Here is a simple, intense late-summer dinner you could cook on a pancake griddle set on the grate above a fire pit in someone’s backyard, as if performing a magic trick. The result is a plate of thick, luscious pork with a deep, burnished crust, redolent of garlic and rosemary, and a sunset of soft, smoky peaches nutty with brown butter. Those with powerful venting systems in their kitchens might try to cook the dish indoors, but the threat of the smoke alarm will loom. There is little poetry to that. For this recipe, endeavor to cook outside, under the sky.

The technique is what Francis Mallmann, the aristocratic Latin American chef who is its most refined and stylish practitioner, calls “the uncertain edge of burnt.” It requires patience and keen observation. What you are looking for on the edges of the meat and fruit is color: a deep, dark brown that is almost black — a black without bitter, a burn that is not burned.

Peter Kaminsky, who wrote a tremendous cookbook with Mallmann a few years ago called “Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way,” calls this style of cooking Maillardian, for the early-20th-century chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, who first described the chemical reaction created as the sugars and amino acids on the surface of food combine in the presence of high heat. The reaction creates all sorts of new and delicious flavor profiles that were not previously present. (Science! It is why we prefer charred steak to boiled.) Mallmann’s burned food, Kaminsky says, simply takes the Maillard reaction further than most and creates a welcome dissonance between the crust of the meat and the peaches and their soft, gentle interiors. If Mallmann’s cooking were music, it would be very loud.

It is not grilling, not really. Mallmann cooks this dish on an Argentine chapa, a piece of cast iron on legs set above an open fire. A chapa allows for quick-cooking a thin steak or a smashed-down lamb chop without drying out the meat or scorching it in the direct flames of a roaring fire. Juices are retained. Fats are not lost. You don’t need to find and buy a chapa, of course. Similar results can be achieved with cast-iron pans set above the heat, one for the meat, another for the fruit.