PIT COOKING
We had wanted to try pit cooking for several years but had been constrained by the strict regulations at most sites which forbade us from digging pits, since many places were historic sites this was understandable!
Ryedale Folk Museum allowed us to dig the pits we needed, however. Pit cooking was a prehistoric method of baking meats without an oven, a situation quite common in the Iron and Bronze Ages. Occasionally small ovens are found with roundhouses or in hut compounds, but such finds are rare. The Iron Age family cooked around the fire and were limited by that fact.
Today there are still cultures equally disadvantaged cook their meats in underground pits, on the Hawaiian Islands for example, tourists can attend large banquets where joints of meat are wrapped in leaves as a protective measure, then buried within stone-lined pits that were hot with the ashes of a recent fire, to be cooked within a few hours. The heat from the stones cooks the meat, and the heat is trapped by the covering of soil above the pit. |
We attempted something similar in 2010 with two joints of
pork. The baking had to be planned carefully, how long would it take the joints
to cook? Unknown? How long would it take to dig and prepare the pit? How long
should the fire burn for? All unknown.
We decided to pull out the joints of meat at 2:00pm, after two hours of cooking. That meant the fire in the pit would need to be scraped out to expose the hot stones at 12:00. Working backwards that meant we needed the fire to burn for a good hour, starting at 11:00, and so digging and preparing the pit needed to have been begun by 10:00! |
There was some sharing of tasks, digging, chopping firewood,
collecting a handful of flattish stones from elsewhere on the site. Turf was
lifted and a pit dug, and we lifted the turf off of an adjacent area, this is
where we would scape the hot ashes (and we didn’t want to burn the grass), we
cut a slope from the pit to this ash area.
By 12:00 the fire was all embers and hot white ash, so we used metal tools and wooden boards to scrape away the ashes exposing the hot blackened stones. One of us had coated the joints in bread dough whilst the fire burnt, this dough wasn’t for eating, but protected the meat from ashes and soil.
By 12:00 the fire was all embers and hot white ash, so we used metal tools and wooden boards to scrape away the ashes exposing the hot blackened stones. One of us had coated the joints in bread dough whilst the fire burnt, this dough wasn’t for eating, but protected the meat from ashes and soil.
Once in place the soil from the pit was filled back in and the turf replaced. The ground steamed for two hours. It was interesting to talk to members of the public who had missed the pit digging to explain to them why the ground was steaming! At 2:00 it was time for the digging up of the joints. Now, I knew where the pit was but not exactly where the joints where. My first spade work sliced into a joint and it came out of the ground a doughy, soil encrusted mess. Yak! I was more careful with the second one and lifted it out whole. Cutting it in half I could see the dough and the gap between meat and dough, it looked a little like a pasty!
We tasted the pork and to our great relief it was cooked and it tasted great! The pit cooking experiment had been a great success, and I realised it had been a good idea to cook two joints; I think that’s a lesson we will continue to follow. Always prepare a back-up in case anything goes wrong.
With a communal effort, and packing lots of joints into the pits, we could easily envisage a clan or tribe using this method of cooking during a feast. It certainly wasn’t something the Iron Age housewife was going to do every week! |