42 BULLETIN 139^ UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



were roasted and the marrow extracted.^ These methods were du- 

 plicated by the Eskimo of Icy Cape: 



" In boiling, for they had not seen metal kettles, they used those 

 neat birchwood tubes prevailing throughout Canada. Filhng the 

 vessel with water, they cast in red-hot stones until they effected the 

 object of boiling; on this they placed the object and all within 

 a tub so as to prevent the escape of the steam. 



"Their modes of cooking at the period to which I allude were very 

 simple. A salmon, spht and traversed by seven or eight skewers 

 transversely, was again threaded in and out, longitudinally, by a long 

 spit. This, stuck into the ground and inclined over the fire, caused 

 the hot fat from the tail to run down the sides and cleanly and effec- 

 tually roast the whole fish fit for any epicure."^ 



The Dogrib and Slave Indians of Canada practiced stone boiling in 

 baskets of spruce root. '' The Hong Kutchin of Canada cooked by 

 this method, using baskets woven of tamarack roots. ^ 



The Kwakiutl Indians used well-constructed rectangular boxes for 

 stone boiling, and the Tlingit used both baskets and boxes. The 

 coast Salish and Thompson Kiver tribes employed strongly woven 

 baskets. Many of the California tribes cooked acorn mush in bas- 

 kets. The Arikara Indians made water-tight cooking baskets. There 

 is a reference to boiUng with hot stones in calabashes among the 

 Indians of the lower Rio Grande, Texas, mentioned in Naufragios of 

 Cabeza de Vaca.^ The following is a free translation: 



'' They do not have pottery ollas, and to cook that which they wish 

 to eat fill half of a large calabash with water, and in the fire put 

 many stones of the kind that can be best heated in the fire; and 

 when the stones are hot they take them up with tongs of wood and 

 throw them in the water in the calabash that it may boil with the 

 heat contained in the stones; and when the water boils they put in 

 what is to be cooked, and from time to time they put in other heated 

 stones to keep the water boiling to cook what they wish, and so they 

 cook." The Zuni Indians sometimes used the stone boiling method.^ 



One of the Zuni methods was to cook in a pit mush spread between 

 heated stone slabs, giving an interesting variant of the pit oven and 

 stone cooking. 



» Edwin Gilpin. Proc. Nova Scotia Inst., vol. 3, 1871, p. 222. 



» Sir E. Belcher. Works of Art by the Eskimo, Trans. Ethnol. Soc. Lond., new ser., vol. 1, 1861. p. 

 133. 



* Alexander Mackenzie's Journey, 1801, p. 33. 



^ Smithsonian Report, 1866, p. 322. 



"InOviedo. Historia General, p. 008. Bandelier, .\rch.In3t. Papers, .■Vmerican Series 5, Cambridge, 

 1890, p. 59. 



' Frank H. Gushing. Zuni Breadstuff, Indian Notes and Monographs, vol. 8, Museum of the Amer- 

 ican Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, 1920, pp. 254-2o.i. This e.xcellent work describes charmingly 

 the elaborate Zuni cuisine. 



