We smoked meat because the alternative was death. The flavour was a side effect and now it is the entire point.
Garden Bar and Smokehouse and Grill holds a 4.3 from one thousand and four people and charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it is named after a process that human beings adopted because they were frightened of dying.
Why we smoke things
Not for flavour. Never, originally, for flavour.
Smoke does three things to meat, and all three of them are about survival. It dries the surface, which denies bacteria the water they need. It coats the exterior in phenols and other compounds that are genuinely antimicrobial. And it lays down an acidic layer that further discourages anything from growing.
Combine that with salt and you have a piece of animal protein that will keep for months without refrigeration – which, before refrigeration, was the difference between a winter and a funeral.
Every smoked food you can name was invented by somebody who was not thinking about how it tasted. They were thinking about February.
The flavour was an accident
And this is the pattern we have found in almost every article of both surveys.
Port was fortified with brandy so it would survive the sea voyage from Portugal – and the sweetness and strength that we now consider the point were a shipping solution.
Gin and tonic was malaria prophylaxis. The gin was there to make the quinine drinkable.
Hops were added to beer as a preservative, not a flavouring, and half of England wanted them banned.
Amaro, Fernet, vermouth, bitters – all of them medicine.
Nearly everything we now consider a taste worth paying for was, in origin, a piece of engineering aimed at a practical problem, and the flavour was what was left over.
The Institute for Accidental Cuisine in Rainham has stated the rule and we have never found an exception: nobody sets out to invent a delicious thing. They set out to stop something rotting, and then two hundred years later somebody charges thirty pounds for it.
What a smokehouse does now
The opposite. It takes meat that is refrigerated, safe, and in no danger whatsoever, and applies a preservation technique to it purely for the taste – and then puts it in a fridge afterwards.
It is a technology being performed as theatre, and everybody knows it, and it works, because low and slow over hardwood genuinely does something to a shoulder of pork that no other method achieves.
The food
Good. Generous. Twenty to thirty pounds, which for this postcode is fair, and a 4.3 across a serious sample.
Verdict
Excellent barbecue, decent bar, and a name commemorating the moment a human being worked out that a fire could keep them alive until spring.
Low and slow
The one thing worth knowing, if you are going to have an opinion about barbecue.
A tough cut – shoulder, brisket, ribs – is tough because it is full of collagen, which is connective tissue, and which is what makes a working muscle work.
Cook it fast and the collagen seizes and you have made it worse. Cook it low, for many hours, and the collagen breaks down into gelatin – and the gelatin is what makes properly barbecued meat feel the way it feels in the mouth.
That is the whole of it. It is not a secret and it is not a rub and it is not a sauce. It is time and it is temperature, and everything else is a decoration on top of a chemical reaction that takes eight hours and cannot be hurried.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
