaves for the evening at six. Several hours later, around midnight,
co-owner Jeff Jones, whom everyone seems to call Uncle Jeff, will have to stop back in
to check if the pigs need any more heat on them. The idea behind the line of perimeter
fire is to build a lasting, indirect source of heat, so that the hogs cook as slowly as
possible through the night. Yet at the same time you want those coals close enough to
the pig’s drip line so that when its back fat begins to render, some of it will
have some nice hot coals on which to drip. The sizzle of those drippings sends up a
different, meatier kind of smoke, which adds another layer of flavor to the pork. It
also perfumes the air in a way that a wood fire alone does not.

That perfume is what I could smell from the
road, and what I was beginning to smell again. Even now, standing here in the middle of
this sepulchral chamber slightly starved for oxygen, hemmed between these two serried
ranks of the porky dead, I was more than a little surprised to register somewhere deep
in my belly the first stirrings of … an appetite!

It is a powerful thing, the scent of meat
roasting on an open fire, which is to say the smell of wood smoke combined with burning
animal fat. We humans are strongly drawn to it. I’ve had the
neighbor’s children drift over “for a closer smell” when I’ve
roasted a pork shoulder on the fire pit in the front yard. Another time, a six-year-old
dinner guest positioned himself downwind of the same cook fire, stretched out his arms
like an orchestra conductor, and inhaled deeply of the meaty-woody perfume, once, twice,
and then abruptly stopped himself, explaining that “I’d better not fill up
on smoke!”

Apparently the same perfume is equally
pleasing to the gods, whose portion of the animals we sacrifice to them has
traditionally been not the flesh of these animals but their smoke. There are two good
reasons for this. Humans must eat to survive, but gods, being immortal, have no such
animal needs. (If they did, they would also need to digest and then, well, eliminate,
which doesn’t seem terribly godlike.) No, the
idea
of meat, the smoky,
ethereal trace of animal flesh wafting up to heaven, is what the gods want from us. They
can and do fill up on smoke. And besides, if the gods did demand cuts, how would we ever
get their portion of meat to them? The fragrant column of smoke, symbolizing the link
between heaven and earth, is the only conceivable medium of conveyance, and also
communication, between humans and their gods. So to say this aroma is divine is more
than an empty expression.

People have known that the smoke of roasting
meat is pleasing to the gods at least since the time of Genesis, where we learn of
several momentous sacrifices that altered man’s relationship to God and disclosed
divine preferences. The first such sacrifice was actually two: the offerings of Cain and
Abel. Cain, a tiller of the fields, sacrificed a portion of his crop to Yahweh, and
Abel, a shepherd, a choice animal from his flock—and God made it clear it was the
sacrifice of domestic
quadrupeds he prefers.
^*
The next
momentous sacrifice came after the waters of the Flood receded, when Noah, back on dry
land at last, made a “burnt offering” to Yahweh. This is a type of sacrifice
in which the entire animal is burned to a crisp—i.e., turned to smoke, and thereby
offered to God. “And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his
heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s
sake … neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have
done.” (Genesis 8:21) If there was ever any doubt about the efficacy of animal
sacrifice (not to mention the sheer power of scent), Noah’s experience should have
put it to rest: The aroma of burning meat is so pleasing to God that it tempered his
wrath and moved him to take the option of worldwide doom completely off the table for
all time.