An old-fashioned fireplace meant for cooking.
A little light cooking in the fireplace adds a special touch to a cozy winter day spent in the living room, but making a serious meal will prove more demanding. While it is true that back in the days before gas and electric stoves, all cooking was essentially fireplace cooking, that does not mean that the living room fireplace is ready made for that kind of service.
Light Cooking
The easiest things to cook in the fireplace are basic snacks of the type familiar to most anyone who went camping with their family or a Scouts organization. Take a metal skewer, or a stick of green (unseasoned, freshly cut) wood that has been cut into a skewer, and use it to toast marshmallows or broil hot dogs, sausage or little cuts of meat in the fire. This can be done in any fire, requires little in the way of special equipment and is very straightforward.
Proper Cooking Fire
Doing anything more elaborate will first require that there be a proper cooking fire in the fireplace. This is important because the fuel in the fire must burn hot enough and long enough to serve its purpose with a minimum of fiddling and fuss. Constantly having to add more logs, stoke up the fire and burn it back to the stage of having hot coals, for example, will create wildly uneven heat and make proper cooking a nightmare.
Only use properly seasoned (dried) hardwood. Seasoned wood burns hotter and with less smoke than green wood, and hardwood will burn hotter and longer than soft. One pattern for building a cooking fire that will reach a high temperature quickly is to lay two or three logs into the fireplace (depending on how wide it is) so one end is against the back wall and the other is facing out the fireplace. Fill the spaces between them with kindling. Then lay logs across the top to create a second layer in an alternating pattern. This checkerboard of logs will create plenty of space for air to circulate in the fireplace, providing maximum oxygen to the fire.
This fire should be allowed to burn down to hot coals before any cooking begins, and from that point forward the fire should be fed with only enough extra wood to maintain the pile of hot coals during the cooking process. The cooking heat should come entirely or mostly from hot coals, just like on a barbecue grill, and not a roaring flame.
Adapted Campfire Recipes
The simplest way to use a proper bed of hot coals burning away in the fireplace are to adapt some campfire recipes that also use hot coals. A recipe that dates back to the Indians is corn on the cob roasted in the husk. Place unhusked corn (or open the husk, pull out the silk, and then put the husk back together) around the edges of the hot coals. Let it sit there for about 15 minutes, turning it two or three times during the process. The heat will steam the corn using the water in its own husk, quickly cooking up some corn on the cob. A similar thing can be done with baked potatoes: Smear the potatoes with oil or Crisco, wrap them in aluminum foil and lay then around the edges of the hot coals for about one hour, turning them over two or three times during the process.
Grilling and Stewing
More elaborate cooking will require specialized equipment. A range of spitjack and hibachi grills can be used in the fireplace, basically transferring the backyard barbecue into the house. The same recipes one would use for a barbecue are easily transferred to these grills. A serious fireplace chef, however, will want to refit their fireplace with mountings for a grill, roasting spit, and also install an iron hook for hanging a stew pot. This will allow the fireplace to be readily transfered into a grill, roaster, stove, and oven pretty much at will, making it a completely equipped kitchen in and of itself.
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