But whether or not fire is constitutive of physical reality, we can say—and science now seems prepared to accept—that the control of fire is constitutive of us, of our humanity. “Animals need food, water, and shelter,” Richard Wrangham writes in Catching Fire. “We humans need all those things, but we need fire too.” We are the only species that depends on fire to maintain our body heat, and the only species that can’t get along without cooking its food. By now, the control of fire is folded into our genes, a matter not merely of human culture but of our very biology. If the cooking hypothesis is correct, it is fire that—by unlocking more of the energy in food and partly externalizing human digestion—fed the spectacular growth of the human brain. So, in this sense at least, Bachelard is correct to credit fire with the invention of philosophy. He might have added music, poetry, mathematics, and books about fire itself.
The cook fire in particular, the kind of fire I’m tending in my front yard, also helped form us as social beings. “Fire’s power of social magnetism,” as the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto puts it, is what first drew us together, and in doing so probably shifted the course of human evolution. The cook fire selected for individuals who could tolerate other individuals—make eye contact, cooperate, and share. “When fire and food combined,” writes Fernández-Armesto, “an almost irresistible focus was created for communal life.” (In fact, the word “focus” comes from the Latin word for “hearth.”) The social gravity of the cook fire seems undiminished, as I’m reminded every time my guests drift outdoors to watch their dinner sizzle and brown, or when the neighbor’s children drift over into my yard to find out what it is that smells so good.
As fire’s presence in our everyday lives has diminished, the social magnetism of the cook fire seems, if anything, to have only grown more powerful. One way to tell the history of cooking is as the story of the taming of the cooking fire followed by its gradual disappearance from our lives. Contained first in stone fireplaces and brought indoors, it was then encased in iron and steel, and in our time replaced altogether by invisible electric currents and radio waves confined to a box of glass and plastic. The microwave oven, which stands at the precise opposite end of the culinary (and imaginative) spectrum from the cook fire, exerts a kind of antigravity, its flameless, smokeless, antisensory cold heat giving us a mild case of the willies. The microwave is as antisocial as the cook fire is communal. Who ever gathers around the Panasonic hearth? What reveries does its mechanical whir inspire? What is there even to look at through the double pane of radiation-proof glass, except the lazy rotation of the “single-serving portion” for the solitary eater? To the extent there has been a revival of fire cooking in recent years, it may be the microwave we have to thank, for driving us back outdoors into the fire’s orbit and once again into one another’s company. …
… But back to this particular cook fire, the one now burning in my front yard.
I wait for the flames to subside and the logs to crumble before I even think about putting on the meat. This is true whether I’m grilling in the open air or slow cooking barbecue under cover. The smoke of wood coals is much gentler than the smoke of burning woods. All but invisible, this “second smoke,” as I’ve come to think of it, has none of the tarry, acrid compounds that the initial combustion of wood releases, and therefore imparts a subtler set of woody flavors.
For barbecue, what seems to work best is to build a fire in the pit and then shovel the coals into a kettle grill that can be covered. I keep the vents almost completely closed, aiming for a temperature somewhere between 200˚F and 300˚F—much hotter and the meat will sear; much cooler and it won’t cook through. Ideally, you would keep the original “mother fire” going, because you may need to add more coals later. Before I put the meat on the fire, I clear just enough space in the bed of coals to place a disposable tinfoil tray directly beneath it in order to catch the dripping fat. I pour an inch or so of water into the tray to prevent flame-ups and help keep the atmosphere in there moist.
Now comes the time—and there will be plenty of it—for doing nothing, except keeping one eye on your roast. (Which is why you can’t leave home.) This is where, if alone, you launch your reverie, or, if with friends, some conversation and drinking. Inevitably, I find that at some point in the afternoon I have either too much fire or not enough fire. The key, as every pit master I’ve ever met has told me, is control, but control is easier to achieve than it is to maintain for any sustained period of time. Opening or closing the vents may do the trick, but if it doesn’t, you’ll have either to add or to remove hot coals, which can be a messy, dangerous business.
