The Joys of Grilling in the Winter
'By now I think I’ve established that I belong to a small and dwindling tribe of humans who like it arduous and exacting. We know that there’s now “an app for that,” but nevertheless we want to learn our Latin on paper, one declension at a time: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. To meet someone to date in person, perhaps at a party or through a friend, or at a night class we take once a week. One tribe member I know — the woman who letter-pressed my wedding invitations and threaded the ribbons onto them by hand — calls herself “Ms. Hardway.” Letterpress is already a heavy slog as it is, but she of course has found an even harder way: the one-ton machine in her studio in Oakland is operated by foot treadle.
When we read a recipe titled “Easy Weeknight Cassoulet,” we stare at it in blank confusion and turn the page. But when we come across one that starts like this — “Shovel a path through the snow to the grill in the backyard, and start a fire” — we light up and tear that one out of the magazine to get to promptly.
So here’s one for us. A whole smoky pork shoulder, cooked outdoors on the grill, in the dead of winter, for several long, nothing-much-to-do-but-wait hours. Here’s one for those of us who are already thrilling at the idea of lighting up the grill that has been standing idle in the backyard since last Labor Day. For the rest of you, who may be frowning at that mercury resting steadfastly in the low 20s, maybe I can persuade you to recall the miseries of grilling on oppressive thick August afternoons. The sweat that trickles down the backs of your knees when you stand over that kettle of white hot coals. The way the humidity hangs so heavily that the smoke can’t plume or swirl away and instead attaches itself to you, stinging your eyes — and everyone else’s too. The scorching of your palms and knuckles when you baste the chicken even with the longest-handled brush you have. And don’t forget those wretched flies with their bottle green bodies that cling to your waiting steaks, to the ketchup cap, to your greasy tongs, driving you — a bit of a hygiene freak — to fits of revulsion. How many times, meanwhile, have you wondered how the hefty gin-and-tonic you poured in the kitchen minutes ago became diluted lime-scented spa water when you went for a sip at the grill?
A nicely tended pork shoulder slow-cooking in the backyard, which needs almost nothing of you once you get her going, nothing more than a little babysitting every so often, could be the national dish of my disappearing tribe. The ideal setup — no surprise to those of us who are bent this way to begin with — is to build not one but two fires, one behind you that I call my service fire, or my feeder fire, the pit in which I burn logs for my own pleasure, to stand near, to be warmed by and illuminated by and, on the practical side, to pull hot coals from to feed into the slow and low fire I have going in my grill in front of me. That slow and low one inside the grill — a mound of red, radiating warmth — will cook the pork.
To experience the winter grilling phenomenon of thin, bone-dry wisps of smoke curling up unhindered to the sky in front and a crystal clean open feeder fire in back may in itself make a convert out of you. But the fact of the chile-paste-rubbed pork shoulder, nestled under the dome of the grill, slowly smoking away, its juices dripping down all afternoon and through the blue of evening, is sure to seal the deal. For me, honestly, the meat is almost beside the point. I wouldn’t mind if you took the easier path and cooked the pork shoulder in the kitchen in a standard oven all afternoon and just pretended to be out there maintaining a steady 300 degrees in the Weber. What I wouldn’t want you to miss out on is the muffled quiet of snowfall. Your pristine worktable nearby — which is just your patio furniture with a small half moon of snow cleared to set down your tongs and your potent bourbon Manhattan, two cherries. That silence. That solitude. That friendly and reasonable excuse to get out of the claustrophobic, overheated house, to manage your cabin fever, to leave the left-swiping, Duolingo shortcutting app-addicted citizenry inside and to go out back — alone — down the path you cleared and tend to the satisfactions of your smoking project in the yard.'
Recipe: Smoky Pork Shoulder With Chile Paste
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/magazine/the-joys-of-grilling-in-the-winter.html?
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