Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (12 page)

“Anyway, as we were locking up for the
night, a stranger came to the front door.

“‘Mr. Mitchell?’ I thought
maybe the man was here to rob us, so I put a little bass in my voice:

“‘Yeah, who is it?’

“‘Oh, I just want to know if
y’all got any more of that barbecue.’

“‘No, we don’t have no
more today, but we’ll have some more tomorrow.’ And that is how Ed Mitchell
got into the barbecue business. The good Lord had brought me right back to where I
started, cooking for my mom.”

Within a few months, they had phased out the
groceries and built some pits, and Ed had persuaded James Kirby, an elderly pit master
in town, to come out of retirement to help man the pits and teach him the old ways.
“Because, by the late nineties, you couldn’t find the kind of traditional
barbecue we wanted to cook. It had died out when everyone switched to gas units. But
there’s a most definite distinction between wood- or charcoal-cooked barbecue and
gas-cooked barbecue. You can taste the difference.” Mr. Kirby was a purist of the
old school, committed to cooking with live fire, and he had a few tricks to teach Ed,
including a technique he called “banking.”

The first time he and Mr. Kirby put a big
pig on to cook, Ed had figured they’d be up all night tending to the fire, so he
laid in a supply of sandwiches and coffee. “But after we got the pig on, and I was
settling in for the night, Mr. Kirby got up, went to the door, and put on his hat. I
asked him where he was going.

“‘You can sit here all night if
you want to, but I’m going home.’ He explained to me that if you bank the
coals right—place them strategically around the pit—and then shut down all the drafts,
that pig’ll sit there and simmer all night, without you having to add more
coals.

“Well, I couldn’t sleep a wink
that night because I just knew that pig was going to burn down the store. But when I
came back to check on it at four in the morning and opened the grill, I could not
believe my eyes. It was the prettiest pig you ever laid eyes on! This beautiful
honey color, and the meat was so done it was literally falling off the
bone.” Mr. Kirby taught Ed the finer points of banking coals; he also showed him
how to crisp the pigskin into crackling.

It wasn’t long before Mitchell’s
Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue had earned a reputation, and the national food writers and
then the academics found their way to Wilson, a town of fifty thousand located on I-95,
“halfway between New York and Miami,” as the visitors’ bureau likes to
point out. The attention had a curious effect on Mitchell, altering his understanding of
who he was and what he was doing in a way that perhaps only an outsider bearing fresh
context can do. A turning point came in 2001, when Ed read an oral history—of Ed
Mitchell—done by a historian named David Cecelski. The history here was Ed’s
own—Cecelski had taken down the skeletal first draft of the narrative you’ve just
read—but reading it helped Ed to see his story in a new light.

“I did not fully realize that what I
was doing—which to me was just old-fashioned barbecue, the fabric of our lives but
nothing all that special—was really a part of the larger African-American story, of our
contribution. And that felt very good.”

Ed Mitchell’s barbecue was becoming
aware of itself, a process that deepened in 2002, when the Southern Foodways Alliance
recognized Mitchell as a leading eastern North Carolina, whole-hog pit master by
inviting him to cook at a symposium on barbecue. The Alliance is a program at the
University of Mississippi established in 1999 and run by historian John T. Edge to
chronicle and celebrate, and thereby help to preserve, Southern foodways. Edge had found
that talking about food—something Southerners could always talk (and argue) about even
when it was too uncomfortable to talk (and argue) about anything else—was a good way to
broach some of the more difficult issues of Southern history. “Food,” Edge
told me, “is one of the ways the South is working through its race
quandaries.”

Edge invited Mitchell to the barbecue symposium
at the university in October of 2002. “So we went down to Oxford, Mississippi, and
it opened my eyes,” Mitchell told me. There were pit masters from every region,
every tradition, as well as scholars, journalists, and panels on the history,
techniques, and regional variations of barbecue. “The symposium was very
informative to me. I realized this thing was a lot bigger than just Wilson, North
Carolina. I mean, there was a national movement going on about barbecue, something that
I literally took for granted. But I learned there how what I was doing fit into the
bigger picture, that barbecue was an African American contribution and I was part of
that tradition. So that was very exciting. It made me proud, very proud.”

