Hearth Cooking: An Ancient Cooking Technique Revisited

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The art of hearth cooking is the art of improvisation. Once you actually start, the naturalness of the process will carry you along. You either already own whatever you need, or you will be able to improvise what you need out of easily acquired parts — such as common red bricks and a small barbecue grill. In my experience, the single most important requirement for the hearth cook is a love of fire and a spirit of culinary adventure. If you’ve got both of those, then hearth cooking is for you.

Approaching the Hearth

What follows are practical instructions for getting started. For more detail on these techniques, and to learn others, I recommend the hearth cooking section of the 2007 edition of Joy of Cooking and my own book, The Magic of Fire.

I start here with the complete vision: an entire meal cooked on the hearth. The most delightful description of such a meal comes from Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, in which a dinner is prepared by Captain Cuttle for Florence while she is sleeping, and while his heart is bursting with a sense of his impotence as her protector. The Captain’s kitchen is a small parlor fire.

The Captain had spread the cloth with great care, and was making some egg-sauce in a little saucepan: basting the fowl from time to time during the process with a strong interest, as it turned and browned on a string before the fire. Having propped Florence up with cushions on the sofa, which was already wheeled into a warm corner for her greater comfort, the Captain pursued his cooking with extraordinary skill, making hot gravy in a second little saucepan, boiling a handful of potatoes in a third, never forgetting the egg-sauce in the first, and making an impartial round of basting and stirring with the most useful of spoons every minute. Besides these cares, the Captain had to keep his eye on a diminutive frying-pan, in which some sausages were hissing and bubbling in a most musical manner; and there was never such a radiant cook as the Captain looked, in the height and heat of these functions: it being impossible to say whether his face or his glazed hat shone the brighter.

Captain Cuttle was not used to cooking such complex meals on his hearth — and his batterie de cuisine was minimal. Dickens emphasizes the small saucepans and diminutive frying pan — a good cue for us. Captain Cuttle’s meal is one every reader can aspire to, either on a fireplace or a campfire. One can use what one has, even if it might not be the most ideal piece of cookware. The food will taste just as good. Hearth cooking, by its nature, is an improvisational dance that fully engages the spirit, especially when one is cooking a meal out of love.

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