Reminds me of a comic strip I once saw, featuring two talking dogs who do the cooking over a geyser (I think it was part of a kids' science magazine), plus the 1961 Jules Verne movie "The Mysterious Island"!


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/d...y-cooking.html


First paragraphs:

By PETER KAMINSKY
MARCH 5, 2018

REYKHOLT, Iceland €” Standing in the mud of the Myvatn geyser field in northern Iceland, Kolla Ivarsdottir lifted the lid of her makeshift bread oven. It had been fashioned from the drum of an old washing machine and buried in the geothermally heated earth. All around us mudpots burbled and columns of steam shot skyward, powered by the heat of nascent volcanoes.

Ms. Ivarsdottir, a mother of three who sells her bread in a local crafts market, reached into the oven and retrieved a milk carton full of just-baked lava bread, a sweet, dense rye bread that has been made in the hot earth here for centuries. She cut the still-hot loaf into thick slices. It is best eaten, she said, €œcompletely covered by a slab of cold butter as thick as your hand, and a slice of smoked salmon, just as thick.€� We settled for bread and butter €” still a supernal combination.

€œDo many people cook other things this way?€� I asked, eyeing the natural heat sources all around me.

€œNot much,€� she replied. €œSometimes a goose that a hunter shot, but most often, just the lava bread.€�

I found this surprising in an energy-rich and conservation-minded country that is also a pioneer in modern Nordic cuisine. In this era of slow cookers and sous-vide, wouldnt it be possible, I wondered, to make a whole meal using Icelands natural geothermal ovens?

I did more than wonder: I decided to test my proposition, a quest that led me last summer on a wide-ranging tour of this islands culinary riches...

(snip)



Lenona.

On 2018-03-07 10:42 AM, wrote:
> Reminds me of a comic strip I once saw, featuring two talking dogs
> who do the cooking over a geyser (I think it was part of a kids'
> science magazine), plus the 1961 Jules Verne movie "The Mysterious
> Island"!
>


There are lots of interesting ways to cook. During my student years I
had a summer job in an alloy smelting plant. We used to heat up food by
setting it on the edge of the furnace shields, or sitting on top of
freshly poured metal pans. We had a steady rotation of hot metal. There
were 4 pans, which were about 6 feet square, 8-10 inches thick and 2
feet deep. The molten metal was poured in about 3/4 to the top. Slag
would rise to the top and quickly form a crust. Food needed to be well
wrapped because of all the dust in there. All I ever used it for was to
reheat things, but some of the lifers actually cooked on them.

When working in a canoe tripping camp I learned about planking fish.
Fish would be filleted and nailed to chunks of cedar and then set near
the fire. Cleanup was a breeze. When the fish was cooked you could just
toss the plank into the fire.


>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/d...y-cooking.html
>
>
>
> First paragraphs:
>
> By PETER KAMINSKY MARCH 5, 2018
>
> REYKHOLT, Iceland €” Standing in the mud of the Myvatn geyser field in
> northern Iceland, Kolla Ivarsdottir lifted the lid of her makeshift
> bread oven. It had been fashioned from the drum of an old washing
> machine and buried in the geothermally heated earth. All around us
> mudpots burbled and columns of steam shot skyward, powered by the
> heat of nascent volcanoes.
>
> Ms. Ivarsdottir, a mother of three who sells her bread in a local
> crafts market, reached into the oven and retrieved a milk carton full
> of just-baked lava bread, a sweet, dense rye bread that has been made
> in the hot earth here for centuries. She cut the still-hot loaf into
> thick slices. It is best eaten, she said, €œcompletely covered by a
> slab of cold butter as thick as your hand, and a slice of smoked
> salmon, just as thick.€� We settled for bread and butter €” still a
> supernal combination.
>
> €œDo many people cook other things this way?€� I asked, eyeing the
> natural heat sources all around me.
>
> €œNot much,€� she replied. €œSometimes a goose that a hunter shot, but
> most often, just the lava bread.€�
>
> I found this surprising in an energy-rich and conservation-minded
> country that is also a pioneer in modern Nordic cuisine. In this era
> of slow cookers and sous-vide, wouldnt it be possible, I wondered,
> to make a whole meal using Icelands natural geothermal ovens?
>
> I did more than wonder: I decided to test my proposition, a quest
> that led me last summer on a wide-ranging tour of this islands
> culinary riches...
>
> (snip)
>
>
>
> Lenona.
>

From a 2013 thread, here's what I wrote:

....as a kid, I'd read a book from my grandparents' time or so - Lucy Fitch Perkins' The Cave Twins - and in that book, the children "roast" eggs in the coals of their cave fire. My grandmother let me do this in the fireplace only after we'd wrapped the eggs in foil first, in case of explosions. They came out a bit cracked, but otherwise, much like boiled eggs. It was one of those sentimental adventures.

8/20/13
And in the late Ruth Chew's children's book about two runaways - The Secret Summer, a.k.a. Baked Beans for Breakfast, the kids get the flattest big stone they can find, put it in the fire for a while then take it out, and then (IIRC) they take a slice of bread with a large hole, place it on the stone, crack an egg into the hole, and both the bread and the egg get well-cooked.

Lenona.

P.S. You can read "The Cave Twins" here, with illustrations! The scene with the eggs is in the first chapter - but what's more interesting, IMO, is what foods the grandmother imagines the twins have brought her when they ask her to guess. (That happens right after the picture of the three of them standing by the fire.) In the next chapter, it's explained how you can boil water without a clay or metal pot - to cook bison meat!

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2842...-h/28425-h.htm

My copy looks like this, except it's deep red:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1916-The-Ca...-/372019173295