Hearth Cooking: An Ancient Cooking Technique Revisited

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To cook whole fish on embers, first rub their insides with salt and lightly stuff them with parsley and a little bit of chopped tomato. When the fish are at room temperature, make a flat bed of embers slightly larger than your fish beside the fire and lay the fish on the embers. When it is time to turn them, use a spatula or long-handled barbecue tongs to turn them onto fresh embers. Fish are done when the flesh is flaky. In my experience, the results are invariably delicious — and how many dishes can one cook from a book that is 2,000 years old?

Dense vegetables are best for roasting on embers. Examples include potatoes and eggplants (pierced first with a knife so they won’t explode), onions, sweet and spicy peppers, fennel, carrots and turnips. I usually get vegetables into the embers by just tossing them there. Long-handled barbecue tongs usually work to get vegetables out — eggplants might require the use of the shovel. Counter-intuitively, when food is placed directly on glowing embers it tends to put them out. Thus, as with the fish, when turning vegetables, move them to fresh embers.

When ember-cooked foods are done, for example when onions or beets can be pierced with a fork, remove from the embers, let cool, then peel away what is burned. What remains is always suffused with flavor and may be suitable for an appetizer as is. Or you may want to incorporate the vegetable into another dish, for example, a vinaigrette for sliced beets or roast onions with baked chicken. Ember-roasted eggplants are delicious mashed with garlic, olive oil and salt, and served as a spread.

If you are just roasting a few dense vegetables, you will be able to toss them into the embers right beside the fire, or even amongst the burning logs. But for cooking fish or flat breads, or lots of vegetables, one needs a large flat bed of embers. If working in the fireplace, it is easier to produce a bed of embers that you can spread out beside the fire if you build the fire exactly the way you would a campfire. Build the fire on the floor of the fireplace, ideally on a bed of ash, rather than raised up above the fireplace floor on iron fire dogs or on an iron fire grate. If you use two logs set on the floor of the fireplace in lieu of iron fire dogs, and build a fire on top of them, you will usually have enough embers to spread next to the fire when the first set of hardwood logs have burned down. (This method of managing the fire is actually best for all hearth cooking.) If working on a barbecue, always use mesquite charcoal.

While hearth cooking is not for every day, it can be for special days, and for special ingredients. If your garden produces just enough dried beans for one pot of beans, then make that dish on the hearth. For the romantic, for the lover of good food, for the serious amateur cook, and for the professional chef, hearth cooking offers both a world of sensory pleasure and a laboratory for culinary experimentation.

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