I now knew exactly what he meant. Ed and I had spent one of the laziest, most desultory afternoons I can remember, standing and sitting around the cookers, getting as close to doing absolutely nothing as you can get while still ostensibly “cooking.” We were “letting that meat cook,” low and slow, and there really wasn’t much to do while it happened.
But now that the guests had arrived and Ed had taken the stage, things were speeding up—getting a tad frantic, in fact. Before me on the chopping block was an entire steaming half of a pig. While Ed explained the procedure to the audience, seasoning his rap with tales of Bobby Flay and the Food Network throwdown, I picked out the ribs and other bones with my cartoony black propylene fingers, and pulled the meat from the carapace of pigskin. Now, wielding a cleaver in each hand, I went to work on the pile of pig parts, reducing it to a roughly chopped mass of pork, leaving some of the belly in reserve so I could adjust for fat and moisture content. The cleavers were heavier than they looked, and the repetitive motion soon exhausted the muscles in my forearms. Aubrey’s chop had looked like pork hash, uniform and fine. I decided to go for something a little rougher, partly because I preferred the texture and partly because my arms were about to fall off. Now, as Ed narrated what I was doing and the crowd watched, I seasoned the great mound of pork. First the gallon of vinegar, then the handfuls of sugar, salt, and pepper, black and red, all of it sown like seeds across the sprawling heap of meat.
A voice in the crowd erupted: “Now, don’t you go forgetting the skeen!” Then another: “Yeah, give us some of that nice crackling!” Fortunately, Ed had crisped a side’s worth of skin before he took the stage, because, from the sound of it, this hungry crowd might not have waited for me to do it now. I shattered the brittle skin with my cleaver and scooped several big handfuls of crackling onto the mound of pork. The rest I piled on trays for the servers to pass around plain, since the crowd seemed mad for the stuff, their energies focused less on the beer and wine now flowing than on these mahogany shards of hog skin. I don’t want to think what would have happened if I had left out the crackling or—God forbid!—burned it beyond a crisp.
VI.
Manhattan, Nyc
A few weeks after my star turn in Wilson, I got a chance to join the barbecue road show one last time, but now on a much bigger stage. Ed and Aubrey and their crew from The Pit were driving up to Manhattan for the eighth annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, and Ed invited me to come to New York and lend a hand. After Wilson, North Carolina, this sounded like opening on Broadway.
Manhattan has never been much of a barbecue town, something the restaurateur Danny Meyer realized soon after he added an upscale barbecue joint called Blue Smoke to his roster of successful Manhattan restaurants. New Yorkers just didn’t get it, and those who actually knew something about barbecue were skeptical such a place could possibly be authentic. So Meyer and Blue Smoke’s executive chef, Kenny Callaghan, hit on the idea of bringing America’s best pit masters to New York City for a weekend in June. The event would teach New Yorkers, who probably own the smallest number of grills per capita in America, about “authentic barbecue,” and at the same time showcase Blue Smoke’s own pit master in the company of such barbecue luminaries as Chris Lilly (Decatur, Alabama); Jimmy Hagood (Charleston, South Carolina); Joe Duncan (Dallas, Texas); Skip Steele (St. Louis, Missouri); and Ed Mitchell (Raleigh, North Carolina). The idea was for some of the authenticity of these pit masters to rub off on Blue Smoke. In exchange, the visiting pit masters would sell a ton of barbecue and get some national media exposure. Seven years later, New York City has evidently discovered a taste for barbecue. One hundred twenty-five thousand people were expected in Madison Square Park for this year’s event, coming to hang around the pits and sample barbecue over two days, at $8 a sandwich.