Southern Foodways wanted to tell the story
of barbecue as an important African American contribution to American culture. The only
problem was that most of the faces of Southern barbecue were now white, like the Joneses
in Ayden, even when a black pitman like James Howell might be working out back. Ed was
the exception: a black man who owned the pits he cooked on. (Or at least did then,
before his troubles.) So Ed Mitchell was as important to the Southern Foodways Alliance
as the Foodways Alliance was to Ed Mitchell.

As part of the symposium, the pit masters
were invited to cook their specialty and then submit to judging by the food writers;
competitive cooking has become an important part of barbecue culture over the last few
years. Ed tells a story about how the truck carrying his rigs made a wrong turn at
Tupelo and arrived hours late. “Everybody else had these fancy rigs set up—you
know, with canopies and shining lacquer. Some of these guys had invested hundreds of
thousands of dollars! So everybody’s waiting to see what sort of equipment Ed
Mitchell’s got, but it hasn’t shown up. Then, finally, the truck pulls up,
this big eighteen-wheeler, and they’re expecting something fancy to come out of
the back when we open the doors. Well, I roll out my
equipment—and
it’s just these three rusty old barrel cookers, that’s all! And everybody
just laughed.

“But you see, that’s all
I’ve ever needed. So I cooked my pig—a little faster than I normally would,
because we started so late—and when it was done I pulled all the meat and chopped it up
and seasoned it. I put the skin back on the fire to crisp, and then chopped that into
real fine pieces and mixed it all together. And lo and behold, when people started
eating it, they started talking, and then literally everyone started running over to
taste my barbecue. We were bombarded! Everybody thought we’d just hung the moon.
We may have had the least impressive equipment, but it turned out the tastiest
product.

“And then, from there on, old Ed
Mitchell’s story has been spiraling ever upward since.” Ed left the Oxford
symposium the most famous pit master in America.

At the time, Ed was, like the Joneses,
cooking standard commodity hogs, but now he had entered a world where the provenance of
pork actually mattered. One of the food writers he met at the symposium was Peter
Kaminsky, who was researching a book about old breeds of pigs that would be published a
few years later under the title
Pig Perfect
. Kaminsky, who is from Brooklyn,
pointed out to Ed Mitchell, gently, that his barbecue was not quite as authentic as it
might be.

“Peter Kaminksy told me
Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue had two out of the three big things people
were looking for in authentic barbecue: traditional cooking, a black-owned
establishment, and traditional hogs.” Kaminsky helped arrange for Ed to cook an
older breed of hog that had been raised outdoors. “I tell you, I was hooked from
the first bite. This was the taste I remember from my childhood,
sweet and succulent and very, very good even without seasoning.”

Kaminsky introduced Mitchell to some people
at North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, who were organizing a group
of black farmers, many of them former tobacco growers. The idea was to bring back some
of the older breeds of pigs, rearing them humanely on pasture without hormones or
antibiotics. An eye-opening visit to a hog-confinement operation solidified
Mitchell’s commitment to supporting this new/old kind of hog farming in North
Carolina. So did a comparative tasting of industrial and pastured hog barbecue that John
T. Edge helped arranged for him to cook at an event in Oxford. Ed realized that if he
could promote these pigs at his restaurant and then get other barbecue restaurants to
join him, he could do something for the state’s small farmers, who were struggling
to stay above water after the fall of tobacco.

“Peter set me on this path,” Ed
said. Here again was the foodways feedback loop at work, in which a Jewish writer from
Brooklyn ends up helping to restore the authenticity of Southern barbecue. By now, Ed
had taken ownership of the project and was eloquent on the subject: “You see, this
cooking is really all about interdependence and community, and that extends to the
farmers who grow the food and the little slaughterhouses they depend on. That sense of
interdependence is what we’ve lost.”

