Cooking with Fire

February 17, 2014
Marcoux, the food editor of Edible South Shore magazine, is an expert in the fields of food history and archaeology. Her dual interests meld nicely in this collection, which is as much about creating sources of heat as it is concocting recipes. For those who revel in primitive forms of cookery, there are plenty of adventures to explore, from the simple to the complex. The first chapter, “A Fire and a Stick,” includes instructions on toasting cheese (“impale a cube of cheese upon an implement”), while a section on spit roasting examines how to roast a leg of lamb by dangling it over a fire on a string. And there are well-photographed instructions on not only how to bake naan bread, but also on how to create a Neolithic-era oven that does the baking. Some recipes are irresistibly dangerous. For example, a cocktail called a flip calls for a red-hot poker to be immersed in a glass of rum, beer, and molasses. It’s a drink that would probably come in handy while trying the more time consuming projects such as bean-hole beans, which requires digging a hole, tending a fire within the hole for six hours to create a suitable layer of coals, then burying a pot of beans in the hole to cook for at least half a day.