When I showed up early Saturday morning, Ed and his crew had already set up their tents, cookers, and chopping blocks on the south side of 26th Street just off Fifth Avenue. Parked around the corner on Fifth, taking up nearly half a city block, was a white eighteen-wheel tractor trailer with a billboard-sized image of Ed Mitchell’s smiling face painted on the side. The night before, the truck had disgorged eight 275-gallon cookers, sixteen pigs, several tables and chopping blocks, cleavers, shovels, bag upon bag of Kingsford charcoal, and countless gallons of (premixed) barbecue sauce. Ed and Aubrey had put the pigs on the fire at six the night before, and a couple of guys from the restaurant had stayed up all night looking after them. Madison Square Park had never smelled so good, the smoke of fifteen different barbecue pits mingling in the soft air of an early-summer evening.
The guys were running two chopping blocks simultaneously, and Aubrey invited me to take over one of them, working next to Ed’s grown son, Ryan. It was only 11:00 a.m., but a crowd had already begun to gather, drawn by the auspicious smoke as well as Ed’s reputation. Since the first Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in 2003, Ed Mitchell has been its biggest draw. He is the only pit master doing whole-hog barbecue, and the only black pit master at the event. You could almost see, floating over the crowd forming at Ed Mitchell’s corner of Madison Park, the thought bubble: “Authenticity.”
By now I knew the drill, or thought I did, and got right to work pulling pork from a nicely browned side of pig that Aubrey had delivered to my chopping block. There was something unexpectedly powerful about the sight of a whole hog cooked on the streets of Manhattan, a collision of realms or times. Yet there is nothing Manhattan cannot absorb, and the scene didn’t take long to feel almost normal. I flattered myself into thinking I knew what I was doing, but it soon became clear I wasn’t in Wilson, North Carolina, anymore—and in fact was in way over my head. At 11:00 a.m. sharp, The Pit crew had begun selling sandwiches, and they sold out the first batch so quickly that the sandwich-making crew began calling, with mounting insistence, for more pork. I was chopping as fast as I could, but there was a limit to how fast you could go. Not only were my arms growing rubbery, but I wanted to be sure there were no little bones or bits of cartilage left in the meat before I released another pile of barbecue to the servers. What if someone chomped down on an overlooked vertebra? Manhattan might have the lowest number of barbecue grills per capita, but surely it has the highest number of lawyers. Yet the clamor from the sandwich crew wouldn’t let up. “More pork, please! We need more pork up here!” I was chopping pork as fast as my arms would let me, then pouring gallons of sauce over the pile, all the while scanning and sifting the meat for suspicious bits of white. As soon as I passed a sheet tray heaped with barbecue to the sandwich crew, Aubrey deposited another steaming pig on my chopping block, and the process started all over again.
(What about the crackling? Sorry you asked. Our assembly line was moving so quickly now that there simply wasn’t time to crisp the skin and add it in. But, luckily for us, only a handful of people in this crowd knew enough to ask for it, and even they didn’t want to wait. So: no crackling today.)
The few moments I could steal to look up from my chopping block, I spotted the big round black-and-white head of Ed Mitchell schmoozing with the crowd, which looked to be happy but also, it seemed to me, collectively insatiable. Behind the velvet rope line snaking down 26th Street, there must have been several thousand people waiting to get their barbecue sandwich, more people than we could ever hope to feed. I redoubled my chopping, working now at a furious pace that (among other problems of quality control) spattered my clothing with hot fat. And then, all at once, I noticed that my feet, of all things, felt simultaneously wet and on fire. I looked down to see that the scalding-hot juice from the pigs was streaming off the chopping block and soaking my sneakers and feet. So it came as sweet relief when Aubrey offered to spell me.
Gratefully, I stepped away from the blazing heat of the cookers, putting some cool air between myself and the smoke and spatter of chopped pig, as well as the hunger of the crowd and the clamor of the sandwich makers. (“More barbecue! We need more barbecue up here!”) I could see Ed moving serenely through the sea of New Yorkers, giving interviews, but couldn’t get close enough to say good-bye. He was charming the congregation with his shtick, which surely never gleamed so brightly as it did in Manhattan. Ed was clearly enjoying himself, playing the role of the barbecue rock star in New York City, but I found the whole happy scene also just a little harrowing. There was obviously not going to be enough barbecue for everyone, and I wondered how the crowd would react when the disappointment dawned.
