Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (7 page)

It’s striking how many different
cultures at so many different times have practiced some form of animal sacrifice
involving the roasting of meat over a fire, and just how many of these rituals conceived
of the smoke from these cook fires as a medium of communication between humans and gods.
Anthropologists tell us some such practice is very nearly universal in traditional
cultures; indeed, you might say it is the
absence
of such a ritual in our own
culture that is probably the greater anomaly. Though it may be that the faded outlines
of such rituals can still be glimpsed in something like whole-hog barbecue.

But the prominence of smoke in rituals of
animal sacrifice suggests we need to add another myth of the origins of cooking to our
growing pile: Maybe cookery begins with ritual sacrifice, since putting meat on a fire
solves for the problem of how exactly to deliver the sacrificial animals to their
heavenly recipients.

What the gods have demanded from us in terms of
sacrifice has gotten progressively less onerous over time. So what started out as a
solemn, psychologically traumatic ritual eventually evolved into a ceremonial feast.
Human sacrifice gave way to animal sacrifice, which in turn gave way to partial animal
sacrifice in a happy series of dilutions culminating (or petering out) in the modern
backyard barbecue, where the religious element is, if not completely absent, then pretty
well muffled. It’s not a big conceptual leap to go from the observation that the
gods seem perfectly happy with a meal of smoke to realizing that maybe we don’t
have to incinerate the
whole
animal in a burnt offering in order to satisfy
them. The gods can enjoy the smoke of the roasting animal, and we can enjoy the meat.
How convenient!

But keeping the best cuts of sacrificial
animals for human consumption is an innovation hard won, at least in classical
mythology, and the figure responsible for it paid a heavy personal price. The Prometheus
legend is usually read as a story about man’s hubris in challenging the gods, the
theft of fire representing the human assumption of divine prerogative—costly yet a great
boon to civilization. All this is true enough, but in the original telling, by Hesiod,
the story is a little different. Here, it turns out to be as much about the theft of
meat as it is about the theft of fire.

In Hesiod’s
Theogony,
Prometheus first incurred Zeus’s wrath by playing a trick on him during the ritual
sacrifice of an ox at Mecone. Prometheus hid the best cuts of beef inside a
nasty-looking ox stomach but wrapped the bones in an attractive layer of fat. Prometheus
then offered Zeus his choice of sacrificial offerings, and the Olympian, deceived by the
“glistening fat,” opted for the bones, thereby leaving the tasty cuts of
beef for the mortals. This set a new precedent
for animal
sacrifices—henceforth men would keep the best cuts for themselves, and burn the fat and
bones for the gods, as indeed is the custom observed throughout the
Odyssey
.
(What Henry Fielding called “Homer’s wonderful book about
eating.”)

Infuriated, Zeus retaliated by hiding fire
from man, making it difficult, if not impossible, for men to enjoy their meat. Indeed,
without the cook fire humans are no better than animals, which must eat their meat
raw.
^*
Prometheus then proceeded to steal it back, hiding the flames in the
pith of a giant fennel stalk. In retribution, Zeus chained Prometheus eternally to a
rock (where his liver became the unending feast—the raw meat—of another creature) and
sent down to mortal men a world of trouble, in the form of Pandora, the first woman.

In Hesiod’s telling, the Prometheus
story becomes a myth of the origin of cooking, an account of how animal sacrifice
evolved into a form of feasting, thanks to Prometheus’ daring reapportionment of
the sacrificial animal to favor man. It is also a story about human identity—how the
possession of fire allowed us to distinguish ourselves from the animals. But the fire in
question—the fire that elevates us above the beasts—is specifically a cook fire, and
what had been strictly a religious observance—a burnt offering of an entire animal to
the gods in a gesture of subservience—becomes a very different kind of ritual, one with
the power to bind the human community together in the sharing of a tasty meal.

The dining room of the Skylight Inn could not
be much less ceremonial: wood-grain Formica tables scattered beneath fluorescent lights;
a sign over the counter with old-timey snap-in plastic letters
listing your options; faded newspaper and magazine clippings about the establishment,
and portraits of the forefathers, decorating the walls. By the door, a glass case
proudly displays the restaurant’s James Beard Award from 2003.

But there is
one
ceremonial touch:
Directly behind the counter where you place your order sits an enormous chopping block,
a kind of barbecue altar where one of the Joneses, or their designated seconds,
officiates at lunch and dinner, chopping with heavy cleavers whole hogs in full view of
the assembled diners. The maple-wood block is nearly six inches thick, but only at the
perimeter. So much pork has been chopped on it that the center of the block has been
worn down to a thickness of only an inch or two.

“We flip it over every year or so, and
then, when that side wears down, we have to get a new one,” Samuel told me, with
the glint I’d learned to recognize as a sign that a tasty BBQ sound bite was fast
approaching. “Some customers look at our chopping block and say, Hey, there must
be a lot of wood in your barbecue. We say, Uh-yeah, and our wood is better than most
other people’s barbecue!”

