Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (60 page)

I must say my time with the pit masters has
definitely made me a
more confident and accomplished griller. (I try
not to misuse the hallowed term “barbecue.”) Some nights I even cook with
wood, taking the time to burn the logs down to bright cinders before putting on the meat
or fish. In general, I cook much more slowly and carefully with fire than I used to, and
the results are well worth it, in both tenderness and flavor. Though on many weeknights,
when time is tight, I still crank up the gas grill and quickly sear some kind of
filet.

But the most surprising legacy of my time in
North Carolina is the annual pig roast we throw every fall. Before meeting Ed Mitchell
and the Joneses, I was definitely not the sort of person who would ever think to cook a
whole animal in the front yard, much less have any idea how to go about it. Now I guess
I am. Though it’s very much a team effort, with Judith and Isaac and Samin and my
old friend (and amateur pit master) Jack Hitt playing key roles, along with a crew of
volunteers who come by to tend the fire through the long night of slow cooking. Early in
November, I arrange for a pig from Mark Pasternak, a farmer in Nicasio, and drive out
there with Jack or Samin to pick it up on a Friday morning. That afternoon, once
we’ve seasoned it and built a wood fire, Jack and I hoist the pig onto the pit for
its twenty-hour or so cook.

The fire pit has gotten a few upgrades,
including a sturdy cast-iron grate to hold the pig, and a hemispheric steel frame
(contributed by my brother-in-law, Chuck Adams, even though he keeps kosher) that we
wrap with heavy-duty foil and painter’s tarps to create a sealed oven. The
contraption still looks like a redneck spaceship landed in the garden, but it holds the
heat so well that the pig can go hours before we have to add new wood coals. (Or
charcoals: We’re not averse to using a little Kingsford during the night if
it’ll buy us a few more hours of sleep.) We deploy a half dozen probes wired to
oven thermometers in order to monitor the temperature both in the pit and in the pig
itself, and try to keep the oven no hotter than 200°F.
All day
Saturday, while we work on the side dishes (coleslaw, rice and beans, cornbread),
friends and neighbors drift in and out of the yard, drawn by the smoke and its
captivating aromas.

When the thermometers inform us the internal
temperature of the meat is approaching 190°F, the pig is done—usually early Saturday
evening, shortly after the guests arrive. Everyone gathers around as we lift the cover
off the pit to reveal a considerably smaller but now handsomely lacquered and fragrant
pig. Now it’s showtime. Jack pulls the meat from the bones, chopping and seasoning
it on a big wooden plank, while I use Ed Mitchell’s technique to crisp the skin on
the gas grill, flipping rubbery flaps of pigskin this way and that until the magic
moment when they suddenly turn into blistered brown glass: crackling! We mix it all
together, the steaming meat and the precious crackling, and let people build their own
sandwiches. Memorable sandwiches.

The whole event is a ridiculously ambitious
undertaking, and every year we vow this is the last one, but that hasn’t happened
yet and probably won’t. What was an experiment has become a tradition, and
traditions have a way of gathering momentum around them over time. People start asking
about the date of the next pig roast before the end of the summer; they’ve come to
count on it. Judith will tell you the best part of the pig roast happens long before the
first guest arrives: For her, it’s all about the team working together to create a
special occasion. For me, the pig roast is also an opportunity to reconnect with a wider
circle of friends, as well as with Jack and the rest of the pit crew, the farmer who
supplies the pig, and then with the whole culture of barbecue.

Any time you cook a whole animal in public
is going to feel like a ritual, will have that ceremonial weight. Maybe it’s the
presence of the animal itself, providing such a vivid reminder of what’s involved
whenever we eat meat—those echoes of sacrifice. Or maybe it’s the
sight of fifty or sixty people sharing the same pig, enjoying their barbecue. Is there
a sweeter proof of the power of cooking to bring people together—to create a community,
even if only for a night? “There’s something very powerful about that
dish,” as Ed Mitchell told me that afternoon in Wilson, “just don’t
ask me what it is.”

