Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 4

I was beginning to suspect that barbecue had become something of a hall of mirrors. Mitch.e.l.l himself seemed to embody the culture of Southern barbecue as reflected back at itself in the celebration of Southern barbecue by Northern food writers, professors of cultural studies, and the Southern Foodways Alliance, which had gotten behind Ed Mitch.e.l.l in a big way. This possibly explained his habit of speaking of himself in the third person ("And that's when the story of old Ed Mitch.e.l.l really began to spiral ever upward ..."). Mitch.e.l.l talked about The Pit as his new "stage," and how he and Greg Hatem were taking whole-hog barbecue upscale, and making it "a little bit more trendy" while "keeping it real." The Pit had an executive chef, and I got the feeling Ed was doing a lot more talking than cooking nowadays.

Delivering his practiced patter, Ed was upbeat in the automatic mode of the salesman or evangelist. And yet I also detected a real sweetness in the man, a pa.s.sion for cooking for people, and, somewhere deep down there beneath all the talk about authenticity, the kernel of something that felt a lot like ... authenticity.

I asked Ed about the event in Wilson, which some of the PR people at the restaurant group had discouraged me from attending. Maybe it would turn out to be as boring as they promised ("I just have to warn you, it's a long hot day in a parking lot with a lot of sitting around") or maybe they wanted to keep the focus on the restaurant, but to me it sounded perfect. Ed would be cooking a couple of hogs himself in his hometown, a.s.sisted by his younger brother Aubrey. He planned to start the hogs on the pit at his old restaurant Friday night, and then finish them in the parking lot Sat.u.r.day on portable cookers. I asked Ed if I could help out.

"I don't see why not. Come on down, we'll put you to work, show you how old Ed Mitch.e.l.l cooks whole-hog barbecue."

When I showed up at The Pit Friday afternoon to meet Ed Mitch.e.l.l for the drive out to Wilson, the pit master was not in the kitchen. He was in the dining room, getting his picture taken with a customer, something that clearly happened all the time. Ed was a slow-moving bear of a man with the build of a linebacker (in fact, he attended Fayetteville State on a football scholars.h.i.+p), but a sixty-three-year-old linebacker, with a prosperous belly. His complexion was dark as coal, and his full-moon face was fringed in a nimbus of snow-white beard. Ed had on his trademark outfit-crisp denim overalls and baseball cap-and after finis.h.i.+ng up with the customer, he asked a server to take a picture of the two of us, with our arms wrapped around each other's shoulders like old friends.

On the ride out to Wilson in one of The Pit's catering vans, I got "the Ed Mitch.e.l.l story," complete with that t.i.tle. Listening to him tell his story was very much like deja vu. More than once, I could swear I had heard this exact sentence somewhere before. And I had-usually in one of the oral histories I had read before coming to North Carolina. The version of "the Ed Mitch.e.l.l story" that follows draws on both those oral histories (especially the one done for Southern Foodways Alliance) and my own interviews with Ed.

Cooking barbecue had never been part of Ed's life plan, though because he was the oldest of three boys his mother, Doretha, had insisted he learn how to cook. She worked while he was growing up, first for a tobacco company, and then as a domestic in the home of one of the tobacco executives who lived in the grand houses on the west side of Wilson. "I stayed home to cook for my brothers, and I hated it. Hated it! Cooking just wasn't something boys did. But I'm a mama's boy, always been, and Mama insisted on it."

Cooking barbecue was different, however. It was something the men did on special occasions: at Christmastime and other holidays, and for "the quarterlies"-family reunions. Ed remembers getting to cook his first pig at fourteen, and how he relished the privilege of spending long hours around the fire pit with the men of the family.

"Moons.h.i.+ne was always an important part of barbecue, because, you see, the men were not allowed to drink in the house. So this kind of whole-hog cooking that had to be done outside and went on all night long-well, that was just perfect for pa.s.sing the jar!" To Ed, the great appeal of cooking a whole pig was not so much the meal as the occasion it provided, for time around a fire, for talk, and for camaraderie. The food was almost incidental to the ritual work of producing it.

