Outdoor Ovens: If you can't stand the heat, go al fresco

By Josh Sutton

Tandoors, communal bakehouses, Cob ovens, Hay boxes, Hangi underground ovens from the Pacific, and of course, Barbeques. Josh Sutton has researched the ways humankind has enjoyed cooking in the great outdoors. By focusing on outdoor ovens, meaning those constructed or used outside of the home, as opposed to the average temperamental contraption found in most modern kitchens, we can learn about the people and communities that built and operated them. We know that people naturally gravitate towards a fire, and with a few recipes as well as instructions on how to build ovens, readers will warm to this book. If you can't stand the heat, go al fresco!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Release date: Mar 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9780714524603

Josh Sutton

Josh Sutton is a freelance writer and illustrator with a focus on food and travel. He writes and illustrates a regular column in Camping Magazine and his features have appeared in The Guardian, The Yorkshire Post, Petits Propos Culinaires and a number of other publications including Country Walking Magazine,The Big Issue and Green Parent Magazine. His first book, Guyrope Gourmet, came out in 2014. Food Worth Fighting For came out in 2016.

Book preview

OUTDOOR OVENS

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT, GO AL FRESCO

Josh Sutton

For my father Alan,

builder of barbecues

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

UNDERGROUND

CHAPTER TWO

OVERGROUND

CHAPTER THREE

WANDERING FREE

CHAPTER FOUR

ENOUGH TO FEED AN ARMY

CHAPTER FIVE

RIBS AND POLITICS

CHAPTER SIX

SMOKESTACK LIGHTNING

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ALSO BY JOSH SUTTON

COPYRIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are manifold and go first to Catheryn Kilgarriff, who presented me with the opportunity to write this book, and also to Rebecca Gillieron, whose painstaking editing has helped shape it thus. Brendan King’s proof reading was greatly appreciated also. A lasting debt of gratitude also rests with the following people who gave up their time in answering my frequent and at times naive queries either by phone, email or in person: Alessia and Chris of A Casa di Alessia, Anne Baber, Nick Baines, Samantha Evans, Shauna Guinn, Jutta Mason, Catherine Phipps, Cameron Downs (HPBA) and all the staff at my local library in Otley, for their diligence and enthusiasm in times of austerity.

INTRODUCTION

Old King Louie, the king of the swingers, portrayed in Walt Disney’s 1967 production of Kipling’s Jungle Book, was desperate to learn the secret of fire. He probably still is. Our ability to make fire is what separates us from all other animals. Charles Darwin claimed that, alongside language, the art of making fire was the greatest discovery ever made by man. It is a claim beyond refute. Fire offers light, warmth and protection and has been integral to human ritual, religion and society ever since our hirsute ancestors first learned to craft flame from friction.

But what is it? Fire is a process rather than a substance per se, it occurs as an exothermic chemical reaction between the oxygen in the atmosphere around us and any given fuel source. The useful side effects of that reaction are heat and light. In a nutshell (a highly combustible fuel source itself), fire consists of excited carbon molecules.

In their unconfined state, crackling and dancing around in the open air, those excited molecules can often provide a focus, a centre point for community and kinship. In some communities, fire forms the basis of ritual and ceremony. Across all communities it enables us to cook the food we eat. Just as many of us have spent endless hours gazing into glowing embers or upon flickering flames – often at the end of a convivial evening – anthropologists, historians, sociologists and countless other groups of curious people have devoted whole careers to the study of fire and its civilizing effect on the human race. Among such scholars, there is still a great deal of debate as to when humans or hominids first learned to control fire. For some, the power of ‘man’s red flower’ has been wielded for the past 400,000 years, but for others it dates back as far as 1,400,000 years – a considerable difference. Dutch sociologist, Joop Goudsblom (b. 1932) takes the view that the domestication of fire ought be ranked as the first great ecological transformation brought about by humans. For Goudsblom, it is this event that marks the dawn of civilization rather than the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, which came much later. Once mastered (whichever date you might opt for), the domestication of fire had a profound effect, not only on the people and communities that nurtured and tamed it, but perhaps more significantly on the types of food they ate.