For next year, Isaac and I have been talking
about brewing a special beer for the pig roast, and maybe we’ll get it together in
time. But, honestly, I’m not sure brewing will ever be more than a very occasional
activity, something he and I might do when he’s home visiting from college. Though
we are getting better at it, I realized the other day, when I opened the fridge and
reached for a Pollan’s Pale Ale rather than a Sierra Nevada. (Though the Humboldt
Spingo proved something of a disappointment—not enough hops, Shane and I decided, to
balance out the heaviness of the malt.) But even if I don’t brew more than once or
twice a year, I already have a much better understanding of what is going on in a really
good ale, and as a result enjoy drinking them much more than I used to.

I would never have expected bread baking to
take up permanent residence in my life, but apparently it has—not every day, but a
couple of times a month, and always with satisfaction. I’ve found the work is easy
to fold into the rhythms of a writing day at home; it gets me up from my chair every
forty-five minutes to turn (and smell and taste) the dough. I’ll bake a couple of
loaves on a Saturday when we have friends coming to dinner, or as a treat for the
family—baking never fails to improve the mood of a household. For a long time, I was
feeling a little trapped by a sense of responsibility to the sourdough starter—the need
to care for and feed it every day, like a pet. But recently I learned how to safely put
it into hibernation for weeks at a time. I’ll feed it well, wait an hour or two,
then add enough additional flour to form a dry ball, and simply lose the container in
the back of the refrigerator. A few days before I want to bake again, I dig
the starter out and wake it up, by feeding and stirring it twice
daily. Every time I take it out of the fridge, the gray clay seems so inert and lifeless
and sour that I’m sure the culture has finally died. But after a couple of days of
attention it starts throwing bubbles and smelling like apples again, and I’m back
in business as a baker. It’s been a lesson to me, in the continuing possibility of
“cultural revival,” to borrow Sandor Katz’s nice term. Meanwhile, the
bread gets better and better, and I find that a really good oven spring can still make
my day.

Each of the different methods I learned for
turning the stuff of nature into tasty creations of culture implies a different way of
engaging with the world, and some are more sympathetic than others. The pit master
performs his mastery of animal and fire on a public stage. The cook marries the flavors
of aromatic plants in her pot at home. Both of these ways of cooking have found their
places in my life, the first one on special occasions, and the second more routinely.
Yet I would have to say that of all the transformations, fermentation has proved to be
the one that has engaged me most deeply.

Maybe it’s because fermenting has so
much in common with gardening, work that has always suited me temperamentally. Like a
gardener, the brewer and the baker, the pickler and the cheese maker all find themselves
engaging in a lively conversation with nature. All work with living creatures that come
to the table with their own interests, interests that must be understood and respected
if we are to succeed. And we succeed precisely to the extent we manage to align our
interests with theirs. As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noëlla and Chad
Robertson and all the other fermentos I met, mastery is never more than partial or
temporary. “Dude,
I
don’t make this
beer,”
a brewer in Oakland once told me after I had complimented him on his black lager.
“The yeasts make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that,
they’ll do all the rest.”

But the work of fermentation is
collaborative in another sense as well. It brought me into contact with a whole
subculture of fermentos, many more in fact than I’ve mentioned here by name.
I’m thinking of all the brewers and cheese makers, the picklers and bakers, who
seemed to come out of the woodwork, like so many wild yeasts and lactobacilli, as soon
as I resolved to learn their crafts. (
Everything is everywhere.
) Each of the
various fermentation arts depends on not one but two subcultures, a microbial culture
and a human culture. I would have thought that the industrialization (and
pasteurization) of the modern food chain would have long since put both these cultures
to rout. But in fact they are still very much alive and all around us, hidden in plain
sight, awaiting just the right conditions, or questions, to reappear and revive.

