I was standing in the seasonal aisle at Ingles on Tuesday holding a twenty-pound bag of Kingsford Original like it was a baby that had just spit up on me, because my friend Caro had texted me the fine print at 6:14 that morning and I had not fully recovered. There is a photograph of a flame on the front of that bag. There is a photograph of a brisket. There is the word ORIGINAL in a font that is supposed to make you think of your grandfather. And then on the back, in print so small I had to use Ember’s pre-K magnifying glass when we got home, there is a list. Seventeen items. Four of them are wood.
Let me say that again. Four. Of them. Are wood.
The other thirteen, as far as I have been able to determine between Caro, my sister-in-law Heather (front desk, pediatric urgent care, Hendersonville, basically a nurse), and the admins of a Facebook group called Briquettes & The Lies They Pressed Into Pillow Shapes, are as follows: limestone. Borax. Mineral char. Sodium nitrate. A “binder starch” from an undisclosed grain. A “lighting agent.” Something called borate-treated cellulose, which Heather says she has personally seen on an MSDS sheet at her cousin’s HVAC supply and which is, and I want you to read this carefully, attic insulation. We are grilling our Memorial Day brisket on attic insulation. Then there’s a coal-derived petroleum byproduct, two compounds I cannot pronounce, a “flavor enhancer” (on a piece of pressed dust, you cannot make this up), and the last three are listed only as “proprietary,” which is what a company writes when the answer would make a mother cry in a parking lot.
I want to be clear, because I have already gotten one email from a man named Greg: I am not anti-grill. My husband Trent has a brisket tradition. He gets up at 4 a.m. on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, he puts on the same sweatshirt he wore the day Ember was born, and he tends a fire on our back patio for fourteen hours while listening to a podcast about the Civil War. That ritual is sacred in this house. What is not sacred is what we have apparently been asking him to put under that brisket for nine years, which according to my best math is roughly 180 pounds of compressed industrial floor sweepings and a binder starch from Who Knows Where, Kansas.
Now. I will say. Lump charcoal is a different conversation, and I want to give it its due. Lump is just hardwood that has been burned down in a low-oxygen kiln. That is fire-and-tree, the way God and the Cherokee intended. The carveout I am willing to make for lump is real. The only catch is that the bag has to say where the wood came from, by county, and if it just says “South America” in a script font I am putting it back on the shelf and apologizing to it. Heather says her cousin once opened a bag of “premium hardwood lump” and found a piece of a pallet with a staple still in it, and I have not been able to unhear that.
So this year I have made arrangements. Our neighbor Marcus, who runs a small wood lot off Old Fort Road and who once hand-split a cord of cherry for a wedding, is letting me come fill the back of the Subaru with what he calls “clean rounds” — oak and hickory and a little applewood, all from trees he watched grow. Trent is going to build a fire from actual identifiable trees, on a grate he wire-brushed himself, in a bed of ash from last summer’s fires that I have personally screened for staples. Will it take longer? Yes. Will the brisket taste like brisket and not like a CVS receipt? I believe so.
I floated all of this at the HOA cookout planning meeting on Thursday and there was a silence I have only heard one other time in my life, which was when I told the PTA the gown was a tablecloth. A woman named Patrice asked if I was “doing a thing again.” I said I was not doing a thing, I was doing a fact, and there is a difference, and she could read the back of her own bag in her own garage. The meeting moved on to the bouncy house deposit.
If you take nothing else from this column, take this: turn the bag around. Read every word. If you see “proprietary,” put it down. If you see “borate,” put it down and also wash your hands. If you see four kinds of wood and nothing else, you have my blessing and Marcus’s, and Trent will be in the driveway at 5 a.m. on Saturday with the sweatshirt and the thermos and the look of a man who finally knows what is under his meat.
Ember asked me at bedtime if briquettes were bad. I told her they were not bad, exactly. I told her they were a choice we used to make before we knew. She nodded the way she does, and she said, very seriously, “Mama, the wood remembers.” Reader, I do not know where she gets it. But she is not wrong.