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Other Uses for the Bean Hole
After your bean hole has been cooking something for you all day while you have been fishing or making a side trip, you will probably find it still usefully hot after you take your supper out of it. Or it will not be much trouble to raise its temperature again by burning a little wood in it while you eat. And then your breakfast will also be ready when you get up.
Cook a pot of cereal over the campfire until it thickens, cover it tightly, set it into the hole, close in the heat, build a slow fire on top, and in the morning it will be of the most jellylike texture, the best cereal you ever ate. And if you have wrapped up a thick slice of ham in well buttered paper, and set it on top of the cereal pot the night before, that will be done to a juicy tenderness with all its flavor sealed in.
But don't do the same thing as some tenderfoot campers we know, who had heard about bean hole breakfasts and thought they would try one. They dug the hole, put in the pot of hot cereal according to directions, covered it up and built that slow fire on top. In the morning the cereal was not only raw but stone cold. They had neglected the important matter of first building a fire in the hole, and rediscovered the elementary fact of physics that heat rises but refuses to go down.
This is bean-hole cookery used as an overnight holding oven: a pot of grain goes in hot and comes out at breakfast, with a slice of ham riding on the lid. The technique depends entirely on the pit itself being hot before anything goes in.
- Heat the hole firstThis is the hinge, and the passage ends by making the point for you. A bean hole cooks by radiating stored heat from hot earth, stone and coals; a fire laid on top of a cold pit warms nothing below it. Burn wood down in the pit until the walls are thoroughly heated, rake most of the coals aside, then set the pot in.
- "Cereal" hereIn context the word means a hot whole-grain porridge — steel-cut or rolled oats, cracked wheat, hominy grits or cornmeal mush — since it is cooked over the fire until it thickens. The long, gentle hold is most likely what produces the "jellylike" texture the author praises. Instant or quick oats will turn to paste and are not worth using.
- ProportionsNone are given. For an overnight hold use roughly the package ratio with an extra half cup of water per cup of grain, since a long soak in gentle heat absorbs more liquid than a fifteen-minute boil. Salt the water before it goes in the pit.
- Well buttered paperProbably plain butchers' or wrapping paper, greased so it will not stick or scorch; the text says only "well buttered paper." Parchment still works; heavy foil is easier in a pit and holds the juices better. Wrap it closely so the juices stay with the meat.
- A tight pot and a sealed pitUse a cast-iron Dutch oven with a close lid. The text has you cover the pot tightly, close in the heat and build a slow fire on top rather than burying the pit under earth; either way, the aim is to lose as little heat as possible overnight.
- The ham is the weak pointA slice of cured ham held eight or ten hours in a pit whose temperature is unknown and falling can spend most of that time in the range where bacteria multiply. If you want ham with the porridge, cook it fresh in a skillet in the morning; the pit is reliable for grain and unreliable for meat.
- Yield and timingNo pot size or yield is given. Put the pot in at nightfall and open it at breakfast, roughly eight to ten hours; there is no way to check it partway without losing the heat, so commit to the full night.