Male preserve
Richard Sennett
Wat passes for summer is finally upon us in the British Isles. Between bouts of rain, we can finally inhale the sun-tan oil, note that last year’s swimsuit seems to have shrunk over the winter and fire up the barbecue. Cooking outdoors connects us to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and, while the Oxford Culinary Conference undoubtedly has views on who once tended the cave’s fire, the barbecue today is a male preserve. The mittens and apron, the lengthy spatula and prongs, the double ginand-tonic: these are the couture, jewellery and perfume which compensate the cooking male for the fact that he is no longer fit to be seen near-naked in the sea or at poolside. Unfortunately, the modern Neanderthal tends to make a mess of the food itself.
Outdoor male meat can invariably be identified by its blackened exterior and its dryness. To compensate, gendered meat is then encased in a bun, slathered with gooey pickle preserves or sugary tomato ketchup. The Oxford Conference probably has discussed the historical origins of this gastronomic horror; these can be traced back, briefly, to the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904, when and where the modern hamburger was born.
The first remedy lies in the proper kit. The most important element of the barbecue is its hood. This is because the essential principle of good barbecuing is that fatty meat is exposed to high heat; the fat is rendered from the meat, drips on to the coals and vaporises; this vapour then permeates and moisturises the meat. To make this process work, the hood should be thick enough to retain the heat and should remain closed once the meat is seared.
In barbecuing, it’s best to think as the Greeks did about penises: small is potent. The coals can do their work only if the volume of air is small. For this reason, when giving a party for many people, I prefer to work with two or three hibachis (small, inexpensive, Japanese barbecues) rather than one monster grill; if you’ve shelled out for one of these mastodons, however, be sure to fill it with more charcoal than the healthand-safety directions recommend.
There’s one further trick to infusing moistness into meat. Hot spices tend to give the human palate the illusion that meat is moist, even when it is in fact dry. So, in making a marinade, I mix fiery Mexican chipotle paste into a red-wine base (I chased all over London last month to find this condiment, only to discover that Waitrose sells it everywhere). Vindaloo mixtures have the same effect; if either seems too multi-culti, you should use Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces with a heavy hand. Hamburgers and other ground meats should similarly be wet; if too soppy to handle, just mix in some breadcrumbs.
These are ways to correct a century of gendered abuse of meat, but of course the barbecue can serve the chef of either sex in other ways. In Greek gardens, for instance, the barbecue is the preferred oven for slowcooking lamb, and the traditional fuel used is slow-burning, fragrant olive wood. In British backyards, something of the same effect can be achieved by constantly replacing the charcoal briquettes in the cooking barbecue with coals started in another container. In terms of British cuts, you’d cook a piece of lamb that combines the ‘best end’ and the ‘breast’; the meat is brushed with olive oil outside. A hole is cut into the best end; thyme, salt, lemon juice and zest are stuffed in; the lamb is cooked slowly until the meat between the ribs falls apart. The idea here, and in its infinite versions around the world, is to keep the heat below the level where it dries out the lamb, camel, bear or moose.
Outdoor cooking is thus a matter of working with extremes of heat; anything which requires constant medium heat to cook, like big slabs of salmon, is better cooked inside. And because of its heat, in working with fish on the barbecue you want to be sure to score the sides of the fish so that the heat can quickly penetrate the interior.
I’ve left for last a pet peeve about barbecuing. It is those searing stripes on T-bone steaks, so beloved of the mittened, aproned cook. Perhaps these recall to the publicschool chef canings at school, but in any case searing stripes tend to inflict cruelty on meat, at least in hands unsteadily fortified by the double gin-and-tonic. In barbecuing well, you want to think from the inside to the outside.
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