A word of wisdom here: in the process of deciding where to build your fire, consider positioning it against a boulder or sandy bank whenever possible. The smoke is then pulled into the partial vacuum created by the nearby object, and it won’t follow you around as you cook.
A single round fire is generally not convenient for cooking. It’s better to arrange a number of small cooking areas in a long trench fire. These can be broken apart for broiling, or the coals raked into several beds, just as you use different burners on your modern range at home. A trench fire is particularly good for skewering or cooking small game on a spit, grilling, or shishkabob-style cooking, or when you want to build a good bed of coals for ash cooking that will keep its heat for a long time.
Begin by digging or scraping a trench about six inches wide, six inches deep, and about two or three feet long. If the length of the trench runs the same direction that the wind blows it will assure a good draft. Bank the trench with standing rocks on both sides, leaving the ends open to take advantage of the draft.
The most important consideration when cooking on, near, over or in rocks is that they must be “fire-proven” (thoroughly dried near the fire for a couple of days) or they may explode when the heat creates steam that expands. Exploding rocks can be extremely dangerous. I speak from experience. Once you have “proven” a few rocks, protect them from dampness and rain so you can use them over again.
Now for the fire. On a dry, flat spot lay a tinder bundle made from dry grass, the dry inner bark of cottonwood, sage, cedar, or birch. Then build a small tepee over it from dry twigs. Over this lean a few larger sticks in tepee fashion so that ample oxygen reaches all parts of the lay. Have your supply of hardwood handy to add when the fire gets going.
If you know how, preserve the ambience of the event by igniting your fire with the coal from a primitive firemaking technique. If not, use one match to light your fire—even if you have more. The skill it takes for onematch firemaking may someday mean the difference between a warmly comfortable camp and a chilly, miserable one.
You may have noticed the way a piece of charcoal turns gray on the outside as it burns. The charcoal is actually turning to ash, and that ash has a purpose—it helps the coal continue to burn by covering it with a screen that lets just enough air through to allow the coal to stay alive. When the ashes are knocked off the coal, it burns red hot, and quickly burns itself out. A fire banked with ashes holds glowing coals for many hours, making it easy to control the heat or rekindle the flame when you want to; ideal conditions for spit cooking.
By the way, you can preserve charcoal for future use by removing the blackened hardwood, dousing it with water, then drying it, or just covering the wood with sand until the fire is out. These charred pieces of wood can be added to your fire just as you would add commercial charcoal briquettes. It’s nice to have a small stash of “wilderness charcoal” in a dry cache in the event you come back to camp in a rainstorm and find your firewood. soaked.
Skewering
Assuming you have something to cook, nature has kindly provided the means to fix most foods.
The most obvious cooking method of early people was to simply skewer food on a stick over an open fire. You can cook anything this way, from a whole fish to a wild-game shishkabob to dough wound snake-like (or a snake wound dough-like) around a green stick.
When you cook chunks of meat on a skewer, first sear the skewer quickly over the flames, then plant it in the ground near the fire and leave it alone for about ten minutes.
To skewer a whole small fish on a stick, secure it with a small green spike so it won’t fall off, then place the skewered fish, head down, into the center of the coals. By placing the head down you prevent the rest of the fish from burning as the heat rises. Cook it just until the eyes turn white since overcooked fish tends to be dry.
Naturally, you shouldn’t use sticks from poisonous plants like poison ivy, poison oak, dogbane or poisonous hemlock.
Spit Cooking
It most likely became a chore for our ancestors to keep turning sticks near the fire for long periods, (although it probably kept the kids out of trouble), so they eventually built a spit that would accommodate whole birds, or a hind leg of mammoth, and could simply be turned from time to time while they went about doing other important business.
The simplest kind of spit is made of green wood, with two forked limbs at the top and several outcropping branches, planted securely in the ground, and a crosspiece on which the meat is impaled.
The problem with spit cooking is that as the food cooks it slides to the lowest balance point, so if you use this method, a couple of things are important to remember: first, skewer the meat through the center and secure it with additional green spikes; second, tie it with cordage so it won’t rotate until you want it to.
Once at a Woodsmoke primitive skills conference we barbecued a whole goat on a spit. This required about six hours of slow cooking, so the spit was situated well above the ground to prevent the meat from burning. The height of the spit can easily be adjusted by raising or lowering the crosspiece as needed. The distance between the food and the fire dictates the length of time necessary to cook the meat.
You can also make a “gypsy” spit by constructing a four-pronged tripod over a small pit. Then build a fire in the pit and let it burn down to a good bed of coals. Tie a chunk of meat tightly with cordage and suspend it from the fork in the tripod about twenty-four inches above the fire. Double-twist the cordage so it winds and unwinds, slowly turning the meat over the coals. (A little wild sage rubbed into the meat adds a nice flavor.) If your fire is too hot, or flames threaten to burn your food, simply cover the burning wood with ashes.
It is important to cook meat slowly and evenly. More game meat is ruined by overcooking than by any other misadventure because the cook has the idea that, 1) an abundance of heat is the way to assure tenderness, and 2) high temperatures burn away wild flavor.
I suppose I can reasonably say that we have developed taste prejudices against wild meat over the centuries—there is nothing at McDonalds that even mildly resembles venison—yet wild meat is actually more healthy than meat bred for the table. The fact is, game species average only 4.3% fat, compared to 25-35% in supermarket meat. The fat of game meat also tends to be much less saturated, which translates to less harmful.
Fortunately, these prejudices work themselves out with time as foods begin to assume a familiar taste, but one way to eliminate most of the wild taste in game animals is to remove as much of the fat as possible, since fat carries much of the game’s flavor.
Grilling
Grilling, with the heat directly below the food, is a common technique associated with outdoor cooking. Theoretically there is very little difference between grilling and broiling, though the latter is usually done indoors in an oven, the heat coming from above the food. Grilling is dryheat cooking. Compared with a steam pit (cooking with moist heat, a method that will eventually tenderize tough cuts of meat), prolonged grilling will only toughen meat and dry it out—so precise timing is important if you expect to turn out a meal you can eat.
I generally devise a grill, or grate, by weaving a number of green willow stems to form a lattice that can be suspended over low heat coals. It takes a little more time, but you may want to add a second lattice of branches with leaves attached over the grate to prevent moisture from escaping as the food cooks. Again, the trench fire is best for this kind of cooking.