After a couple of years playing football at Fayetteville State, Ed was called up to serve in Vietnam, where he spent eighteen harrowing months. When he got home he finished his degree, graduating in 1972, and was recruited by Ford Motor Company to join a minority-dealer development program. After some training in Michigan, Ford sent him to Waltham, Ma.s.sachusetts, where he worked as a regional manager in customer service for twelve years, until the day he got word that his father, Willie, had taken ill. Ed decided to return to Wilson to help his parents out.

At the time, Ed's parents ran a mom-and-pop grocery story on the east side of town, but after his father pa.s.sed in 1990, business took a turn for the worse. Every day, Ed would escort his mother to and from the store, and he remembers coming by one afternoon to find his mother looking downcast. He asked her why. "Well, I've been here all day," she told him, "and I haven't made but seventeen dollars, and twelve dollars of that was in food stamps."

"I wanted to cheer her up, so I asked her, what did she want to eat for lunch? She thought about it and said, 'I know what I want. I've got a taste for some old-fas.h.i.+oned barbecue.' Well, I knew what that meant, so I went down to the Super Duper and I bought a small little pig, maybe thirty-two pounds or so, and I bought five dollars' worth of oak wood to give it the flavor I wanted. I pulled the old barrel cooker out of the shed, put the pig on, and gave it about three hours to cook. When the pig was done, I chopped it up, Mama seasoned it, and she and I sat down in the back of the store for a late lunch.

"While we were enjoying our barbecue, someone came into the grocery story wanting some hot dogs, which was something Mom and Dad offered. But when the man saw the pail of barbecue, he said, "Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l, y'all got barbecue, too?" Mother looked over at me. I had my mouth full, so I couldn't speak, but I nodded, uh-huh. I figured what she needed was to make some money, so, yeah, sell the man some barbecue! She made the guy a couple of sandwiches and he left.

"When I came back that evening to escort her home, Mama was all bubbly, happier than she'd been in all the time since Daddy pa.s.sed. I asked her, why the change in mood? 'I made some money today,' she said. 'I sold all that barbecue.' Get out of here! But it seems the man had gone out in the community with his sandwiches and told somebody, and that somebody told somebody else, and the news got around like wildfire, until all the barbecue was sold.

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

"'Mr. Mitch.e.l.l?' I thought maybe the man was here to rob us, so I put a little ba.s.s 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 Mitch.e.l.l'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 Mitch.e.l.l, 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 Mitch.e.l.l-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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 Mitch.e.l.l's barbecue was becoming aware of itself, a process that deepened in 2002, when the Southern Foodways Alliance recognized Mitch.e.l.l 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 Mitch.e.l.l to the barbecue symposium at the university in October of 2002. "So we went down to Oxford, Mississippi, and it opened my eyes," Mitch.e.l.l 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 Mitch.e.l.l was as important to the Southern Foodways Alliance as the Foodways Alliance was to Ed Mitch.e.l.l.

As part of the symposium, the pit masters were invited to cook their specialty and then submit to judging by the food writers; compet.i.tive 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 s.h.i.+ning lacquer. Some of these guys had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars! So everybody's waiting to see what sort of equipment Ed Mitch.e.l.l'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 Mitch.e.l.l'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 t.i.tle Pig Perfect. Kaminsky, who is from Brooklyn, pointed out to Ed Mitch.e.l.l, gently, that his barbecue was not quite as authentic as it might be.

"Peter Kaminksy told me Mitch.e.l.l'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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 Mitch.e.l.l'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 owners.h.i.+p 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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.

V.

Wilson, North Carolina

When we pulled up at the back door of the restaurant formerly known as Mitch.e.l.l'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 s.h.i.+ny 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 was.h.i.+ng down the carca.s.ses with water, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 G.o.d.) 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.

