When I was nine or ten, my uncle Raymond grilled in a concrete backyard in Charlotte with whatever charcoal was on sale at the Winn-Dixie. I don't remember the brand. Blue and white bag, I think. What I remember is the smell — that chemical edge when the lighter fluid first caught, and then underneath it, the real smell that came after, something cleaner and hot and alive. He'd make chicken on that grill every Saturday he had us, and it always came out tasting like smoke and summer.

For a long time, that smell was charcoal to me. I didn't know there was another kind.

The first bag of briquettes I bought as an adult was Kingsford. I bought it at a grocery store, same as Raymond always did. I used lighter fluid from the same shelf, the same starter method he'd shown me — pile it up, soak it, light it, wait. It smelled exactly like his concrete yard in Charlotte, which probably says more about muscle memory than about any quality of the charcoal itself. That summer I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't, but I had the right fuel at least.

It was Curtis who told me about lump charcoal. This was years later, after I'd moved here, after I'd started taking the grill more seriously. He came over one afternoon when I was setting up and said, "What is that?"

I told him it was charcoal.

He said, "No, I mean what kind."

I said briquettes, and he looked at me the way a man looks when he wants to say something and is deciding how to say it. What he said was, "Try lump sometime. Just try it." He said it the same way he told me about the two-zone setup — short, like he'd given you the whole thing and you could figure out the rest.

I bought a bag the following week. It looked different from briquettes — irregular shapes, not pressed into uniform pillows. You could see the wood grain in some pieces. When I poured it into the chimney and lit it, it caught faster than I expected, and the color of the coals was different. Brighter. And when it was ready, the heat coming off the grate was genuinely intense — hotter than anything I'd had from briquettes.

I seared a steak that night and got a crust on it that I'd never managed before. Dark and dry and crackling when I pressed it. My wife said it tasted like something from a restaurant. That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my cooking.

I've used lump charcoal most of the time since then. Not because it's better in every way — it isn't. It costs more and burns out faster. But it burns cleaner, gets hotter, and when it's going strong it feels like a real fire in a way that briquettes don't quite. I think about Curtis every time I light a bag.

The first time someone handed me actual hardwood was a few years after that. A man named Everett at a neighborhood thing — he'd pulled in from Louisiana the year before, came to the cookout with a cooler of meat and a paper bag full of what turned out to be pecan wood chunks. Nobody had a smoker that day, just kettles, and he walked around asking whose grill had the lowest temperature going.

Mine did. I'd been keeping the cool side around 275, doing some ribs low and slow.

He put two chunks of pecan on my coals without asking and closed the lid. I was going to say something, but I didn't. Twenty minutes later the smoke coming out of the vents had a sweetness to it that was different from anything I'd had before. Not heavy or sharp. More like something you'd smell from a bakery if bakeries burned wood.

When the ribs came off, Everett cut a piece and handed it to me before I'd even plated anything. He watched me eat it the way people who are proud of something watch you receive it.

I said, "That's the wood."

He said, "Pecan. It's what we use back home."

I've chased that flavor since. Not desperately — I'm not obsessed with it — but I notice now when pecan or cherry wood chunks are available at the hardware store. I pick them up when they are. Hickory is what I use most because I can find it reliably, and it's the smoke I recognize from the stuff Paul used to make, that deep and serious smoke that sits in your clothes afterward. Oak when I want something milder. Cherry for pork when I can get it.

But pecan is the one I come back to when I'm thinking about what smoke can be. Everett didn't stay long that evening — had somewhere to be, he said. But I've thought about those ribs often enough over the years that it feels like he was there for hours.

The honest answer to what I burn and why is that it depends on the cook, and it depends on what I have, and it depends on what I'm trying to taste. Briquettes for a long slow cook when I need consistency and don't want to babysit. Lump when I want real heat or I'm doing something that needs a quick hard sear. Wood chunks on the coals when I want smoke to mean something.

Some people talk about fuel like it's the most important variable. I don't think it is. A good fire you're managing well beats fancy charcoal you're not paying attention to. But there's something to matching the fuel to the cook — not just as technique, but as intention. The pecan smoke was something Everett chose deliberately. He knew what it would do to those ribs, and he was right.

Raymond didn't know the difference between his charcoal and any other kind. He just cooked every Saturday and made chicken that still lives in my memory thirty-some years later. Maybe the fuel doesn't matter as much as showing up and doing it.

But I still buy the good stuff when I can. That part I got from Curtis.