Read Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation for Free Online Page B

Bright-orange cinders drop
between the axles, where they’re scooped out with a shovel and then fed into the
pits. The pits line both of the long walls: a sarcophagus of brick, maybe three feet
tall, with iron bars running across them to hold up the hogs and, suspended above each
of them by cables, a four-by-eight sheet of black steel, hinged and counterweighted with
cinder blocks, to cover them. The pits can hold as many as a dozen two-hundred-pound
hogs at a time. On the insides, the pits are caked with an oily black grime that would
definitely horrify a health inspector, except perhaps a North Carolina health inspector.
It seems that the state has instituted a special, more lenient health code for barbecue
establishments; that, and the informal grandfather clause to which Samuel had alluded,
is all that stands between a place like this and condemnation.
    “Yeah, we clean the pits now and then,
depending,” Samuel offered when I broached the sanitation issue. “But you
don’t want to clean them the whole way out, because then you’re losing all
that good insulation.” The problem is, that cake of grime, which a chemist would
probably say consists of equal parts saturated pig fat and the particulate matter
suspended in wood smoke, is highly flammable. So, it seems, is the smoke we were
breathing, which, to my alarm, Samuel claimed could actually ignite if it got
sufficiently thick and the room sufficiently hot. “That’s called a
flash-over,” he offered. Samuel has become, perforce, a close if not always
entirely successful student of fire. He mentioned he’d joined the Ayden Volunteer
Fire Department. Under the circumstances, this would seem like the politic thing to
do.
     

     
    The vestibule of
hell:
The pit room was in fact an infernal chamber, and not a place likely to
stimulate an appetite for cooked pig in many people. The residues of fires big and small
were everywhere, blackening the bricks, charring the ceiling, puckering the plywood
walls. While Samuel and I talked, I could see over his left shoulder a spectral presence
emerging out of the smoke, the figure of a slightly bent black man slowly pushing a
wheelbarrow topped with a sheet of bloodstained plywood on which the splayed pink
carcass of a hog precariously balanced. I could see the hog’s eyeless head,
bobbing slightly on the lip of the wheelbarrow, and, as it drew closer, the face of the
man carefully inching it forward. It was deeply lined, leathery, and missing several
teeth.
    Samuel introduced me to James Henry Howell,
the Skylight Inn’s longtime pit master. Howell made it instantly clear he would be
leaving all the talking to the Joneses. He had work to do, and indeed it appeared that
the lion’s share of the physical labor performed at the restaurant—putting on the
hogs late in the afternoon, flipping them over first thing the next morning, carrying
them, quartered, into the restaurant kitchen for the lunchtime rush, and then chopping
and seasoning them on the big wooden block—was work that James Henry Howell did himself,
leaving the Jones men free to hold forth. Which was fine by me, except it meant I
probably wouldn’t be getting any hands-on experience or how-to instruction here in
Ayden. That was going to have to wait.
    Back and forth across the pit room Mr.
Howell slowly wheeled his hogs, melting into the haze to fetch another carcass from the
walk-in cooler, then emerging again with his load, which he would tenderly tip onto the
iron grates. Howell worked slowly and deliberately, and whenhe was
done putting the hogs on, he had created an arresting tableau: a smoke-dimmed conga line
of splayed pink carcasses, laid out skin side up and snout to butt. The interior of the
cookhouse now looked like a bunkroom, the sleeping hogs bedded down for the night. Of
all the animals we eat, none resembles us more closely than the hog. Each the size of a
grown man, hairless and pink, its mouth set in what looks very much like a sly