Food Cooked over Dung

[CalMeacham]

I keep running across this, and I find it oddly fascinating.

What brought it up most recently is this passage from Mark Kurlansky’s book Salt (pp. 366-7):

Another specialty of Zigong salt workers was huobianzi. The tough thigh of an old salt well ox was cut by hand in a continuous paper-thin slice by slowly turning the leg…The strips were seasoned with soy sauce and salt, then air-dried and grilled over a low heat from burning ox dung. Today, a gas heater is used, but it is said that huobianzi that is cured over ox dung has “a special frangrace.”

I’ll bet it does.
Cooking over animal dung used to be common. Marvin Harris claims, in his books, that cow dung is one of the many products produced by cows that make them worth preserving (and hence “sacred”) in India – the low, cotinuous heat produced by a dung-fueled fire allows Indians to set a pot meal on a dung fire and let it simmer for a long time (a sort of organic crock-pot) while they work outdoors.

Travellers on the trails of the American West often had no other fuel that buffalo chips (or ox chips).

And there’s Ezekiel 4:12, where the prophet is told to bake barley cakes using human dung. This has frequently been interpreted to mean that the bread contained dung, but it’s pretty clear to me that they’ve misinterpreted the passage, and it means “cooked over dung”. This site says otherwise: http://www.nobeliefs.com/washingtonnews/EzekielBread.htm

(Be sure to read all the way to the bottom, including the footnote), saying, among other things, that

not to mention that it would stink to high “heaven” if you did

…but he obviously hasn’t heard about the charm of huobianzi.

Seriously, I think that necessity has made folks cook food over burning dung in the past, and that it invariably has affected the flavor. But people got over it, got used to it, and, in a Stockholm Syndrome way, even got to like it. We’re insulated from that, because we can afford to use gas heaters to make our huobianzi if we wish (and can use other, more genteel fuels to flavor our food, like hickory or mesquite charcoal), but our ancestors did what they had to.

Any other cases of this sort of cooking?

[CalMeacham]

Article on the efficiency (and practicality) of dung-fired cooking:

http://www.bioenergylists.org/stovesdoc/apro/dung/Aprodung.htm

[MovingTarget]

I can personally say that I have cooked food over “cow chips” while I was camping before. I was with my uncle and he was doing the cooking and such, but it wasn’t really any different than using wood. It does burn slower and at a lower temp than wood though. He put on a pot of beans in the morning and just kinda left it most of the day, adding a few “fuel chips” throughout the day. But hey, I thought the beans were good. Just my two cents.

SN1P3

[wolfman]

I have done the old wilderness trick of lighting dung(exact species unknown) to maintain flame all day until you come back. I never really noticed much of a smell, but they were very small pieces, and not producing much heat.

[Revtim]

@CalMeacham

This has frequently been interpreted to mean that the bread contained dung

“I asked for raisin bread but this is corn bread!”

[lieu]

What, you mean everyone’s dung isn’t reminiscent of mesquite briquettes?

[Harmonious_Discord]

Something in a pot isn’t going to absorb much of the flavors from smoke.

[CalMeacham]

Something in a pot isn’t going to absorb much of the flavors from smoke.

1.) Not everything’s cooked over a pot. Otherwise, there’d be no point in “mesquite grilling”

2.) In some cases, I’d think it’s be offensive if even some of the flavor from the smoke got into the pot.

3.) Unless the pot is covered, I think it’ll still potentially absorb something.

I see from the Internet that cooking over buffalo chips and, later, cow chips, in the oven in your Kanasa or Oklahoma house was a regular thing until the early 20th century. You tried to get well-dried chips. Surprisingly, this method of feeding your fire produces a LOT of ash.

[Harmonious_Discord]

@CalMeacham

1.) Not everything’s cooked over a pot. Otherwise, there’d be no point in “mesquite grilling”

2.) In some cases, I’d think it’s be offensive if even some of the flavor from the smoke got into the pot.

3.) Unless the pot is covered, I think it’ll still potentially absorb something.

I see from the Internet that cooking over buffalo chips and, later, cow chips, in the oven in your Kanasa or Oklahoma house was a regular thing until the early 20th century. You tried to get well-dried chips. Surprisingly, this method of feeding your fire produces a LOT of ash.

Fly ash.

[Tom_Tildrum]

Cruise the lesser cable channels during late-night hours. I’ll bet someone out there has an infomercial on cooking with dung. They’ll probably be hawking something like a Toilet Stove, that facilitates cooking with one’s own dung:

It’s a toilet – and it’s a stove!
Lunch goes away – and dinner’s ready!

Note to self: Trademark “Commodious Cookery”.

[Ca3799]

I just read Caravans by Michener and he had a description of the Kochi’s cooking over dung in the book.

[China_Guy]

Places like Tibet, where there are vast areas with no firewood, use Yak “chips” for fuel. It burns hot and clean, and when dried out has no noticeable odor.

I’ve spent many a meal around a yak dung fueled dinner. Most of that happened out in the nomad lands near the earthquake epicenter (about 200 km away).