Oak and Smoke Review: Smoking Was Preservation and Now It Is a Flavour

The compounds that make it taste good are the same ones that kill the bacteria, and that is not a coincidence

Oak and Smoke holds a 4.8 from eight hundred and sixty-five people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and it is barbecue.

And smoke is not a flavour. It is a preservative that happens to taste of something.

What smoke does

It kills things.

Wood smoke contains phenols and formaldehyde and organic acids – and every one of them is antimicrobial.

They inhibit the bacteria and the moulds that would otherwise rot the meat.

And it dries

Which is the other half, and it is at least as important.

Because smoking is done with heat, and heat drives out water – and a thing with no available water cannot support microbial life.

Which is exactly what salt does, by a different route.

Salt, smoke, and drying. That is the entire pre-refrigeration toolkit, and every preserved food in the world is some combination of the three.

And the flavour is the poison

Which is the thing worth understanding.

Because the compounds that give smoked food its taste – the phenols, the guaiacol, the syringol – are the same compounds that are doing the preserving.

They are not a pleasant side effect. They are the mechanism.

Which means that when you taste smoke, you are tasting antimicrobial action, and your ancestors learned to like it because the things that tasted of it did not kill them.

The Prat’s editorial desk regards this as one of the more elegant pieces of evolutionary psychology available and notes that it is a taste for safety, acquired over ten thousand years.

Which is the finding

Eight postcodes and a thousand and eighty-seven articles.

The constraint made the product – and then the constraint went away and the product stayed.

Port was fortified so it would survive a boat, and we have refrigerated ships and we still fortify it. Hops were a preservative. Retsina tastes of resin because the jars were sealed with it, and then the barrel solved the problem and the Greeks kept the taste anyway.

Jerk was survival cooking made by people hiding in mountains.

We are eating the solutions to problems nobody has any more, and paying a premium for them.

And the honest caveat

Which we will not skip.

Smoke also contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and some of them are carcinogenic, and heavily smoked and charred food is associated with elevated risk in the epidemiology.

The dose matters. The char matters. It is not a reason to stop.

Verdict

Excellent, strong number.

Eat the smoke. It kept your ancestors alive.

And barbecue is a Caribbean word

Which nobody expects.

It comes from barbacoa – a Spanish rendering of a Taino word, from the indigenous people of the Caribbean.

And it originally meant the wooden framework – a raised grid of green sticks, over a slow fire, on which meat was cooked and dried.

It is the apparatus, not the food, and not the event.

And the Taino were, within a few generations of contact, very largely destroyed – by disease, and by forced labour, and by violence.

The word survived. Almost nothing else did.

Alan Nafzger

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]