This, it seems to me, is one of the greatest
pleasures of doing this wholly unnecessary work: the spontaneous communities that spring
up and gather around it. Fermentos, I found, are uncommonly generous with their
knowledge and recipes and starter cultures, perhaps because the microbes have taught
them modesty, or because they understand that cultures of every kind depend for their
survival on getting passed on, one hand to the next, down through time. Maybe, too,
there is the sense of solidarity that comes from feeling yourself in the minority, as
these post-Pasteurians surely do in this era of mass-produced and industrially sanitized
food.

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small
but eloquent protest—on behalf of the senses and the microbes—against the homogenization
of flavors and food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across
the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much
prefer we remain
passive consumers of its standardized commodities,
rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of ourselves and of the places
where we live, because your pale ale or sourdough bread or kimchi is going to taste
nothing like mine or anyone else’s.

But surely the most important of all the
relationships sponsored by this work is the one between those of us who elect to do it
and the people it gives us the opportunity to feed and nourish and, when all goes well,
delight. Cooking is all about connection, I’ve learned, between us and other
species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important,
other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes;
that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of
intimacy.

One of the most memorable cooking teachers I
met in the course of my education was Hyeon Hee Lee, a Korean woman I visited in a town
outside Seoul hoping to learn how to make traditional kimchi. It was a fairly brief
encounter, no more than a few hours, but in retrospect it did as much as any other to
help me find myself in the kitchen. Before we began, Hyeon Hee made sure, through our
translator, that I understood that there are a hundred different ways of making kimchi;
what she was going to teach me was just one way, the way of her mother and her
grandmother before that.

Hyeon Hee had done most of the prep before I
arrived, brining the Napa cabbages overnight and pounding the red peppers, garlic, and
ginger into a thick paste. What remained was for us to carefully rub the brilliant red
paste into the leaves of the cabbages, which are kept intact, one leaf at a time. You
had to make sure that every internal and external square inch of every head of cabbage
received its own spice massage. Then you folded the leaves back on themselves and
wrapped them around so that the whole thing vaguely resembled a pretzel, before gently
placing the bright-scarlet knot at the bottom
of an urn. Once the urn
was full, it would be buried in the earth, beneath a little lean-to in the backyard.

While we worked together that wintry
November afternoon, kneeling side by side on straw mats, Hyeon Hee mentioned that
Koreans traditionally make a distinction between the “tongue taste” and the
“hand taste” of a food.
Hand taste?
I was beginning to have my
doubts about the translator. But as Hyeon Hee elaborated on the distinction, while the
two of us gently and methodically massaged spice into leaf, the notion began to come
into a rough focus.

Tongue taste is the straightforward chemical
phenomenon that takes place whenever molecules make contact with taste buds, something
that happens with any food as a matter of course. Tongue taste is the kind of easy,
accessible flavor that any food scientist or manufacturer can reliably produce in order
to make food appealing. “McDonald’s has tongue taste,” Hyeon Hee
explained.

Hand taste, however, involves something
greater than mere flavor. It is the infinitely more complex experience of a food that
bears the unmistakable signature of the individual who made it—the care and thought and
idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it. Hand taste cannot
be faked, Hyeon Hee insisted, and hand taste is the reason we go to all this trouble,
massaging the individual leaves of each cabbage and then folding them and packing them
in the urn just so. What hand taste is, I understood all at once, is the taste of
love.

Below are four basic recipes, one based on
each of the four transformations: a pork shoulder slow cooked over a fire, a sugo (or
Bolognese sauce) cooked in a pot, a whole-grain bread, and a sauerkraut. In some cases,
the recipe comes from the cook who taught it to me; in others, I have adapted it from
what I was taught. A word of caution that is at the same time a word of encouragement:
As I learned in the course of my education in the kitchen, “the recipe is never
the recipe.” It might look comprehensive and legally binding, but in fact these
recipes should be treated as a set of sketches or notes. Each of them has been tested by
a professional recipe tester, so faithfulness to details and procedures will be rewarded
on your first attempt. But after that you should feel free to adjust and improvise—these
are templates that can be varied endlessly with little risk and much potential reward. I
cook these dishes, or variations on them, regularly, only seldom looking at the text.
That way, they continue to mutate and evolve, as recipes should. Eventually they become
your own.