Here is when one’s easy condescension toward those who cook with gas or charcoal will be tested.
And in fact I must confess that the best results I have achieved to date have involved: propane. A pork shoulder needs at least six hours, and ideally a couple more, to attain perfection, and it’s hard to keep a gently smoldering fire gently smoldering quite that long. So, rather than keep a mother fire burning all that time, and then have to lift up a hot grate and shovel fresh coals underneath it, I take the meat off the wood fire once the temperature in the grill has dropped below 225˚F or so. By then, I figure the meat has received most of the blessing of wood smoke, the flavor of which cooked meat can’t absorb anyway. Now the meat just needs more heat and time: a couple more hours at 250˚F to 300˚F. And besides, by now I’ve acquired from Ed Mitchell and his colleagues a much more supple and forgiving concept of authenticity.
When I move the shoulder onto the gas grill, its internal temperature hovers around 160˚F, and the skin, which is pulling apart into little cubes, has a nice wood-toned finish, though it still feels rubbery to the touch. At this temperature, the meat is cooked through but dry and tough. If I took the shoulder off now, I would have not barbecue, just overcooked pork.
But a miraculous transformation occurs once the internal temperature of the meat reaches 195˚F. If you’ve been poking the shoulder along the way, you will feel it. The muscles, which had earlier felt as though they had seized up tight, have suddenly relaxed. The slow, steady heat has dissolved the collagen into moist gelatin and freed the muscle fibers, which now separate into tender, succulent, pullable threads. And if everything has gone according to plan, the skin by now will have crisped into precious little cubes of crackling.
There you have it, all but the chopping and seasoning: authentic-enough barbecue. It’s not whole-hog, true, but the shoulder, which consists of a few different muscle groups as well as plenty of fat, is the next best thing. The first time I achieved delicious, quasi-authentic results—crackling included—I wanted to call Ed Mitchell with the news, practice my boasting—as indeed I am now doing—and look seriously into entering a competition. But eventually I settled down. I called up some friends to come over for an impromptu dinner, and together we enjoyed one of the tastier sandwiches I had ever made, and without a doubt the very proudest.
VIII.
Coda: Axpe, Spain
There is one last cook fire I need to tell you about, one that made me think that, even after some two millions years of practice, the possibilities of cooking with fire may not be exhausted yet. I found this fire in the microscopic town of Axpe, in the Basque Country of Spain, high in the rocky hills between the cities of San Sebastián and Bilbao. This is where, in an undistinguished but ancient stone house on the town square, a self-trained chef in his fifties by the name of Bittor Arguinzoniz, a former lumberjack and electrician, has been quietly and intently reinventing what it means to cook with fire in the twenty-first century.
I met Arguinzoniz within twenty-four hours of cooking with Ed Mitchell in Manhattan, and the contrast between the two men an
d their worlds could not be starker. Bittor does not like to give interviews, or for that matter even talk much, at least not while he’s cooking, a process demanding such fierce concentration that a visitor to his kitchen feels at first like an intruder and then utterly invisible. He is a modest, ascetic man, tall, slender except for a compact paunch, and gray as smoke. Bittor likes to work in solitude, seldom leaves Axpe (where he grew up in a house with no running water or electricity; his mother heated and cooked exclusively with wood), and is not given to pronouncements, except perhaps one: “Carbón es el enemigo”—“Charcoal is the enemy.” He believes cooking is all about sacrifice, though I soon realized he was referring to the sacrifice of the chef himself, rather than that of the creatures he cooks.
The kitchen at Asador Etxebarri (which in the Basque tongue means “New House”) combines the gleaming, controlled geometry of stainless steel—six grills of Bittor’s own design lining one wall—with the raw power of a raging wood fire. On the opposite wall, at waist height, two open ovens each hold a stack of blazing logs. Every morning, Bittor and his sous-chef, a loquacious but protective Australian named Lennox Hastie, begin the day by cooking a large quantity of the local oak, citrus, olive, and grape logs in the two ovens, to produce the wood coals with which Bittor cooks exclusively.
