Kissed by Flame

Open-hearth cooking enthusiast and author William Rubel shares his passion for embers. He will give a talk and demonstration of open-hearth cooking at Mather Mill in Fort Washington, Pa., Oct. 20.

By: Amy Brummer
   Some people dream of sugarplums, others dream of potatoes. Falling into the latter category, author William Rubel’s night vision inspired a quest that has resulted in his new book, The Magic of Fire (Ten Speed Press, $40).

   In the dream, he was eating baked potatoes with shepherds in the high mountains. They were sitting around a campfire holding potatoes in their hands, but the potato wasn’t hot, which he believed was impossible. Several years later, Mr. Rubel was at a shepherd exhibit at the Musee d’art Populaire in France, and it reminded him of the dream. When he got back, he decided to make a baked potato by throwing it into the fire.
   "I took it out after a while, and it was actually glowing on one side," says Mr. Rubel, who will share some of his favorite recipes at a book signing and demonstration at Mather Mill in Fort Washington, Pa., Oct. 20.
   "I let the embers cool," he says, "and I held it in my hand. It creates an insulating jacket, so I ate the potato out of my hand and the flavor was unbelievable. It was lightly smoked, it was rich, it was warm, it was magical. It was really the experience that hooked me completely into hearth cooking."
   Mr. Rubel began experimenting, trying to find literature on the subject, but had little success. Reading between the lines in his cookbooks, he began to decipher the techniques that had been adapted to suit our modern appliances, bringing dishes back to the hearth. One influential volume, he says, was Paula Wolfert’s book, The Cooking of Southwest France.
   "She has some daube recipes, which are stews," Mr. Rubel says. "Originally these were cooked in a fireplace overnight, then again during the day. She’s giving a modern redaction, doing it in the oven. That was a hint, that this was buried in the embers at nighttime and had a long cooking. So just from those hints in books I was able to derive the technique."
   Field research is another important component to his work. He garners a lot of information from sojourns to Africa and Asia, where people cook over live fires every day.
   "What you especially see are the gestures of working with the fire, working with the embers and working with the ash," he says. "The tools tell you how they need to be used. If you have soup in a pot, or a stew in a pot, that you want to heat by radiant heat, there will be a point were it starts to simmer on the side closest to the fire, and essentially the pot tells you where it needs to be. The fire itself also tells you, but like many crafts, when you just do it the materials will tell you how to perform."
   He is passionate about tools he uses, driven by a lifelong interest in utilitarian folk-art objects from around the globe.
   "I love these objects that were made by an individual," he says. "They were hand forged, they were unique. Someone went to a blacksmith and said, ‘I’d like a spoon for frying eggs,’ and they talked about it and came up with a spoon that suited the purpose. In the modern world, there is almost no place in the U.S. where people are making tools that are being used like that.

"These recipes are all very simple, country recipes," says author William Rubel. "By taking your cooking back to the hearth, you will discover something about the dishes that you can’t learn from the oven."

