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Cheese May Be
SUBSTITUTED FOR MEAT ADD I CAN TOMATOES OR BOTTLE OF CATSUP IF DESIRED (NAVY, LIMA, OR KIDNEY BEANS MAY BE USED) Holes in the Ground, in fact, are very popular with Robinson Crusoe cooks. James Wilder, who wrote Jack- Knife Cookery, is very fond of Plug Hat Holes, by which he means holes just about the size of a silk hat. Line the hole with stones, build a fire in it, and keep the fire going until the stones are heated through. Wrap your food in leaves, lay it on the hot rocks, cover with more leaves, branches, seaweed, canvas or wet burlap. Shovel back the dirt. Be sure that there is no hole from which steam is escaping-and let her cook! Try a little one first, and work up to more ambitious achievements. Whole meals can be cooked in one hole. It takes some practice to know how long to allow different foods to cook, but the chief thing to remember is to give them plenty of time. Your hole will stay hot for twelve or eighteen hours. Allow from two to four hours for cooking most foods. Don't be impatient. Go for a hike or a swim and your dinner will be ready for you when you get back.
This is pit cooking — the ancestor of the New England clambake and the Hawaiian imu — written for campers with a shovel and an afternoon to spare. The technique still works, but a few of the assumptions behind it need updating.
- A "plug hat" holeA plug hat is a silk top hat, so the author means a pit roughly the size of one: about a foot across if you go by the brim, and no deeper than that. The recipe gives no measurements, so treat any figure as an estimate. That is the right scale for a first attempt: one chicken, or a few foil packets of vegetables.
- Choose the stones carefullyUse dry, dense field stone or granite cobbles. Porous rock and anything pulled from a streambed holds trapped water and can crack sharply or burst when it heats. Discard any stone that shows a fracture line after the fire burns down.
- Heat the pit properlyTwo to three hours of hard fire is not excessive. Rake out the coals and embers, or bury them under a layer of sand, before food goes in; food resting directly on live coals scorches while the pit as a whole is still only warm.
- Leaves and greeneryThe leaves are there to make steam and keep dirt out. Use grape, banana, corn husk, or damp seaweed. Avoid oleander, yew, and anything you cannot identify, and skip conifer boughs against the food itself — the resin carries into it.
- Wet burlap, not plasticCanvas and soaked burlap are still the right covering. Do not substitute a plastic tarp or garbage bag as the sealing layer; it melts onto the food. If you want a moisture barrier, heavy foil goes next to the food and the burlap over it.
- Timing and temperatureTwo to four hours is a fair estimate for vegetables, whole fish, and small birds, and a large joint or a whole bird may want longer. The advice to "give them plenty of time" is sound, but check meat and poultry with an instant-read thermometer when you open the pit rather than judging by the clock — a pit that lost heat through an unnoticed vent can leave the centre well short of done.
- Opening the pitOnly once. Every excavation dumps heat and dirt, so if the food is underdone you have lost most of the pit's remaining energy. Plan to overshoot rather than to check.
- The bean dishThe surviving lines are fragmentary: they allow navy, lima, or kidney beans, with a can of tomatoes or a bottle of catsup added if desired, and something — the page title suggests cheese — substituted for meat. Dried kidney beans must be boiled hard for at least ten minutes before any slow cooking; canned beans are already safe.