Bittor flavors all his food with wood, a different species and even a different kind of ember (glowing red or ashy white, intensifying or fading) for each dish. Grapevines, which burn hot and aromatic, he matches with beef, whereas a single dying ember of oak would be used to more subtly inflect the flavor of a scallop. A black plunger jutting from the wall above each of the wood ovens allows him to precisely control the amount of oxygen feeding the fire, and thereby the temperature, and the life span, of the wood coals it produces.
By the kitchen’s screened back door stands a little lean-to, neatly stacked with different species of firewood and, on top of the woodpiles, crates of produce—tomatoes, leeks, onions, fava beans, and artichokes. Most of it has been grown a few miles up the hill, on a plot tended by Bittor’s eighty-nine-year-old father, Angel, mainly because he could find nothing worth cooking in the market. (“Everything is prostituted,” he tells me, with a little snort of disgust. “With chemicals.”) Most of the seafood he cooks—lobsters, eels, sea cucumbers, oysters, clams, fishes of various kinds—is kept alive in saltwater tanks (a challenge up here in the mountains) in a room off the kitchen until the appointed moment when the fire is ready and the creature is pulled from the water to meet it.
The afternoon I spent in his kitchen, Bittor had on a black T-shirt and gray slacks. He wore no apron, yet remained spotless: Liquids of any kind scarcely enter into his cooking. I had planned to ask if I could pitch in with the cooking, as I had done in North Carolina, but I quickly realized that, here, that would be tantamount to asking a brain surgeon if I might assist. Lennox made it clear I was lucky just to get into the kitchen.
Everything at Etxebarri is cooked to order, not a moment sooner. When the first order came in, I watched Bittor use a small stainless-steel scoop to retrieve a fist-sized pile of oak embers with which to cook a sea cucumber. Sea cucumbers are striated, slightly rubbery white sea creatures, reminiscent of squid, that live on the ocean floor. They require brief but intense heat to break down their leathery skin. Before he puts one on the grill, Bittor watches his coals intently, patiently waiting for them to ripen. A stainless-steel wheel above each grill, and connected to it by a system of cables and counterweights, allows him to make microadjustments in the distance between food and fire. When Bittor determines the coals are ready—strictly by eye; I never once saw him pass his hand over the fire to judge its heat—he places the sea cucumber over them. Now he spritzes it with a fine mist of oil, which he believes helps the food better absorb the aromatic compounds in wood. And then he silently waits, staring at the sea cucumber as if lost in a trance. He’s looking for the slightest suggestion of a grill mark to form across the striations before flipping it, just once.
Next I watched Bittor “cook” an oyster, a process that involved choosing a single, perfect ember and placing it beneath the plump dove-gray ovoid with a pair of forceps, just so. I flashed back to James Howell, in Ayden, shoveling smoky wood coals under a pig. Here was the same basic operation, yet could this cooking possibly be more different? Fire, it seems, is protean; smoke, too. Bittor didn’t actually want to cook his oyster, just wreathe it in the merest wisp of orange wood smoke, a process that took less than thirty seconds. The whole time, Bittor looked to be in a staring contest with the oyster. I can only infer—because he would not speak, and never touched the oyster—that he was watching for a change in the reflectivity of its surface, a certain shift in the quality of its glistening, that told him it was done, or, rather, ready for the table. He then passed the oyster to Lennox, who gently slid it back into its shell. Bittor bent down and sprinkled several grains of sea salt over it, and then a spoonful of an off-white froth that Lennox had made by whipping the liquid that the oyster had left behind when it was shucked a few moments before.