I found out later we sold out by 1:00 p.m., eight whole hogs and two thousand sandwiches snapped up in something less than two hours. Ed would likely have promised the crowd there would be more barbecue tomorrow, eight more pigs, and eventually they must have drifted off to other stands, other sandwiches. But I was long gone by then, eager to escape the crowd and the heat.
I made a slow circuit of Madison Square Park, checking out the other pits and pit masters. It was a United Nations of barbecue, with all the important denominations represented: South Carolina with its eccentric mustard-based sauce, Memphis with its ribs, smoked links and brisket from Texas. All the pit masters were men, all had a gleaming rap, and many of them also had an equally gleaming rig. But by far the best of these was Jimmy Hagood’s fire-engine-red double-decker barbecue-joint-on-wheels, up from Charleston: a full-scale kitchen with a half dozen pig cookers at street level linked by a circular stairway to a deck with tables upstairs. Chatting up Jimmy, I learned he had been an insurance agent in Charleston, bored with life until he discovered his inner pit master. This struck me as still a work in progress, with something of the indoors—the office, even—not yet completely expunged. “You’ve got to work your persona,” he explained. “It’s called marketing.”
The second-floor platform on Jimmy Hagood’s rig commanded a fine treetop view of the whole festival. I sat myself down for a few minutes to sip a cold drink and catch my breath. Barbecue, barbecue as far as the eye could see, tens of thousands of people wending their way among the fragrant curls of hickory smoke, carrying their cardboard trays of pork ribs and barbecue sandwiches. How many years had it been since Manhattan had seen so many pigs—I guessed that more than three hundred hogs had been sacrificed to feed the weekend’s crowd—or so many wood fires?
Manhattan these days is a world capital of gastronomy, but these barbecue men cut figures that could hardly be more different from that of the typical New York chef. In a place where chefs regard themselves as artists, and diners prize novel tastes and experiences, the world of the pit master seems premodern, almost epic in its directness and lack of shading or irony. Getting it right counts for more than making it new, which to these men is an utterly alien concept. How could you improve on barbecue? Theirs was an outdoor and completely externalized world, everything in it brightly lit and foregrounded, with plenty of smoke, sure, but no shadows—no subtleties or shades of gray. The pit masters worked exclusively with the ancient, primary colors of cooking—wood, fire, smoke, and meat—and strove not for originality or even development but for faithfulness.
Compared with the contemporary chef, the pit masters present themselves less as artists than as priests, each with his own congregation and distinctive liturgy, working, scrupulously, in forms passed down rather than invented. What chef would ever boast, as Samuel Jones, trotting out one of his most cherished sound bites, did to me in Ayden, “Our barbecue is like the King James Bible”? In their work and their food as much as in their patter, the pit masters are as formulaic as Homer. They present themselves as outsized, heroic characters, but full of themselves in the specific way epic heroes are—boastful rather than merely egotistical. They’re allowed to boast, because they don’t stand for themselves so much as for an ideal or, better yet, a tribe—the community defined by their style of barbecue. “I am the old keeper of the flame,” Ed Mitchell told the oral historian from the Southern Foodways Alliance, putting more than a little of the King James into his diction. “And I don’t want anyone to forget that you did not take sausage out of the hog and barbecue those sausages and call it barbecue, you did not take ribs out of that hog and call it barbecue, you did not take the shoulders out of that hog and call it barbecue. You first cooked the whole hog, and everything derived from cooking the whole hog.”
It’s almost as though these men fixed their personae at a time before novels were invented. So could there possibly be a better stage for such brightly drawn characters, or for the elemental drama of pig meets wood fire and time, than twenty-first-century Manhattan? From my perch atop Jimmy Hagood’s shiny red barbecue rig, I gazed across Madison Square Park and caught my last glimpse of Ed Mitchell, his great round head rising out of the crowd like a black-and-white moon, lighting up a whole sea of New Yorkers.
