Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan Read Free Book Online

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-full 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 burninganimal 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