The four pits, which occupied one long wall of the kitchen, were built out of brick and resembled the ones in Ayden, except that they had sleek, stainless-steel covers and a sophisticated system for ventilating the smoke. Ed was very proud of the kitchen's design, which included a redundant ventilation system and sprinklers that allowed him to safely and legally bring wood-burning barbecue pits into a restaurant kitchen-the first time, he claimed, this had ever been done in North Carolina.

Ed was happy to give orders and let me work. I never did figure out whether he had decided I had some potential as a pitman, or was just happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting. He handed me a shovel and told me to remove the ashes from the floor of the pits, ashes probably left over from the last barbecue Ed cooked here, before the foreclosure in 2004. What he instructed me to do next came as a surprise, and a disillusioning one at that. He asked me to empty two twenty-pound bags of charcoal into the center of each pit. Ed cooked with Kingsford!-those little rectangular black pillows of compressed charcoal made from sawdust and who knows what else. How authentic is that? Ed explained that Kingsford gave him a long, slow burn that "allowed me to get some sleep at night." But it was tasteless! What about the wood smoke? "You'll see in due course."

After I mounded the briquettes in the center of each pit, Aubrey squirted copious amounts of lighter fluid onto them, waited a moment for it to soak in, and tossed a match that instantly ignited an impressive conflagration. This wasn't exactly the primordial fire I'd come in search of. It was more like the suburban backyard barbecue blazes of my childhood. Everyone, it seems, makes his own compromises, whether in the interest of convenience or cost, but everyone else's compromises are abominations. Though I uncovered a reservoir of mutual respect between the Joneses and Mitch.e.l.ls, the former regards Mitch.e.l.l's charcoal as a sad declension, and the latter feels the same way about the Joneses' commodity pigs. ("I would say they're eighty percent of the way there," Ed told me.)

While we waited for the briquettes to catch fire and then mellow, Ed showed me around the building, parts of which had been leased to a woman who was operating it as a cafeteria. The structure was a somewhat bewildering warren of rooms that had been added on, piecemeal, to the original mom-and-pop grocery store. The former store survives as the comparatively tiny, windowless heart in the middle of what has grown into a sprawling cinder-block complex. Proudly, Ed showed me the upstairs lecture hall, where he had planned to start a barbecue college for aspiring pit masters; the "pig bar," where customers could have a drink while watching Ed or Aubrey chop barbecue; and the dining room, the walls of which were covered with a remarkable mural depicting the role of barbecue in Southern history. It was an ambitious piece of folk art, at least fifty feet in length, and painted over the course of a few years by an autistic man who worked in the kitchen as a dishwasher. (It took me the longest time to realize Ed was not saying an "artistic man," which seemed self-evident.) "He offered to do the whole thing for ten dollars," Ed told me. "That didn't seem right, so I gave him twenty dollars and bought the paint."

Ed made sure I looked at every scene closely. The mural depicted a myth of the origins of barbecue in the traditions of the tobacco harvest. Its theme was community. You saw carts laden with tobacco; men stripping the big leaves, women poling them, then handing the long poles to men to hang in the barn; wood fires burning in the barns to cure the tobacco; men slaughtering hogs outside, hanging their carca.s.ses from trees; women making sausages and soap from the lard; men digging the barbecue pits, which looked like fresh graves, and pa.s.sing jars of moons.h.i.+ne. And then the climactic scene: On a broad lawn in front of a big white mansion, an improbably long table stretches out in the shade of a great oak. This is the site of the celebratory feast that marked the end of the harvest.

"Now look at the faces of the people at that table: black and white. Together. This was practically the only time that happened back then. We needed each other and everyone knew it, even if we went back to our separate lives afterward. But whether you were picking cotton or putting in the tobacco, everyone worked together and then everyone feasted together at a barbecue."