VII.
Berkeley, California
I didn’t realize how much I’d learned in North Carolina about cooking with fire until I got home and ran a few experiments. I ordered a whole pork shoulder from an Iowa hog farmer I knew named Jude Becker. Jude raises traditional breeds outdoors and finishes them on acorns in the fall. I also ordered a cord of wood, oak and almond, and began cooking with it in the fire pit in my front yard. In fact, I began burning shamefully large quantities of wood, because I now understood that it was not the fire but the remains of the fire, the smoldering wood coals, that you really wanted to cook with. (Well, Ed Mitchell’s Kingsford compromise to the contrary notwithstanding.) I probably could have cured an entire barn’s worth of tobacco with all the wood I burned before I ever put a piece of meat on to cook. What I had learned—not only from the Southern pit masters but also from all the other fire cookers I met in my travels, people working in traditions and places as far-flung as Patagonia and the Basque Country—is simply this: You have to cook the wood before you can cook the food.
The pork shoulder arrived in a surprisingly big box and wasn’t at all what I expected. Say “pork shoulder” to a butcher, and he’ll wrap you a five- or six-pound cut of meat, a portion of the shoulder, or top of the front leg, that is sometimes referred to, confusingly, as a picnic ham or Boston butt. But apparently the same order in the wholesale trade means an entire front leg of a hog, complete with hide and dainty hoof, and that’s exactly what greeted me when I pried opened the box. I suppose I could have cooked the whole thing, but a failure of nerve (and shortage of eaters) prompted me instead to call in a chef friend for help butchering it. She showed me how to bone out the shoulder and cut it into three manageable parts. The good thing about working from the whole leg is that we could divide it in such a way that each section still wore its skin. Which meant I could try for crackling. We scored the leathery skin with a sharp knife in a tic-tac-toe pattern; this would help the fat to render and the skin to crisp.
My fire pit is an old, shallow hammered-iron bowl about four feet in diameter; the guy who sold it to me said he found it in India, where it was used to cook street food. The pit is wide enough at the bottom that you can build a fire on one side and then shovel the ripe coals under a grill set up on the other; however, covering such a big area for barbecue is a problem. So far, the best solution anyone has come up with is something less than elegant: Bend a few pieces of rebar into an igloo-tent frame and cover that with one of those silvery insulation blankets people use to wrap their water heaters or engine blocks. The result resembles a redneck Martian’s spacecraft, but it does the trick when cooking a large segment of animal.
Cooking barbecue in
my front yard involves a great deal of time staring into a fire, waiting for the flames to subside and the wood to break down into smoldering coals that I can shovel under the meat. Gazing into the flames of a wood fire is mesmerizing; the flames seem to take control of your thoughts, deflecting them from any linear path. Gaston Bachelard, the idiosyncratic French philosopher, claims that philosophy itself began in front of the fire, flowing from the peculiar reverie that a fire inspires.
Bachelard offers not a shred of evidence for his claim, but there is a certain poetic truth to it, and poetic truth is the only kind he’s interested in. In 1938, he wrote a slim, oddly elusive book called The Psychoanalysis of Fire, essentially to protest modern science’s reductive understanding of fire.* Fire once obsessed the scientist as much as the poet. It seemed to be the key to all transformation. But no longer. What humans have believed since belief began—that fire is a great and powerful thing, one of the constitutive elements of reality—science now tells us is merely an epiphenomenon: the visible trace of a straightforward chemical process, also known as “rapid oxidation.”
But though fire “is no longer a reality for science,” in our everyday experience, as in our imaginations, it remains what it was for Empedocles, who more than two thousand years ago counted it, with earth, air, and water, as one of the elements: the four underived and indestructible substances from which the world is made. Modern science has long since replaced the classical quartet with a periodic table of 118 elements, but, as the literary critic Northrup Frye writes in his preface to Bachelard’s book, “For the poet, the elements will always be earth, air, fire and water.”