Primitive Skills and Crafts: An Outdoorsman's Guide to Shelters, Tools, Weapons, Tracking, Survival, and More by Richard Jamison;Linda Jamison

Author:Richard Jamison;Linda Jamison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 1602391483
Published: 2008-09-13T23:52:00+00:00

Ash cooking was probably the first method known to humans. The residue is easily blown off once the food is cooked. (Photo: Richard Jamison)

The weather will affect the time; cold weather requires a little longer cooking time. In exceptionally cold or damp weather you can create more heat by building another fire on top of the covered pit.

Boiling

A cooking pot, more likely than not, was used by primitives along with any other reasonable method of boiling food. I'm not talking about making a molded clay vessel, but rather a container into which hot stones can be dropped to raise the temperature of the liquid enough to cook food. It can be clay, or rawhide, or even a tightly woven basket. But clay is most likely to be available in a pinch.

One way to accomplish this is to dig a hole in the earth, line it with clay and build a fire in it to harden the pot. Once the clay is fire-hardened and cool, you can pick it up and dump out the ashes. Or, you can wait until the clay is dry, carefully remove it from the hole and `fire' it over a very hot fire. I have made several large cooking pots this way in a day or two, whereas molded pottery takes much longer to construct.

Raw skins can be used to boil food by digging a depression in the ground, staking the edge of the hide to the rim of the hole, filling it with water and using hot rocks to bring the liquid to a boil. Rawhide cooking bags can also be suspended over hot coals via a tripod in the traditional native American way.

As the stones cool, remove them with tongs or forked sticks and add new ones. It takes six or seven hot rocks to start the water boiling in approximately ten minutes, then a couple every five or ten minutes to keep it going. Don't put wet stones back into the fire, as they will explode.

The disadvantage to the clay pot cooking technique is that it is so timeconsuming, more so than the pit when you consider the time it takes for the pots to dry before firing. The advantage-a hot stock pot. A ladle and spoon can easily be carved from wood, as can a bowl.

Whether you are in a survival situation or just out for enjoyment, cooking can be far more enjoyable when there are no pots and pans to scrub. And, regardless of the method you choose, I hope you find as much satisfaction in doing things the old way as I do.

If, for some reason, we decide to abandon the hectic, "good life" of our modern age and start living the real life, we will have to learn new ways to perform old tasks, like cooking. And the "new" ways would, ironically, really be the old ways of our ancient ancestors.

Tamara Wilder and Steven Edholm

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