The magician pulled a bunny out of his hat. It was my fourth birthday party, and as the man held the rabbit aloft, grasping its neck, all my friends ooohed at the trick and cooed at the cuteness. Next, he extracted a bunch of jewel-toned silk scarves, and the parents clapped. Maybe it's because the supernatural is always disconcerting, but I started to fret, feeling that something terrible was about to happen. When at last he produced a blazing white ball of fire from the hat's depths, everyone applauded and cheered... while I dove under the table, where I remained, hysterical, for the rest of the afternoon.
Like water, or the sun rising and setting, fire is ubiquitous in our lives. But that didn't change the fact that I was deathly afraid of it, and as a cook, my crazy-making, inexplicable phobia proved to be a fairly serious liability. For a while, I thought I'd gotten better. During a stint in cooking school, I learned that the arts of searing, sautéing, roasting, and broiling took care, focus, and attention—not a Xanax and a fire extinguisher. Still, I failed my flambé class. Convinced that my eyebrows would be incinerated, I spent the evening in the bar downstairs. Old fears die hard.
When I fell in love and moved to rural Connecticut, it never occurred to me that I'd be expected to cook over open fires as a matter of course. That my partner's prized possession was her late father's 1950s avocado-green Weber grill was God's little yuckster joke on me. We were still at the stage where I was trying to impress her with my culinary prowess, and this, of course, did not include immolating expensive steaks because I was too terrified to flip them.
What didn't help either was Susan's preferred method of starting up her Weber: the lighter fluid splash-and-match approach, whereby a carcinogenic hellstorm would tower wildly over the kettle. On one rainy occasion the flames melted the vinyl siding off the house, leaving silver dollar–sized Colonial Gray splotches stuck to the deck while I ran for cover. There had to be a better way.
"Respect the fire," my friend Porter said when I told him about the melting of the house, "and it'll respect you. And never, ever start out big." Porter is a master of the Boy Scout arts: knot-tying, fire-building, grilling large hunks of meat. The fact that he can often be found doing these things while wearing fine seersucker suits is confidence-inspiring. So later, when he was stuffing tapenade and herbs into a pork shoulder destined for a crumbling, prehistoric-looking outdoor oven, I persuaded myself to stay. I could watch from a safe distance of, say, 30 feet while still carrying on a conversation with him.
Porter is a man of supreme understatement, and he cooks the way he conducts the rest of his life—carefully, delicately, and with commonsense restraint. This translated to the way he built his fire: slowly, methodically, and in an almost… chaste way. There were no huge, masculine explosions of vertical flame bursting skyward, such as I'd seen during demonstrations in cooking school; there was no lighter fluid, no singed eyebrows, and no melting house parts. There was just a small flicker of orange amidst a tangle of kindling and wood, and above it, on an ancient metal grate, a richly aromatic pork roast just beginning to brown.
"I want to show you what I'm doing," he said, holding his hand out and beckoning me over. I stepped a little bit closer to the smoldering wood. Porter turned the roast fat-side up, so that it wouldn't ignite; he blew on the fire to increase its heat, smothered it with ashes to lower its temperature, and kept this blaze behaving itself. He moved the pork to the cooler side of the grate to baste it, in order to avoid a flare-up, and then nudged it back over the higher heat. It was like a dance, and it went on for hours while he drank cold rosé and barely broke a sweat. The pork sizzled and hissed, and the aroma of smoke and meat and lemon and garlic swirled through the air until I couldn't stand it anymore: When the flames died down, I had to get closer to pull that one perfect, stray piece of crisp crackling off the side for a taste. When I finally confessed my lifelong fear of fire, and how I'd almost gone home when he struck the first match, he just laughed.
That evening, Porter changed everything for me. Fire didn't have to be terrifying. What he showed me was that an effective fire can be a small fire; that it takes time, focus, and concentration to build one, and more of the same to keep it going; that the art of cooking food over fire means constant measuring: knowing where your heat is hottest and coolest, knowing where the fat lines are in whatever it is you're grilling (and understanding that they will catch), even knowing what direction the wind is blowing. He taught me that if you treat your fire disrespectfully—thoughtlessly—odds are you will, in fact, incinerate what you're preparing.
Growing up a city girl, I only experienced fire when it spiraled out of control: when my mother charred the lamb chops in our broiler, or when the beauty parlor down the street exploded, sending gallons of Clairol Dark Blonde hair color into the atmosphere in a four-alarm conflagration. What Porter taught me that day is that fire is something you can control.
Today, cooking over a live flame is something I do as often as I can: slow-smoking ribs on my late father-in-law's Weber, carefully adding a steady stream of wood chips into the kettle by hand with the confident knowledge that they won't seize up and engulf me in flames. When it's too cold or wet out to cook over charcoal (or when I'm under time constraints), I turn to the gas grill for year-round outdoor cooking, including the pollo al mattone that I make at least once a week. And recently, I've learned how to plan, and actually force, flare-ups.
A few weeks back I grilled an octopus. It wanted real fire to char it a bit, to underscore its oceanic chew, and as I made the flames rise up to singe the flesh, I thought what a long way I'd come since that fireball flew out of the magician's hat.
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