Exposure to fire, or more specifically heat from a fire, causes a number of changes in organic matter. In meat, heat breaks down collagen, the connective tissue between muscle fibres. When applied to most vegetable matter, heat begins to break down the structure of cell walls aiding the release of starch, protein and other nutrients contained within. In both cases, the use of heat renders the food more easily digestible. Humans have evolved to depend upon a cooked diet. Through learning to cook, we as a species have shortened the amount of time we need to chew our food. Never mind the advice ‘chew your food at least 32 times’, which I for one found hard to swallow as a child, consider our nearest neighbours in the animal kingdom: the great apes. Mountain gorillas will spend up to eight hours a day doing little else but masticating. Our molars have shrunk, our digestive tracts have shortened, even the size of the human bite has diminished over time as the need to devour large quantities of raw meat and vegetable matter was usurped by the art of cookery. It’s not just humans who prosper on a cooked diet. According to primatologist Richard Wrangham, domestic animals such as calves, lambs and piglets grow faster when fed on cooked food. Cows produce more milk on a diet of cooked rather than raw seed. Even black vine weevils do best on thoroughly boiled and blended lima beans!¹ One of the arguments supporting the notion that fire has had a civilizing effect on humans is the very fact that by cooking our food, we have more time on our hands. The hours we have saved through no longer having to sit around lethargically digesting raw food have been put to good use, freeing up time for social interaction. It is of note then that a significant form of that social interaction among humans manifests itself as the communal meal, where both the fire and the food are central to the ritual at hand, be it religious or otherwise.

Tending a fire is labour intensive and takes discipline. Tending a fire for culinary purposes more so. Cooking with fire demands a steady, even and often lasting heat, which means that some of that precious time we humans save by eating cooked food must be expended in gathering and preparing fuel. It is in this way that a fire may become a communal affair as groups of people work together to build and maintain a heat source. By its very nature, building a fire invites community and cooperation. Whether people are motivated by the act of community and division of labour or are driven solely by the thought of a tasty reward at the end of the process is a moot point, but it is clear that fire not only changes the nature of our food, it can also change the nature of how we interact with one another.

There is obviously a world of difference in terms of skill sets, experience and equipment needed between cooking a fish on a stick over an open fire, and turning out the perfect steak cooked sous vide. The sophistication of cookery is an ongoing and iterative process; one enabled by man’s mastery over fire itself. This meant that the tools available to the naked chefs of the Neolithic age for example (weren’t they all?), were developed with a greater understanding of the potential of fire. Tips of wooden spears were hardened and made more resilient in the cooler ashes at the edge of a fire, and heat from the same fires was used to bend and shape horn and antler to make more efficient hunting tools. As people learned over time to control flames and direct heat, the degree of heat attainable increased. This opened up options for further improvement and the development of hunting equipment as man entered the Bronze age and later the Iron Age, smelting metal tips for spears and the like. It also arguably marked the onset of man’s (and I do mean men in the majority of cases) obsession with kitchen gadgets. Cooking implements and vessels for the sole purpose of preparing and cooking were folded, fired and forged, and from that came the development of the oven. Ovens may take many differing shapes and sizes, and clearly not all ovens are used for the purpose of cooking. Kilns and furnaces serve an industrial purpose, saunas and sweat lodges are ‘ovens’ with a restorative or cleansing function (both spiritually and physically). Individual ovens may be designed and built for a specific purpose, but all ovens share commonality in that, through the application of heat, they have a transformative effect on their contents – be they clay, metal ore, Scandinavians, or indeed, a well-fattened pig.

This book is solely concerned with ovens built with a culinary purpose in mind. It sets out to investigate and celebrate a whole range of ovens, used and built the world over. By focussing on outdoor ovens, and by that I mean those constructed or used outside of the home, as opposed to the average temperamental contraption found in most modern kitchens, we can learn a little more about the people and communities that build and operate them. Kate Colquhoun, in her fascinating book Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking (2007), describes people of the Bronze Age piling hot coals over an upturned clay pot to form rudimentary ovens. It is a method still very much in use today. Hot coals piled over and around an earthenware or cast iron pot sealed with a lid, form the ‘Dutch oven’ and the Caribbean ‘coal pot’, both discussed in later chapters. With an inquisitive eye on the historical, and a fascination with the social