Hearth Cooking: An Ancient Cooking Technique Revisited

Enlarge Image Image Gallery On the hob, a kettle steamed; on the hearth, a cat reposed. — Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend  IAN EVERARD

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We cannot know what dream the cat dreams while sleeping on the hearth in front of a gentle fire. We can only assume that in her obvious quietude that hers is a dream of contentment. Of our own dreams, of our pleasure at looking into flames, at feeling the moist warmth of a wood fire upon our face, there can be no question. Many a love has been kindled under the spell of the fire.

It is difficult to compare hearth cooking with cooking on a modern kitchen stove because the open hearth is so much more than a place to cook. The firelight casts its spell over the room and infuses everything cooked on the hearth with a touch of magic.

Hearth cooking is an ancient and wonderful craft. It is the craft that stands at the center of European cuisine. With few exceptions, all recipes that originated in Europe were first created on an open hearth and only adapted comparatively recently to the modern kitchen. All adaptations involve a shift, however subtle. When translating languages, even when the meaning of the words remains precisely the same, there is an inevitable shift in feeling, a shift in the poetry of sound: ocean, le mer, el mar, il mare. In making the move from the open hearth to the modern kitchen, recipes undergo two shifts: always a shift of poetry and often a shift in flavor.

Richer Flavor from Fire

Compared with the fireplace, the modern kitchen stove and oven, even taken together, are one-dimensional. As you begin to cook on your fireplace, and as you begin to adapt your repertoire from the kitchen stove to the open hearth, you will discover that your fireplace — or campfire or the familiar barbecue — are cooking tools of undreamed potential. When cooking with live fire, most everything can be made to taste better: stronger, deeper, richer, more striking.

If you don’t have a fireplace, or if it’s summer, then what to do? The household fireplace is really nothing more than a campfire that was brought indoors, moved against a wall, and then set under a chimney. Everything you can cook on a fireplace you can cook on a campfire — which means virtually every recipe in any cookbook. When I say campfire, I’m thinking of a fire that is built on the flat ground, not set down inside a pit. A barbecue and fire pit can also be used for hearth cooking, but the best and most flexible options are the traditional fireplace and campfire. That is because they offer the greatest range of access to all aspects of the fire: a level space in front of the fire, space on the embers beside the fire, easy access to the hot ashes that surround the fire, and, of course, the space directly over the fire, which makes it easy to tend.

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