Clay Wrapped Cooking
Corotica merrk
ā
Senebelenae na Preachain (Clovis)
Mimir’s Well March 2019
HISTORY
Clay baking is a valid method of cooking food when cooking equipment and implements are non-existent,
scarce, or already in use. Clay cooking can protect meat from overcooking from direct fire, and ash
contamination. Remains of burnt, brittle, irregularly shaped clay is commonly found in British midden pits dating
from the neolithic up to the pre-roman era, and clay-baked cooking is a plausible explanation. Below are two
examples from archeological digs in Britain that discuss remains of cooking in/with clay:
Trethellan Farm, Cornwall, UK (Nowakowski 1991: 57,140), is a Bronze Age settlement where clay shards
were recovered. In house 142, specifically the description strongly suggests the remains of a clay baked meal.
'The most significant feature about this hearth was the amount of burnt clay it produced; the only context
within the entire settlement which produced burnt clay fragments in this quantity. Much of the clay was found
as hard baked amorphous lumps many of which displayed surfaces apparently smoothed and moulded by
hand and through the careful piecing together of some fragments it was discovered that some originally formed
parts of a shallow clay dish ....... also found in pit 3046 similar pieces of clay a deep red in colour. Very friable
pieces of fired clay of which only two pieces join to form the edge of what appears to be the triangular rim of a
larger flat based object.'
At Woolley Barrows, in North Cornwall: “an excavation was undertaken in by E.A.K. Higgenbotham
(Higgenbotham 1976: 10) at a Neolithic longbarrow and a Bronze age round barrow. The excavation of the
longbarrow exposed a large stone area extending up to 9m from the edge of the mound. Resting upon this
stone surface was a small hearth, 0.60m by 0.70m, bounded by siltstone blocks, at the centre of which the soil
had been scorched to a light red colour. On top of this contemporary stone surface were small fragments of
amorphous, slightly burnt and reddened clay. These were suggested by Mr Higgenbotham to be contemporary
with the Neolithic flint in the barrow.’
The food cooked in clay was likely be meat since meat was a large part of the British diet, and that method of
cooking has lasted a millenia, from the paleolithic all the way up to a pre Roman era British diet. Organs and
joints of meat, whole fowl or fish could all be cooked in clay. For the purpose of this paper I will be referring to
the item cooked in clay as some form of meat, although any vegetable or fruit could also be cooked in this
manner.
Clay cooking also shows up in other ancient and contemporary histories in the world. “Beggar's Chicken” or
“Mud Chicken”, is a clay wrapped chicken dish, believed to originate in Hangzhou, in the Zhejiang Province of
China. The dish cannot be traced to a specific time period, but legends of its origins permeates Chinese
culture. The most popular tale concerns a beggar who stole a chicken from a farm. Having no cooking pots or
utensils available, he wrapped the bird in lotus leaves, packed clay around it and cooked it in a fire pit. Another
tale recounts this dish as a favorite of a peasant boy who later became the first Emperor of the Han dynasty
(202 BCE to 220 CE), and that this clay-baked chicken became an imperial specialty.
A variation of clay cooking can be found today in New Zealand, with a native Māori method of cooking called
Hangi, or ‘kai. Food was traditionally wrapped in leaves and placed on hot stones at the bottom of a fire pit
hole. The food is covered with wet cloth and a mound of earth that traps the heat around the food to cook it.