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Field Guide To Primitive Skills
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Articles From February 2008 Week #1 February 2008 Introduction To Primitive Cooking by Tim MacWelch
Whether you are a "Foodie" or not...whether you can even boil water or not...Primitive Cooking does work, and it can be a lot of fun. Just ask the full bellied patrons of our annual Primitive Cooking class. We will now embark on our first installment of a multi article series on the fine art of wild cookery. When you first hear "primitive", your mind may start to judge. Primitive is typically a derogatory word in modern English. It is perceived to mean archaic, bad, old fashioned, obsolete and worst of all...DIRTY! Well yes, there actually will be dirt - and smoke - and ash - and bugs. But there are also big payoffs. Like pure flavor. Just the food and the smoke is what you will taste. You won't taste the metal pan, or the off tasting oil (what is a canola anyway?), or the MSG. All you taste is reality. So with that in mind, our series will begin with cooking basics, a foundation if you will. Here are some rules about dealing with fire and which woods to burn. The next articles will deal with cooking styles. Hope you're as excited as I am. Let's dig in...
Cooking Fires Now go out and spark up a fire (no lighter fluid please, that will ruin the flavor of the smoke) and roast up something on a pointy stick. Wasn't that fun when you were a kid? It still can be fun. We're just getting started. Enjoy the flavor of reality. Tim Week #2 February 2008 Primitive Cooking With Coals by Tim MacWelch
Primitive cooking with coals will be the first technique in this series of
ancient cooking styles. If you want to try the often written about (and often horrible) ashcake - skip the recipes in most books. The results are usually hideous. The traditional ashcake ingredients of flour, leavening powders, salt, gunpowder and other frontier era kitchen spices are usually not very tasty to our modern palates. Just use pancake mix. It's not very old school, but if you have to buy flour from the store to make ashcakes in the woods, you might as well buy some flour that will work! Use the "just add water" kind of mix and stir a little water into 1/2 cup of mix until it resembles bread dough. Pat some dry mix or flour on your hands and pat out your dough flat, like you are trying to make a tiny pizza. Then set it in your bed of coals. It will start to brown on the bottom which is just barely visible at the bottom edge of the cake in about a minute. If you see black you cooked that side too long. Flip the cake over when you see golden brown on the bottom edges, and cook for a minute more. Then pick it out of the fire, blow off the ashes and enjoy. Very good with honey, jam or syrup - but what isn't? You can try some very old school ingredients like acorn flour or cattail starch, but forget about the concepts of cake and bread. You'll most likely be making "crackers" or sugarless "cookies". Prepare yourself for crispy to rock hard textures and you won't be disappointed. Or just buy some pancake mix. Just remember "Anyone Can Cook"
Week #3 February 2008 How To Make Jerky by Tim MacWelch
Almost every class I teach has someone present who asks "Hey, did you read that book about the kid who lived in a bus in the woods in Alaska who starved to death after he shot that moose and then all the meat went rotten?". Then after they catch their breath, they ask "Couldn't he have preserved that meat somehow?". Well, I still haven't read that book, or seen the movie about that book, but I can set you up for success in the age old tradition of making "Jerky". Step 1 Get some fresh meat. It has to be raw! Cooked meat which is then dried out will go bad in a very short time (hours or a few days) and lead to food poisoning. Red meat and fish do very well for jerky making, although anything which used to have a pulse and parents will work with this technique. Salt and spices are optional. Step 2 Cut it thin and across the grain. Slice your pieces less than 1/4 inch thick and cut perpendicular to the grain of the meat. What's a "grain"? The grain is the long bundles of muscle fibers. The grain appears as stripes or lines in the meat. Just cut across these lines, not in the same direction - or the jerky will be tougher than it needs to be. Cut off all fat. The fat will go rancid in the dried meat. Fat must be preserved by rendering, which will be a whole different article. Sprinkle on or rub in salt and /or spices while the meat is still juicy. This is optional, but using salt will create a slightly less hospitable environment for bacteria. And after all, the whole point of jerky is to make the meat less hospitable to bacteria by removing the moisture which the bacteria need to live. Step 3 Dry it out. Hang it on an improvised rack or simply hang it on twigs and branches around camp. It can be dried near a small smoky fire to add smoke flavoring and keep flies away while the meat dries. Depending on the humidity, it may dry in one day or several days. Don't leave it out overnight. It will get damp and the critters will get it. Put it somewhere dry overnight, but not in your hut if you're in bear country. Flip it a few times during the drying process. When it becomes dark and slightly brittle, it is done. Step 4 Store it somewhere dry and safe from pests. Good luck with this one. On the east coast, the driest place may be in your hut up high in the roof somewhere. But food inside your hut in bear country is a bad idea. Just keep it as dry as possible. Check it every few days for mold, worms or other visible life forms. It will be covered with bacteria, which leads us to the next step, safe consumption of dried raw meat. Step 5 Time to eat the jerky. Since we are dealing with dried raw meat that has been sitting around for sometime, food safety should be a strong concern of ours. I always cook the jerky before I eat it to make it as safe as possible. This usually involves toasting it over the fire or pounding it up with a rock and throwing it in a soup or stew. It will never turn back into tiny, tender steaks, but at least it won't be as chewy as that store bought stuff. Be careful, Tim
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