Cooking on an open fire: what the old ways know
Fire is not a historical curiosity. The World Health Organization estimates that “around 2.1 billion people worldwide (around a quarter of the global population) cook using open fires or inefficient stoves” today, burning wood, dung, crop waste, kerosene or coal.
It is worth starting there, because it stops this page becoming a campfire romance. The same fact sheet puts the deaths from household air pollution at an estimated 2.9 million in 2021, more than 309,000 of them children under five. Smoke breathed indoors, day after day, is one of the largest causes of death in the world. A fire is a wonderful way to cook outdoors and a terrible one to live with indoors, and nothing below applies under a roof, an awning or a tarp. For why, see carbon monoxide.
With that said: for most of history most people cooked this way, and the cooks who did it well knew things a gas burner lets you forget. Four of them are worth carrying.
Cook on embers, not flames
The first thing every fire cook learns is to wait. Flames are uneven, sooty and gone in minutes. What you cook over is the bed of embers they leave behind, which gives a steady, even heat for an hour or more. The Food Standards Agency’s test for a barbecue is the same test for a fire: the coals
should be glowing red with a grey, powdery surface.
That takes most of an hour from lighting, and it is why fire cooking needs planning that a stove does not. Light it before you start chopping, not when you are hungry. Hardwood makes a better ember bed than softwood, and dry wood matters more than either: see kiln-dried logs.
The oldest bread in Australia’s settler kitchens was baked straight in the embers. In 1827 Peter Cunningham wrote that “the farm-men usually bake their flour into flat cakes, which they call dampers, and cook these in the ashes”. Bread straight in the flames burns outside and stays raw inside. In the embers, it bakes.
Heat from above turns a pot into an oven
A pot sitting on embers is a frying pan with high sides. Put embers on its lid as well and it becomes an oven. That one trick is how bread and puddings get baked with no oven in sight.
Lodge, who make cast iron camp ovens, give the rule of thumb for baking as “a 3:1 ratio of coals on the top and bottom”, roughly even for roasting, and coals underneath only for boiling, stewing and frying. They also say to lift and turn the pot a quarter turn every ten to fifteen minutes, and the lid a quarter turn the other way, so no single hot coal burns a patch.
The pot needs to be made for it: heavy cast iron with a flat lid that holds coals, not a domestic casserole with a domed lid they slide off. See the cast iron casserole for what to look for.
Leave it alone
Fire is hard to adjust. You cannot turn it down by a notch, so the old fire dishes are built to need very little attention once they start.
South Africa’s potjiekos is the clearest case. The Voortrekkers, Tony Jackman writes in the Daily Maverick, “used their three-legged cast iron pots to cook in at the end of the day’s trek”. Meat goes in at the bottom, vegetables above it, potatoes on top, a little liquid at the edge, then the lid, and “you never stirred your potjie during its two to three hours of cooking.” The layers steam in each other’s vapour and each keeps its own texture.
That discipline suits tinned food unusually well. A tinned potato survives a gentle heat for forty minutes and does not survive a spoon.
The bottom of the pot is the prize
A fire is hottest directly underneath, and good fire cooks turned that from a problem into a feature. Nigerian party jollof is made over wood in great pots, and the Centenary Project puts the “hero of the party jollof rice” down to the smoke from the firewood. The toasted rice that sticks to the base, the bottom pot, is prized. The trick is knowing when to give the pot more heat for the last few minutes, and when to take it off before toasting becomes burning.
Where you can light one in Britain
This is where a lot of fire-cooking advice written elsewhere goes wrong for a British reader. The rules differ sharply between England and Scotland.
In England, the Countryside Code says plainly: “do not light fires and only have BBQs where signs say you can”. It adds: “Always put your BBQ out, make sure the ashes are cold and dispose of them responsibly,” and “Call 999 if you see an unattended fire.” In practice, fire cooking in England means a campsite that allows fires, private land with the owner’s permission, or your own garden.
In Scotland, access rights extend to lighting a fire, but conditionally. Scottish Natural Heritage’s guide to the Access Code says: “Wherever possible use a stove rather than light an open fire. If you do wish to light an open fire, keep it small, under control and supervised”, and “never light an open fire during prolonged dry periods or in areas such as forests, woods, farmland, or on peaty ground or near to buildings where damage can be easily caused”. And: “Remove all traces of an open fire before you leave.” Some areas have their own byelaws on top of the Code, so check locally.
Wales and Northern Ireland have their own codes; check them before you go.
Wherever it is allowed, a fire bowl or raised grill keeps the fire off the ground. A folding grill or a charcoal barbecue gives you a bed of embers with far less smoke and fuss than a wood fire, and everything on this page works on one. Have water to hand before you light anything, and do not leave until the ashes are cold.
The recipes
Each of these comes with a one-burner method as well, so they work whether or not you can light a fire tonight.
- Damper: Australian bush bread from the coals
- Firewood jollof rice: with its bottom pot
- Chicken and apricot potjie: layered and never stirred
- Campfire peach cobbler: tinned fruit and coals on the lid
For the other ways to make heat, gas, charcoal and electric, see ways to make heat.