   "But when you go to Africa, there are and they’re making them out of recycled material. So you have an oil drum that you have cut up and are making into spoons. I have a coffeepot from Eritrea, a gorgeous coffee pot made from Soviet 155 mm artillery shells. They were in a war for a long time so they make coffee pots from artillery shells."
   He admires the craftsmen for their skills and resourcefulness, noting that it takes very little to get started with hearth cooking. "You don’t have to buy special tools, spend $500, $100 or even $50 to get started," he says. "You can make a grill out of two bricks and a barbecue grill. You can take any kitchen pot and put it in the fire."
   It became clear to Mr. Rubel in writing the book that people should not feel hearth cooking was an expense or a burden. The owner of an 18th-century clockwork spit, Mr. Rubel recognized this was an investment most people were not going to make.
   "I was thinking the big weakness in this book is that with spit roasting, it requires a spit," he says. "They’re very expensive, even a modern one. I remembered that I read this thing about cooking on a string but I’d never tried it, so I did, and it is so beautiful and so magical that actually I don’t use my clockwork spit any more."
   Mr. Rubel recommends piercing meat with a skewer and forming a string handle that fits over that skewer.
   "You can lift the meat from the handle, like a handbag," he says. "That handle is attached to a looped string and the food just turns, and sometimes the food will turn for up to 10 minutes without any added energy. The energy is in the string, being released as it is unwinding."
   But not all of his experiments yielded favorable results. When Mr. Rubel conceived the book six years ago, he invited his publisher, Phil Woods, to his home in Santa Cruz, Calif., for an authentic hearth-baked meal. He chose an ancient recipe, perfected by many cultures using the simplest of ingredients. It called for a chicken, freshly caught and killed, feathers intact, to be enveloped in clay and baked in embers.
   After cooking, the clay is cracked open, and if done correctly, the feathers should come right off, producing a succulent, perfectly roasted bird. To make it extra special, he stamped the package with an antique bread mark, creating a lovely terra cotta package.

The exterior of a hearth-roasted pepper, above: raw, left; at 55 seconds, middle; at 3 minutes, right.

Above, the interior of a coal-roasted pepper.

   Unfortunately, he couldn’t get his hands on an undressed bird but figured he would get by without one. This would prove to be disastrous. It turned out that the feathers were what held the clay in place, giving it some structure.
   "I put it in the fire," he says, "and didn’t really know how long it should cook for, and am thinking it will be a while. Well, the clay cracked and we had chicken that could best be described as baked leather. Luckily for me, my publisher is a really generous guy and he said, ‘That’s OK, I like leather.’"
   Mr. Rubel is aware that people might not want to invest that kind of time and energy into making dinner, especially if there is a chance that no one can eat it. But the book offers options that go from a quick grilled fish cooked on a direct flame to a stew left for long, slow simmer.
   "The range of fire cooking is from hotter than hot to cooler than cool," Mr. Rubel says. "You can cook hotter than you do in your own kitchen and much cooler, never exceeding 160 degrees."
   Overall, Mr. Rubel is excited to see changing attitudes about food in America. He feels people are going back to basics, buying food from small farms, farmers markets and asking questions about what they are eating and why, also exploring the organic movement, with its emphasis on whole foods, fresh vegetables, meats and herbs. By marrying these components with the hearth, he intends to help people understand the foundations of food.
   "These recipes are all very simple, country recipes," he says. "They are not complicated."
   Because of this, he believes the only thing standing between making a fire and cooking in one is inertia. By walking readers through recipes and telling them what to expect, he hopes to allay some of their fears. His attitude is that it is just a matter of taking the first step and doing it, just as he did with the potato.
   "The book opens with appetizers that could not be easier," he says. "They require no tools. And you have nothing to fear because the worst thing that could go wrong is that you will lose an onion. You can toss onions right onto the embers next to the fire, and you turn them a few times. The outside becomes totally burned. As soon as you can pierce it with a fork all the way to the center, the onion is done. You peel off the burnt exterior and you have an onion that has a flavor that you cannot identify. If people did not see you do it, they wouldn’t know you cooked it in the fireplace. It is the basis for a very simple salad that is found in medieval cookbooks. I add a bit of olive oil, salt and herbs.
   "There is such pleasure to be derived by cooking in front of the fire and sitting in front of the fire, eating something that you have cooked there. All European and American cooking started in the hearth. By taking your cooking back to the hearth, you will discover something about the dishes that you can’t learn from the oven. You will bring out flavors and textures that you didn’t know existed in the dishes."
William Rubel will give a talk and demonstration of hearth cooking at Mather Mill, one block from Hope Lodge, 553 S. Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington, Pa., Oct. 20, 2-3:30 p.m. Admission costs $10. Reservations recommended. For information, call (215) 757-4397. On the Web: www.williamrubel.com