The dull rhythmic knock-knock-knock of
cleaver hitting wood is the constant soundtrack of the Skylight dining room.
(“That’s how you know you’re getting fresh barbecue,” says Uncle
Jeff.) Above the chopper’s head, the menu board lists a succinct handful of
choices: Barbecue sandwich ($2.75); barbecue in trays (small, medium, and large, from
$4.50 to $5.50) and barbecue by the pound ($9.50); along the bottom, the sign promises
“all orders with slaw and cornbread.” A few soft drinks, and that’s
it. The only things on the menu that have changed since 1947 are the prices, and those
not by all that much. (The price of a barbecue sandwich at the Skylight Inn undercuts
that of a Big Mac—$2.99—at the McDonald’s in Ayden, one of the few instances where
slow food beats fast food on price.) The next Skylight
sound bite goes
like this: “We got barbecue, slaw, and cornbread, that’s all,” Samuel
recites. “When you come here, it’s not
what
you want, it’s
how much of it you need.”

As I waited at the counter to place my order
(a barbecue sandwich and an iced tea), I watched Jeff chop and season barbecue.
Seasoning consists of salt and red pepper, a generous splash of apple cider vinegar, and
a few dashes of Texas Pete, a red-hot sauce that, curiously, is made in North Carolina.
(I guess “Texas” is a superior signifier for spicy and authentic.) Wielding
a cleaver in each hand, Jeff roughly chops big chunks of meat from different parts of
the hog. This is what makes whole-hog barbecue special.

“See, you got your ham, which is lean
meat but can be a little dry, and then you got your shoulder, which is greasier
[pronounced
greazier
] but more tender and moist, and of course there’s
the belly meat, which is probably your juiciest cut. ’Course, there’s always
some nice bark here and there.” Bark is BBQ terminology for the singed outer edges
of the meat. “And then you got your skin [
skeen
], which lends some nice
salty crunch. Chop them all together, not
too
fine, throw some seasoning on
there and mix it in good, and that’s it right there: whole-hog
barbecue.”

Uncle Jeff insisted that I also take a tray
of unseasoned barbecue, so I could see for myself that what’s going on here at the
Skylight Inn does not in any way, shape, or form depend for its flavor or quality on
“sauce.” This is a word he pronounces with an upturned lip and a slight
sneer, suggesting that the use of barbecue sauce was at best a culinary crutch deserving
of pity and at worst a moral failing.

I tried the unseasoned barbecue first and it
was a revelation: moist and earthy, with an unmistakable but by no means overpowering
dimension of smoke. In fact, the meat had a flavor far subtler than what you would think
could ever have issued from the smoking
inferno of oak wood and hog out
back. The variety of textures was especially nice—ham, shoulder, belly, bark—but it was
the occasional mahogany shard of crackling dispersed through the mixture that really
made the dish extraordinary: a tidy, brittle, irreducible packet of salt, fat, and wood
smoke. (Bacon gives you some idea, but only an idea.) I suddenly understood, at a deep
level, exactly what had overcome young Bo-bo when he touched the irresistible substance
to his tongue: There
is
something life-altering about pork crackling.

Though I think I enjoyed the seasoned
barbecue in the sandwich even more. The sharpness of apple cider vinegar provides the
perfect counterweight to the sweet unctuousness of the fat, of which there was plenty
melted right into the meat, and also balances out the heaviness of the wood smoke.
Together, the acid and red pepper brightened and elevated a dish that otherwise might
have seemed a little
too
earthy.

So this was barbecue.
Right away I
realized I had never before tasted the real thing, and I was converted. This was easily
one of the tastiest, most succulent meat dishes I had ever eaten, and certainly the most
rewarding $2.75 I’d ever invested in a sandwich.
Barbecue
: My first bite
made me realize, with a cringing pang, that, as a Northerner, I’d already spent
more than half of my life as a serial abuser of that peculiar word, which is to say, as
a backyard blackener of steaks and chops over too-hot fires—over
flames
!—with a
pitiable dependence on sauce. Even before I had finished my sandwich, I resolved to
figure out how to make barbecue like this, to try to redeem that noble word, at
home.

There was so much going on in this sandwich.
It wasn’t just all the different cuts of pork, which kept things interesting bite
after bite, but also all that wood and time and tradition. This was the way barbecue had
been prepared for generations here in eastern North Carolina, and, having done my
reading in BBQ history, I could appreciate
what an accurate reflection
of this place and its past this sandwich offered. If a sandwich can be said to have
terroir,
that quality of place that the French believe finds its way into
the best wines and cheeses, this sandwich had it, a sense of place and history you could
taste.

Since the Europeans first set foot on these
shores, the pig has been the principal meat animal in this part of the country. Indeed,
the words “meat” and “pork” have been synonymous for most of
Southern history. The Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto brought the first pigs to
the American South in the sixteenth century. For centuries, the descendants of those
hogs ranged freely in the Carolinas, feeding themselves on the abundant mast produced by
the oak-and-hickory forest. This means that, at least before pigs were confined to
farms, the flavors of the Eastern hardwood forest could find their way into their meat
by two routes: first as acorn and hickory nuts and then as wood smoke. (Three ways, if
you count the wood contributed by the chopping block.) These feral hogs were hunted as
needed, or rounded up in the fall by the porcine equivalent of the cowboy. Hogs were so
abundant that even slaves could enjoy them from time to time. And because a single
animal yielded so much meat, to “cook a pig” in the South has always implied
a special occasion, a gathering of the community.