Too Close to the Fire
“Should we do an asado?” my friend nudges my side and points to a metal tin can turned grill that is sitting in her brother’s driveway. What she was really asking was: would I barbecue for our friends and her family. A full table with extra chairs crammed around the edges and every last inch of table space occupied. Yeah, I reluctantly agreed, because, like when we are offered sex or tossed a football, the heterosexual man never says no to an asado. “What’s wrong with him?” they’d think to themselves.
Heavy gray clouds blocked out the sun and trapped the winter chill, which whistled and picked up pieces of dirt from the road in surprise gushes of wind. It looked like rain was gathering over the rice fields in the distance. On the side of the house were stacks of clay red quebracho logs, which were slippery with the morning’s rain and hard as rocks. Every whack sent blood pumping into my arms and shoulders, the tension crawling up my spine until my neck froze into place.
The fire caught quickly but between the wet wood and wind, I struggled to ignite the logs. In the United States people don’t really barbecue, one of the men said behind me. There they use charcoal that they start with lighter fluid, the other chimed in. Isn’t that right? You guys don’t build real fires? I walked into the backyard to gather more wood and when I came back one of them had taken over the fire. I’ve done this my entire life, he said without taking his eyes off the flame, grabbing at the pieces of wood I’d torn off of vegetable crates to form a teepee around the fire I'd built, which was exactly what I was going to do. I hope he cuts himself on a nail and gets tetanus, I thought to myself.
Silently our hands danced until they tangled. There is something about the performance of cooking with fire that always teases out territory. He blew at the fire and I stood behind fanning the flame. He moved coals to the grill and I poked them down and broke them apart into bright orange embers. There was no doubt in my mind that this wasn’t teamwork. It was mutiny. We danced awkwardly around one another until I realized that I was silently arguing over an asado I didn’t want to cook in the first place. I poured a tall glass of Petit Verdot and joined a card game inside.
About an hour later, the table was filled with short ribs that were grey and limp and fire red chorizos that had been smacked so hard by the flames that they had charred black and white like writing on a chalkboard. He cut them down the middle mariposa-style, I scowled to myself, leaving all the fat drippings on the coals outside. Potatoes were cooked with no consideration for their size; large potatoes were starchy and resistant, small potatoes dense and dry. Bell peppers withered like fallen cactus flowers. The vegetables were not important despite the two vegans at the table.
We all clapped. He built a good fire.
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I have since felt hyper-aware that fire turns us into caricatures of masculinity in a way that I have never experienced in a kitchen. In the summer of 2016, I found myself in a restaurant kitchen for the first time, on the day before my first pop-up event and after years, I quickly realized, of fucking around hosting a supper club out of my apartment. I arrived hopped up on coffee and yerba mate, eager and grinning, and was shocked by how effortlessly everyone moved around the kitchen without colliding into one another.
I treated my pop-ups like a culinary school, especially during the first year, and chased after cooks and restaurants that I wanted to glean knowledge from, like how to clean and butcher meat and vegetables depending on how they will be cooked. At a dinner at Donnet, I wanted to make a tostada with a mushroom chorizo. I emptied all the portobellos and white buttons into a large bowl and was intercepted on my way to the sink by Manu’s shrieking. Mushrooms absorb liquid like a spunge and rinsing them with water makes them slimy and rubbery. I had made this dish half a dozen times and had no idea I was doing it wrong.
She tossed me a clean cloth and showed me how to wipe away the excess dirt. We quartered each mushroom and cooked them with tomato paste, orange vinagre, cilantro and chile ancho until the sauce thickened and the mushrooms could be broken down with a spatula into a chunky paste that I spread on fried corn tortillas topped with avocado and lemon juice. Mushrooms presented a new world and every cooking technique a different cut: I learned to saute white buttons whole to keep them plump, grill oyster mushrooms with rock salt and lemon until they crisp, always cooked whole and then thinly sliced, and quickly slice and bread monkey brain to deep fry.
At one of my very first pop-ups, the owner of the restaurant decided to give himself an extra 30% of the earnings the day I went to collect. We sat at a small table with two glasses of beer between us and he explained that he needed an extra 20% for taxes and 10% for credit card service charges. That part of the deal went without saying, he explained as he poured half a pint of lager into his gut. You don’t want your beer? he asked. I imagined throwing it in his face and stomping out of the bar with my money in a raised fist. Suck a fat one! This is how all of my conflicts in the kitchen have gone; it’s never about the value of my skill or lackthereof but about maintaining hierarchy, which isn’t so much about exercising masculinity as it is the power of authority. He had control of the money and I had no real recourse to do anything about it.
I know that I’m getting a romanticized version of life in a restaurant kitchen filled with comraderie and communal teaching minus all the microagressions and competition. I am a guest and the restaurant doesn’t have much to lose if I fuck up. But when I cook at home for guests I feel something similar, a desire to share food and know-how without a bunch of helicopter dicks flying around the room. I have never cooked for a dinner party where guests gathered behind me to analyze the way I build a sauce or break down a whole fish, measuring up my value as a cook, despite those being cooking processes that require more nuance and care.
“It has nothing to do with how well someone can grill. It’s not the asado,” my friend Clara, a recovering restaurant cook, told me. “It’s the fire. My straight guy friends can’t grill for shit but they all have an opinion about the fire. Anthropologically, it’s all backward. Men hunted, women cooked. We always built the fires.”
Are we just overcompensating? Appropriating the most basic of human necessities? Without fire, we can’t cook, we all starve. Men save the world. Grunt grunt grunt.
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I don’t remember when exactly people stopped cooking for me and I don’t totally understand if it is because I am the best cook in the group or the most discerning eater. You only like your own cooking, my wife often complains, which is a big exaggeration of a partial truth. Being invited to a meal and only having to show up and eat is my quixotic fantasy.
Recently I was invited to join an asado at a friend’s house. I had cooked on their parrilla before and it was traumatic. Standard grills are built into the wall, comically long and adjustable, this was a small circular barbecue with a little hatch that made it difficult to move around the coals. Once I had my coals ready, I filled the entire grill. A terrible idea. Fat began to drip and launch flames upwards — I lost control of the fire. A crust built around everything too quickly. Pumpkin wedges got cold because I had to pull them from the grill and quickly attend to a pork shoulder whilst a line of 10 hungry friends began to form a circle around the fire.
I cooked stressed although no one noticed. A good cook doesn’t just cook well; a good cook is the one that can put together a good meal and convince everyone that not only do they have everything under control but also that they are having a good time. I still felt like a shitty cook.
I suggested to the asador in the group chat that if he hadn’t used a grill like this before, that it was easier to cook one thing at a time to maintain control of the fire. My suggestion was quickly received with a collective pulling out of penises. I’m going to have to hold him back later, the hostess wrote. How could you question a god of fire? To question a man’s ability to grill is to question their value as a man, or at least that is what they all heard. Everyone egged on the masculine spectacle that formed around the fire. Whose was bigger?
I arrived at the asado with fresh masa to make tortillas, a bottle of fernet and a ruler so that we could all measure our dicks. I left behind the digital scale to weigh our balls, we can just eyeball that.
That night we ate lomo al trapo, a Colombian dish that requires you to cover a tenderloin in a kilo of salt and wrap in a linen towel wet with red wine, which is tied tightly, and thrown directly onto the hot coals for 30 minutes. The salt forms a crust that allows the meat to absorb the flavor of the wine and retain all the juice. It was soft and red like fresh sashimi with just the right touch of salt and a distant whisper of wood and tannin. It was probably the best piece of steak I’ve ever eaten.
We all clapped. He cooked a good meal.