Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (5 page)

My destination this sparkling May afternoon
is the Skylight Inn, Ayden’s lone surviving barbecue restaurant, and even without
the perfume of oak and hickory, the place would have been impossible to miss. The
Skylight Inn is housed in a cheerfully ridiculous building. A low-slung octagon of brick
is crowned with a silver mansard roof that is itself crowned with a replica of the
Capitol Rotunda. High above the dome flaps an American flag. The proportions of this
ramshackle wedding cake strongly suggest that no architect was involved in its
conception, but that, more likely, the design process involved some strong drink and a
napkin. The silvery dome went up in 1984, a few years after
National Geographic
declared the Skylight Inn “the barbecue capital of the world.” (There is no
skylight, which is odd for what is otherwise such a literal building.) A billboard
towers over the parking lot, highlighting one of the restaurant’s numerous mottos
(“If it’s not cooked with wood it’s not Bar-B-Q”) and a drawing
of the late Pete Jones, the Skylight Inn’s founding father. Jones fired up its
pits for the first time in 1947. But the sign will have you know that the family’s
roots in barbecue go back much further than that: “Upholding a family tradition
since 1830.” Family legend has it that an ancestor by the name of Skilton Dennis
launched the very first barbecue enterprise in North Carolina, and possibly the world,
in 1830, when he began selling pit-cooked pork and flat cornbread from a covered wagon
not too far from here. Whenever Samuel Jones—Pete’s grandson and one of three
Jones men now safeguarding the family
tradition—speaks of these giants
of barbecue, he refers to them, unironically, as “our forefathers.”

I know this much (and much more) about the
Skylight Inn before even setting foot on the premises because I have read the oral
histories and watched the documentaries. These days there is little about Southern
barbecue that hasn’t been meticulously documented and fulsomely celebrated; for a
sleepy vernacular cooking tradition, barbecue has woken up and become notably
self-aware. No self-respecting Southern pit master (and self-respect is something most
of them have, in bulk) lacks for a sack of sound bites as homespun and well worn as a
politician’s. He finds plenty of occasions to deploy them, too, whether to
visiting journalists or in barbecue competitions or at academic conferences organized by
the Southern Foodways Alliance.

What I was chasing here in North Carolina
was not a sound bite but a taste, one I’d never experienced before, and also an
idea. The idea goes something like this: If fire is the first and most fundamental form
of cookery—of the handful of ways humans have devised for transforming the stuff of
nature into the stuff of our sustenance and pleasure—then, for an American at least,
whole-hog barbecue over a wood fire represents the purest, most unreconstructed
expression of that form. By learning what I could about how that work is performed, and
how it fits into a community and a culture, I was hoping to learn something about the
deeper meaning of this curious, uniquely human activity called cooking. Along the way, I
hoped to get a little better at cooking with fire myself. By now, cooking has become so
thickly crusted with pretension and gadgetry and marketing hype that the effort to
reduce it to its most basic elements, to drive it into a corner and see it plainly,
seemed like a good way to take hold of it again. I had reason to believe the
Skylight’s pit room might offer one such corner.

I know, the quest for authenticity is a
fraught and often dubious
enterprise, and nowhere more so than in the
American South in this time of acute gastronomical self-awareness. When I asked a
friend, a chef in Chapel Hill, where she liked to go for barbecue, I could almost hear
the sigh in her e-mail: “Driving around NC, I always think that I am about to run
into that perfect time-capsule bbq restaurant, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
My friend hadn’t yet made it out to Ayden, however, so I allowed myself to
hope.

If I wanted to solve for the powerful,
primordial equation of pig–plus–wood-smoke–plus–time, the pit behind the Skylight Inn
certainly sounded like a place I needed to check out. The Joneses were “barbecue
fundamentalists,” in the words of one barbecue historian (yes, barbecue now has
historians), refusing for several generations to tinker with the basic equation: They
cook, exclusively and slowly, whole hogs over “live” oak and hickory coals.
They disdain charcoal as a modern-day declension and sauce as “a cover-up for bad
cooking.” To judge from the captivating smells emanating from their chimneys, the
Joneses’ fidelity to tradition has served them and their customers well. It has
also justified the heroic effort required to defend their “dying art”
against the various forces attempting to kill it: the scrutiny of the health department
and the fraying patience of the fire department, the convenience of natural gas and
stainless steel, the scarcity of firewood, the ubiquity of fast food, and the desire on
the part of the pitman for a decent night’s sleep, one undisturbed by dreams of
conflagration. Or actual sirens. For I had heard that the Skylight Inn’s cookhouse
has endured more or less regular fires, and in fact has burned to the ground on more
than one occasion. The first thing anyone who cooks with live fire will tell you is that
it all comes down to one word—“control.” But it turns out that that is
considerably harder to achieve than you might think, even in the twenty-first
century.

