STONE AGE COOKERY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTILTOE."]
SIR,—I have been reading with interest a summary report of a lecture by Miss N. E. Layard, F.S.A., F.L.S., President of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, describing how prehistoric man cooked food by dropping red-hot stones into the cooking water until it had been brought to boiling point. It was at Buckenham Tofts Park that Miss Layard found evidence of the way food was cooked in the Stone or Bronze Age. During inves- tigations in that part of the country she came upon a compact mass of fire-cracked flints and a stratum of heating stones two feet in depth, the quantity suggesting the presence of a communal kitchen: The calcined heating stones, or pot-boilers, were heated on embers and then dropped red-hot into the liquid to bring it to the boil. " I have made the experiment of boiling mutton in a pan of water heated by some of the very stones from the cooking-place at Buckenham Tofts," said Miss Layard. " To keep it on the simmer for twenty-five minutes or more involved the continual relaeating of the stones and replacing them in the vessel. The result was like that described by Lord Avebury when some Eskimos were observed cooking meat by the same process—a mess of soot, dirt, and ashes, with well- baked but discoloured fragments of meat. It was offered to the cat, but I regret to say it was ignominiously refused." Miss Layard added that sho had move success with a cup of milk which was brought to boiling point by the application of two small heaters. To hard-boil an egg took from ten to fifteen minutes.
It will interest Miss Layard and no doubt your numerous other readers to learn that this method of heating water was common in the Highlands up to at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his remarkably interesting book, A Hundred Years in the Highlands, the late Mr. Osgood H. Mackenzie quotes from his uncle's diary a milking-scene, from which I cull the following :— " And now as to the dairy. No finery of china or glass or even coarse earthenware was ever seen in those days; instead of these, there were very many fiat, shallow, wooden dishes and a multitude of churns and casks and kegs, needing great cleans- ing, otherwise the milk would have gone bad. And big boilers being also unknown, how was the disinfecting done, and how was hot water produced? Few modern folk would ever guess. Well, the empty wooden dishes of every shape and size were placed on the stone floor, and after being first rinsed out with cold water and scrubbed with little heather brushes, they were filled up again, and red-hot dornagan (stones as large as a man's fist), chosen from the seashore and thoroughly polished by the waves of centuries, which had been placed by the hundred in a huge glowing furnace of peat, were gripped by long and strong pairs of tongs and dropped into the vessels. Three or four red-hot stones would make the cold water boil instantly right over, and the work was then accomplished."
Inverness.
(Editor. Northern Chronicle),
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