It was a Tuesday in November, and Food Lion had pork shoulder on sale for $1.69 a pound. I bought a five-and-a-half-pound piece and paid $9.30. That's the whole story, financially. Everything else is about the cooking.

I put it in the slow cooker before I left for work. Patted it dry first — that's important, the surface moisture has to go or you're steaming instead of browning — then rubbed it all over with salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Nothing you'd have to make a special trip for. I set the Hamilton Beach to low, propped the lid open a crack with a wooden spoon so the steam could escape, and left.

My slow cooker is a five-quart Hamilton Beach I bought at a thrift store for fifteen dollars three years ago. It works exactly as well as one that costs eighty dollars. The only thing a slow cooker has to do is maintain a low, even temperature for a long time. This one does that. I don't need it to talk to my phone.

I want to explain why pork shoulder specifically, because the cut matters here more than with most things.

Pork shoulder — also called pork butt, also called Boston butt, despite being the front shoulder of the pig; food terminology is a mess — is marbled through with fat and connective tissue. It is the opposite of a lean cut, and that is precisely the point. In a slow cooker, over eight hours at low heat, all of that connective tissue converts to gelatin. The fat renders. What's left is meat that is so soft it pulls apart when you look at it, but it's not dry — it's coated in that rendered fat and gelatin, and it stays moist. A chicken breast in a slow cooker comes out stringy and sad. A pork shoulder comes out like it's been tended to all day, which, in a sense, it has been.

Pork shoulder is cheap because it is not a restaurant cut. Restaurants need individual portions. A five-pound hunk of shoulder with a bone in the middle doesn't portion neatly. Home cooking is where this cut belongs, and home cooking is what it's built for.

What I came home to

The house smelled like it when I came in through the back door. Not like it was cooking — like it had been cooking, like someone had been tending something all afternoon and the smell had gotten into the walls and the curtains. Pork fat and salt and faint sweetness from the rendered collagen. It's one of the better smells a kitchen can produce.

My mother was in her chair in the living room with the television on. She looked up when I came in and said, "Whatever that is, it smells ready." She was right. Eight hours on low, and the meat had pulled away from the bone and the whole thing had sunken into the pot under its own weight.

I lifted it onto the cutting board and it started coming apart before I even touched it with the forks. I gave it about ten minutes to rest and firm up slightly — if you pull it too hot it just turns to mush — then worked it apart with two forks in about four minutes. The bone came out clean. Most of the fat had rendered into the liquid.

I saved that liquid. Strained it through the colander, let it sit a minute so the fat rose to the top, skimmed off most of the fat but left a couple tablespoons because that's where the flavor lives. Then I mixed it with about a cup of Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce and poured it over the pulled meat. The cooking liquid does something to the finished sauce — thickens it slightly, rounds it out, makes it taste like the meat was involved instead of poured on at the end. Don't throw it away.

Marcus came home at six-fifteen

He plays basketball after school on Tuesdays and he comes home hungry in the way that only teenagers can be hungry, which is to say completely and urgently. He dropped his bag in the doorway — I have asked him not to do this, he continues to do it — and said, before even taking his shoes off, "what's that smell."

He ate standing up at the counter, making himself a roll with pulled pork and coleslaw — I'd made the coleslaw while the pork rested, just shredded cabbage and a dressing of vinegar, oil, salt, and sugar, takes five minutes and needs to sit long enough to soften anyway. He ate one, went back, made another. He was eating the third when he finally sat down at the table.

"Mom," he said, "this is the best thing you've made in weeks."

My mother called from the other room: "Did he say please?"

"Thank you," Marcus said, still chewing.

We had soft rolls and the coleslaw and the pulled pork and nothing else, because nothing else was necessary. The meat was tender enough that you didn't need to cut it, didn't need to chew it very hard, didn't need anything complicated around it. It was pork and salt and time, and that was more than enough.

What $9.30 can do

That night was dinner for three, and Marcus ate enough for roughly one and a half of us, so call it dinner for four in terms of what we actually consumed. There was about three pounds of meat left after that meal. We had pulled pork sandwiches for lunch the next two days, and on Thursday I made a hash — last of the pork in a skillet with diced potatoes, onion, and a couple eggs cracked in near the end, yolks still loose. That was dinner.

The bone went into the freezer bag. Pork bones make a rich, slightly sweet stock that's particularly good under potato soup. That's a future meal, already in progress, costs nothing.

Full recipe here if you want the exact method: Slow Cooker Pulled Pork.

I do this every time pork shoulder goes below $2 a pound. I buy the largest piece that fits in my slow cooker, put it on before work, and come home to a house that smells like dinner has been happening all day. Which it has. You don't have to be there for it.

That's what the slow cooker is actually for. Not a novelty, not a Sunday project. An appliance that makes the toughest, cheapest cut of meat into something you want to eat standing up at the counter before you've even taken your shoes off.