When celebrity chef Dan Barber and author Michael Pollan, both Jewish, appeared together at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan in January, 2008 they each gleefully opened their remarks before the heavily Jewish audience with a personal pig story. Food writer Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan even described the event as including “many a joke about Jewish boys liking artisanal pork.”
Indeed. Pollan devotes an entire chapter of his most recent project, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin Press HC, 2013)—more than a quarter of the book—to whole hog barbecue, reveling in details about learning from the pit masters of North Carolina, perfecting the technique of crackling (making crispy pig skin), and inaugurating his own, now-annual, pig roast tradition in the front-yard fire pit.
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