I tasted twelve courses that Bittor had cooked, and all of them, up to and including the butter and the desserts, had in some way been touched, more or less, by wood smoke. This probably sounds like a recipe for monotony. That it was nothing of the kind remains something of a mystery to me. That oyster? It tasted more like an oyster than any oyster I have ever tasted. Somehow, the taste of smoke didn’t merge with the oyster but coexisted alongside it, held in a perfect balance, so that it underscored the oyster’s meaty brine, in the way that a frame or window can deepen our appreciation of a view we might otherwise overlook. Many of the dishes seemed to work that way, the native flavor of an octopus or tuna belly intensified by just the right note of the right kind of smoke, much as a careful deployment of salt can bring out the flavors of a food without announcing its own salty presence.
By the end of the meal, I began to think that Bittor had figured out how to use smoke as a sixth flavor principle, entitled at last to equal billing with salt, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami. And maybe smoke is that, one of the irreducible, primary colors of taste. Or so at least it can seem, perhaps because wood smoke was cooked food’s first flavor, the taste we gave to raw nature when we first introduced it to fire. This, anyway, was the sort of speculation inspired by Bittor’s cooking, at once so elemental and so delicate that it becomes a meditation on the nature of cooking itself.
When Bittor and I sat down to talk at a picnic table outside, he spoke of cooking with wood as the “best way to honor the product.” For him fire is not about the transformation of nature—of the animals and plants and fungi he works with—but about achieving something more like an italicization of nature, making the food more like itself rather than something else.
“What the grill is going to do is reveal the excellence or mediocrity of the product,” Bittor explained, which is why he must go to such lengths to secure the freshest and best produce. For him the grill is a tool for exploring the natural world, the creatures of the sea and the meadows (the steak he grilled for me was too good to be true: a cut from a fourteen-year-old dairy cow that he quickly charred on both sides at once in a blazing-hot fire of grapevines) but also of the woods: the various trees he cooks with. For the trees are clearly this former forester’s first love, and their flavors inflect everything he touches. Though to my surprise, Bittor insisted that his medium is not smoke, a taste and a smell he regards as crude; rather, he flavors his food with the “perfume” or “fragrance” of wood. But isn’t that communicated to the food by means of smoke? “No, no, no smoke,” he insisted. It was here I got lost, either in the vagaries of translation or in the metaphysics of bur
ning trees.
In Bittor’s view, there is no food that cannot be enhanced by fire, by this quality of that-which-is-not-smoke, though exactly how to achieve this enhancement is not always obvious. “My cooking is a work in progress; I am still experimenting.” At the moment, he’s on a quest to figure out how to grill honey. A metalworker, Bittor has fabricated pans with stainless-steel meshes so fine he can “cook” something as delicate and minuscule as caviar. Lennox said it had pained him to watch Bittor experiment with kilo after kilo of caviar (at $3,200 per kilo) until he was ready to add it to the menu. To cook mussels, he built a kind of Bundt pan that conducts smoke through a central funnel to flavor the briny liquor without letting so much as a drop of it escape. For his butters and ice cream, Bittor briefly warms cream in unglazed crockery that admits only the most indirect hint of smoke—or, rather, the perfume of wood.
In fact, my meal at Etxebarri began and ended with variations on smoked cream, and for me these remain the most memorable tastes of the afternoon, if not of my whole exploration of fire to date. Bittor churns his butter himself and serves it without bread. It is meant to be eaten plain, like a fine cheese, and his butters—there were both cow’s milk and goat—become a study in contrasts, of these two different methods nature has evolved for transforming grass into butterfat. But that hint of smoke, or whatever you want to call it, brought out something else in the cream, something entirely unexpected, even poignant.
Cream—the richest, sweetest part of milk—is of course our first flavor, the taste, in a spoon, of life’s first freshness and innocence, long before we ever encounter the taste of cooked food. And what is smoke—or ashes, with which one of the butters has been dusted—if not the very opposite of that freshness? There it is, innocence and experience mingled in a spoonful of ice cream. Bittor, whom no one would describe as a sunny man, has figured out a way to pass a fleeting, chill shadow of mortality over the formerly uncomplicated happiness of ice cream.