Last night, a ten-ton meteor exploded over southwestern Russia, near the Kazakhstan border. More than 900 people were injured, mostly by glass shattered from what experts are saying was either the meteor bursting into flame in the atmosphere or the sonic boom from the space rock breaking the sound barrier. Some might say that this is no time to be thinking of food, but if a flaming chunk of the firmament comes barreling down on you, destroying your area’s power and gas infrastructure, it can’t hurt to know how to survive on the 3,000-degree (possibly) meteoric hand that’s been dealt you. Luckily, there are plenty of tried-and-true ways to cook with nothing but a bunch of hot rocks.
Between the domestication of fire and the invention of stoneware (a kind of dense clay pottery) and metal pots, rocks were the best technology available to humans to cook stuff on a flat surface, for a long time, or with steam. Modern fans of Native American-style stone cooking claim that a good hot rock is better for grilling up a steak than an actual grill, and party-hardy New Englanders revive age-old hot-rock earthen-oven traditions every summer at clambakes on the beach.
Hot rock ovens came in many forms, but the clambake style is one of the most basic: you dig a pit, start a fire, and put a bunch of rocks on top. Once the fire’s mostly burnt out and the rocks are glowing-hot, you spread the ashes around the rocks, cover it with wet seaweed, and then cover the seaweed with whatever you want to bake (clams, corn, lobster, etc.). Add as many layers of seaweed and food as you can fit, cover it with something (hardcore Cape Codders will go for a beer-soaked canvas tarp), and let the hot rocks work their magic. The clambake technique is standard on the Hawaiian islands, where they call the hot rock oven an imu, and on New Zealand, where it’s called a hangi, but traces of similar methods have been found at archaeological sites all over the world.
Native Americans would also just make a bark-lined pit, fill it with water, and then drop hot rocks in to make it boil, or, as described by the shipwrecked explorer Cabeza de Vaca, would cook up a batch of beans in a hollowed-out gourd by popping in a few hot rocks, making the pre-Colombian equivalent of Cup Noodles.
In Japan and Korea today, using rocks as grilling surfaces is still fairly popular. Anyone who’s ever been to a Korean restaurant has probably had dolsot bibimbap-rice plus a bunch of toppings served in a sizzling stone bowl. It’s not quite as common in Japan as it is in Korea, but you can still find ishi-yaki (literally “rock grill”) restaurants, where you’re given raw ingredients and cook them yourself on a big, flat rock at the table.
The area of Russia where the meteor struck last night doesn’t seem to have any recent traditions of hot rock cooking, but now’s as good a time as any to bring it back. Cabbage boils up pretty much the same no matter where the heat’s come from.
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