The Magic of Fire Hearth Cooking One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire

The Magic of Fire Hearth Cooking One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire

Why cook by the hearth when our modern stoves offer such convenience? William Rubel’s remarkable The Magic of Fire provides unexpected answers to the question, not immediately apparent to those interested in pursuing live-fire cooking and the intense flavors it produces. To be sure, the book is definitive in its exploration of open-hearth technique; readers learn everything they need to know about equipment, methods (including ash baking, ember roasting, and hearthside grilling, among others), and even about fire itself (it has various life stages, each best for a particular cooking task). Rubel also provides 100 delicious hearthside recipes for fundamental foods like roasted red peppers, ember-baked fish, pot roasts, and desserts, including bread pudding and baked apples–formulas he conscientiously walks us through.

But the book’s greatest–and most exciting–virtue lies in its presentation of fire cooking not merely as a “hobbyist” project but as a means for understanding cooking itself. It does this by revealing the relationship of fire to the things it cooks; in learning, for example, that a hearthside frittata requires “a moderately mature fire with gentle to moderate flames” to cook while simple toast needs “a new to moderately mature fire with moderate to high flames,” we begin to see just how cooking works. For anyone interested in this everyday but still magical feat, this is thrilling stuff. With over 100 color illustrations of the required fires (whose preparation is thoroughly detailed); a discussion of alternative cooking “venues,” including campsites; and a useful food glossary, this guide, both practical and illuminating, is an unexpected treasure. –Arthur Boehm

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars A One Of A Kind Book.
I volunteer at a Historic Site on weekends. Lately I took training there on hearth cooking, as one of their buildings is a 1840’s era kitchen where all cooking was done in a fireplace. I went searching for recipes for this type of cooking. Although this book is not focused on historic recipes only, it does turn out to be a wealth of information on this method of cooking. The descriptions are very well done, the paintings and sketches are simply wonderful and the recipes will keep a person busy for a very long time. This book would be “the best” I would recommend for anyone wanting to do hearth cooking.

1 Star Better know what you are getting
It is a great looking book, but that’s where everything good about it ends. The book is big and has great animation but it’s not really about cooking. Granted, it has recipes but nothing particular stands out. Also, it skips a fundamental step, FIRE. What is the best way to set it up, best wood to use, how to manage it?

I was disappointed.

5 Stars The magic of this book!
As a cook I like being able to step away from the stove, the variation of cooking with different “media”, the experimentation. I never imagined that I could make anything other than barbeque over an open fire but Rubel’s receipes and instructions are so clear and assuring that I surprise myself with every meal I’ve made. The recipes are outstanding! The paintings by Ian Everard are gorgeous. The actual writings, history and presentation make a beautiful package. In addition to buying a cookbook you are also buying an art book. Leave this one out before dinner for the guests to see.

5 Stars It will make you fall in love with slow food.
The Magic of Fire is that rare coffee-table sized book — it’s the one you are going to use for more than just drooling over the pretty pictures. (Mind you, the pictures are quite droolworthy.) Rubel carefully describes the techniques of hearth cookery, and then provides a number of recipes to practice upon. Tantalizing glimpses of how fire is and has been used around the world add more spice. A must read for anyone who loves traditional foods, or even just the warmth of a good fire. I recently took my copy with me to the mountains, just because I’d have a chance to play with a campfire, something I can’t do at home, and found myself looking at the fire in whole new ways.

5 Stars A Beautiful and Fundamental Book
Cooking in fire and coals wasn’t important to me until I ate in a humble farmhouse kitchen in the mountains of the Veneto a few years ago. The flavors of woodsmoke in the roast squab and the wild-mushroom risotto were magical. They transformed simple, lean ingredients into something amazingly rich, complex, and soul-stirring. I was haunted for months after by the memory of those flavors. Then I had one of the greatest meals of my life at Chez Panisse, which featured flame-broiled rabbit sausages and coal-roasted lamb, which was finshed in the kitchen fireplace in a puff of rosemary smoke. From my vantage in the dining room I watched the utterly simple preparation, an immemorial process, and vowed to learn whatever I could about hearth cooking. In lieu of a grandmother with traditional hearth-cooking skills, I had books, and The Magic of Fire continues to stand out above the others.

This book teaches almost everything I’ve needed to know to cook with fire. It starts with a lucid little essay [TOO little: I would have loved something deeper] on hearth cooking, aptly weaving the poetics of the practice into the pragmatics. It introduces the tools of the craft and provides a quick peek at various hearth-cooking methods. Again, much more detail would have been welcome, but this is a tantalizing glimpse into a craft that can absorb years of practice. There are a couple of pages on the fire itself, and a few coy words on the complications of preparing multicourse meals. Then to the food.

The food: 100 recipes of heartbreaking simplicity and flavor. Have you ever eaten a sweet red pepper roasted to blackness in wood coals? One ingredient, simply transformed, may be the most delicious vegetable you’ll ever eat. Unless you’ve had the great fortune to have eaten a young eggplant prepared the same way. Roasted garlic-sage duck will scent the neighborhood like no lighter-fluid-marinated hamburger patty aver will. And, if you crave an instant return trip to the north Veneto, try the grilled polenta with porcini. It is unaccountably good.

You are unlikely to find such pleasures from such simple preparations anywhere else. A warning: complications, both financial and conjugal, may arrise if your dedication to these hearthside pleasures leeds you to tearing out the patio in preparation for building a dedicated outdoor fireplace and bread oven. But great pleasures are a path of no return.

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