We were talking about slaughterhouses
because we had pulled off the highway in Sims to pick up our hogs at a small custom meat
plant, George Flowers Slaughterhouse. As we drove up, Mr. Flowers himself was sitting
beneath a tree out front, having a smoke. He was a wiry old white guy with the most
unusual facial hair I had ever laid eyes on. If in fact it
was
facial hair,
because it wasn’t quite that simple. Mr. Flowers’s prodigious muttonchops,
once white but now stained
yellow by tobacco smoke, had somehow managed
to merge with the equally prodigious yellowish-white hair sprouting from his chest. I
didn’t want to stare, but they appeared to form a single integrated unit, and if
so represented a bold advance in human adornment.

Mr. Flowers greeted Ed warmly, ribbing him
about a recent TV appearance, in which Mitchell had roundly defeated Bobby Flay in a
“throwdown” on the Food Network. (I was surprised how deep into the sticks
of eastern North Carolina news of this epic confrontation had penetrated.) After a
while, Flowers showed us into the plant, which wasn’t a whole lot bigger than an
old-time gas station with a garage. A sign posted on the loading dock spelled out the
services and prices: $100 to cut up a deer; $150 to break down a cow, and $18 to dress a
hog for a barbecue. Inside, Flowers’s sons were cleaning up. The killing was done
for the day, and they were pushing blood into drains in the floor with brooms. The
severed heads of several different species—pig, sheep, cow—were piled high in a barrel
by the door. The Flowers boys threw our split pigs over their shoulders, carried them
outside, and flipped them into the back of the van.

When exactly does the cooking process begin?
is a question I sometimes wonder about. Does it start when you take your ingredients out
of the fridge and begin chopping? Or does it begin before that, when you go shopping for
those ingredients? Or is it earlier still, when the meat for your meal is being raised
and taken to the slaughterhouse and killed? In ancient Greece the name for the man who
did the cooking, the butchery, and the slaughter was the same—the
mageiros—
since all were steps in a single ritual process. Ed Mitchell had
evidently decided his own cooking would now start all the way back on the farm. For
barbecue to be truly authentic, he was saying, it should pay at least as much attention
to the pigs as it did to the seasoning or the sauce.

When we pulled up at the back door of the
restaurant formerly known as Mitchell’s Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue,
^*
at
the corner of Singletary and 301 Highway South, in the black part of Wilson, Ed’s
younger brother Aubrey was standing there waiting for us, impatiently. “Aubrey is
always getting places very early,” Ed explained, “but to him, see, early
is
on time.” (I would discover as much the next morning, when Aubrey
was scheduled to pick me up in front of my Holiday Inn at six; I found him fidgeting in
the lobby at five.) Aubrey was an intense man, a decade or so Ed’s junior, and
built on a stouter frame, which made the shiny gold crucifix he wore loom large on his
chest. Ed introduced him to me as his indispensable second, “the man behind the
man, the vice president of operations. Aubrey here is my Scottie Pippen”—i.e., to
his Michael Jordan. This wasn’t the first time Aubrey had heard these compliments,
and he seemed to take them in stride.

It was time to start cooking. While Ed
supervised, Aubrey and I lifted the split hogs onto big sheet trays, carrying them as if
on stretchers into the kitchen. The sink was long enough to accommodate an entire split
pig, and we began by washing down the carcasses with water, trimming stray bits of fat,
and removing any blood. (“You never want to eat blood,” Ed explained. The
injunction is biblical: Blood is the animal’s soul, and that belongs exclusively
to God.) The
pigs were heavy—about seventy-five pounds each half—and
extremely slippery when wet. The first time I tried to hoist my end out of the sink
after we’d rinsed it, I lost my grip. The pig fell to the floor and had to be
rinsed all over again, a humiliating start to my barbecue career.