The control of fire is so ancient and represents
such a momentous turn in human history that it has engendered a great many myths and
theories to explain how it might have come to pass. Some of these are just plain crazy,
and not only the ancient ones, either. Take Sigmund Freud’s theory, for example.
In a footnote to
Civilization and Its Discontents
, Freud traces the control of
fire to the fateful moment when man—and by “man” in this case he really
means
man
—first overcame the urge to extinguish whatever fires he chanced upon
by peeing on them. For countless millennia this urge apparently proved irresistible,
much to the detriment of civilization, the rise of which awaited its repression. Perhaps
because putting out fires with one’s stream of urine is something women
can’t do very well, the activity served as an important form of male competition,
one that Freud suggests (no surprise here) was homoerotic in character. Cooking with
fire remains very much a competitive male preserve, and those of us who do it should
probably count ourselves lucky Freud isn’t around to offer his analysis of exactly
what it is we’re up to.

The course of human history shifted on the
fateful day when it dawned on some fellow possessed of an unusual degree of self-control
that he didn’t
have
to pee on the fire, and could instead preserve the
flames and put them to some good use: keeping himself warm, say, or cooking his dinner.
Freud believed this advance, like so much else of value in civilization, owed to the
unique human ability to govern, or repress, the inner drives and urges before which
other animals are powerless. (Not that we have many reports of animals putting out fires
with
their
urine.) For him, the control of self is the precondition for the
control of fire and, in turn, for the civilization
that that discovery
made possible. “This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his
renunciation of instinct.”

In all the time I’ve now spent with
pit masters, whiling away the hours before the smoldering logs, I’ve never once
brought up Freud’s fire theory. I’m just not sure how well it would go over.
I have, however, on occasion brought up a second theory, one that, though it is equally
outlandish, contains a bright cinder of poetic truth that can usually be counted on to
bring a smile to the streaked, perspiring face of a barbecue man.

This is the theory put forward by Charles
Lamb, the English writer (1775–1834), in his essay, “A Dissertation upon Roast
Pig.” Lamb claims that all meat was eaten raw until the art of roasting was
accidentally discovered, in China, by a young man named Bo-bo, the dimwitted son of a
swineherd named Ho-ti. One day, while Ho-ti was off gathering mast for his pigs, his
son—“a great lubberly boy” who liked to play with fire—accidentally burned
down his family’s cottage, in the process incinerating a litter of piglets. While
he was surveying the ruins and deciding what to tell his father, “an odor assailed
his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced.” When Bo-bo
reached down to feel one of the burnt pigs for any sign of life, he singed his fingers
and then instinctively touched them to his tongue.

“Some of the crumbs of the scorched
skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the
world’s life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he
tasted—crackling!”

Bo-bo’s father returned to find his
cottage in ruins, his piglets dead, and his son gorging himself on their corpses. Ho-ti
was sickened by the scene of carnage, until his son exclaimed to him “how nice the
burnt pigs tasted,” and, bewitched by the extraordinary aroma, he, too, sampled a
piece of crackling and found it irresistibly delicious. Father and son decided to keep
their discovery secret from their
neighbors, whose disapproval they
feared; to burn one of god’s creatures was, after all, to imply it was less than
perfect raw. But in time

Strange stories got about. It was
observed that Ho-ti’s cottage was burnt down more frequently than ever.
Nothing but fires from this time forward … As often as the sow farrowed,
so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze.

Their secret eventually got out, neighbors
tried the technique for themselves and marveled at the results, and the practice caught
on. In fact, the custom of burning down houses to improve the taste of piglets grew so
widespread that people began to worry that the art and science of architecture would be
lost to the world. (“People built slighter and slighter every day,” Lamb
tells us, and “now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every
direction.”) Fortunately, a wiser head eventually figured out that the flesh of
pigs might be cooked “without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress
it.” The invention of the gridiron and then the spit soon followed. And so did
humankind discover quite by accident the art of cooking meat over fire—or, rather, we
should probably specify, over a
controlled
fire.

“Welcome to the vestibule of
hell.” Samuel Jones chuckled as he walked me around back of the Skylight Inn to
visit the cookhouse where the pits are. There were two cookhouses, actually,
cinder-block buildings the size of cottages sited at odd, arbitrary angles to both the
restaurant and each other. (“Granddaddy apparently hired a drunk to design
everything out here,” Samuel explained.) The larger of the two buildings had
recently been completely rebuilt, having burned to the ground late one night after one
of its brick hearths had failed. “We
keep those fires burning
twenty-four/seven, and every couple of years even the firebricks lining the inside of
the chimneys just give out.” He shrugged. “I’d say this cookhouse has
caught on fire about a dozen times. But that’s just how it goes when you’re
doing whole-hog barbecue the right way.”

Sometimes it’s the hog grease that
pools in the bottom of the pit that catches fire; other times a burning cinder will
climb the column of smoke rising through the chimney and then fall back onto the roof.
Just the other night, Samuel happened to be driving by the restaurant a couple of hours
after closing time when he noticed a tongue of flame licking out from beneath the
smoke-room door. “Now, that was a
real
close call,” he smiled. (A
surveillance camera in the cookhouse indicated the fire had started only four minutes
after the pitman had left for the night.)