You also need to make some tongs for putting the food in and taking it out of the hot coals and ashes. These can easily be made by heating a green willow stick in the ashes until it becomes pliable, then bending it in the center to make a usable tool.

As with most primitive skills, the key is patience. The secret to cooking in the ashes is not to get in a hurry—wait for your coals to turn to white ash, or you will burn your food. It is easy to cook food on flat rocks amidst the ashes, too. You’ve heard of frying eggs on hot pavement? This is the same principle, in fact, the predecessor of frying was parching on flat rocks. Before the Iron Age ushered in more durable devices with handles, a thin batter of acorn mush (like a tortilla) was baked in the ashes on soapstone griddles that had a little hole on one side to accommodate a hook to push it in or pull it out of the fire.

Steam Pit

The Cochise Culture (whom archaeologists believe lived on the North American Continent over 10,000 years ago) used the steaming pit as a method to prepare their foods, which consisted mainly of small game animals, nuts, berries and other seasonal plants. In Hawaii today, you can go to a luau where the main course is cooked in a pit. So the technique has obviously withstood the test of time.

Although it takes a little extra effort to prepare, the results are worth it because the steam in the pit both tenderizes and moisturizes. In my opinion, this is the most foolproof method of cooking for any kind of food, from greens to roots to meat. And it frees you for other tasks.

I have cooked everything from small ground squirrels to a hind quarter of beef in a pit with good success. And there is nothing quite like coming back to camp, exhausted after a day-long hike, uncovering the pit, and enjoying a tender, succulent hot meal without having to go through all the ordinary preliminary hassles. Multiply your delight ten-fold if a rain shower has dampened your spirits and your firewood.

To construct a pit, you will need a digging stick (and soil that can be dug up), some green plants, some large slabs of bark, if they are available, and a pile of fire-proven rocks.

A digging stick is more than just a stick used for digging, but that’s another story. A digging stick is made by beveling a green stick on one end, then fire-hardening it in the ashes to give you a good hard digging edge that can be sharpened.

On the trail I use my digging stick to scoop out the pit. This is a lot of work in an age of efficient tools like shovels, and it is amazing to think that the early Hohokom Culture, who lived in the southwest over 2,000 years ago, dug their entire irrigation system (which was thousands of feet long) with digging sticks. Yet, in some aspects a digging stick is preferable to a shovel, particularly for prying rocks out of the ground.

The size of pit depends on the amount of food you plan to cook in it. It doesn’t have to be extremely deep and it can be used again and again if you are in a stationary campsite, so the effort you expend is not in vain. The pit should be a minimum of two feet deep because you should reserve about one foot of space above and below your food, before the stones are added.

Select enough fire-proven rocks to tile the bottom and sides of the hole, preferably flat ones that don’t take up too much space.

Using hardwoods, build a roaring hot fire inside the pit on top of the rocks to create a good bed of coals. You can also build another small fire close by and place a few stones in it to heat. These rocks will go on top of the fire pit after the food is in place and covered with grass.

Once the fire in the pit burns down and you are sure the rocks are well heated, scrape out the coals as thoroughly as possible to avoid giving your food that yummy, wet-ash flavor. It’s important to work quickly at this stage so the pit doesn’t cool off too much.

Because rocks hot enough to fry eggs will also burn food, line the pit with grass or other green vegetation. Green cattail or bulrush leaves work well, but be sure not to use pine, sumac or other scented plants for this purpose because they will flavor your food. The natural moisture content in the leaves and grasses help create steam (thus the name “steam pit”) that both tenderizes and moistens your food just like a big pressure cooker.

Birds, rabbits and similar-sized game will cook more quickly when cut in pieces. But if you especially want to cook them whole, stuff a couple of smooth, hot rocks inside the body cavity.

Cooking vegetables is tricky business. Many early plant foods were tough and fibrous and were eaten raw, or sometimes roasted in the coals. Unlike the cultivated species, there are few wild plant foods that can go directly on a grill without some prior cooking to moisten them and relax the fibers, yet they are quite palatable when steamed in a pit. Cattail roots are particularly good when cooked in a pit, and when they are collected in the fall, the starch and protein content are about the same as potatoes.

After the food is arranged in the pit, cover it with more grass or leaves, making sure the covering is thick enough to prevent dirt from sifting through to the food. This is a critical step unless there is water nearby to wash off the inevitable grit. Large bark slabs laid over the top layer will also help keep the dirt off the food.

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

Finally, sprinkle on a little water to increase the steam pit effect, then put the hot stones from your second fire on top so heat will radiate from all sides. Cover the entire pit with dirt, and seal any steam vents. Again, use care to prevent dirt from sifting through the covering to the food.

Now go about your business for a few hours; two hours for a small pit, up to four hours for a very large pit. You really can’t cook it too long, but you can get impatient and dig it up too soon, so be sure to allow plenty of time, then add another half hour for good measure—you will be surprised at how long the ground will keep your meal warm.

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.