44 BULLETIN 139, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



ing. The cooking of green vegetables in a pit oven tends to produce 

 steam which assists in baking, but this is incidental to the process. 



Steam cooking is a very important branch of modern food prepara- 

 tion. The steamer for domestic use differs little from the Malay 

 apparatus. For large uses the engineer has done his part. 



Sunning. — While not requiring any apparatus and only remotely 

 connected with cooking as commonly defined, sunning really accom- 

 plishes some of the purposes of the use of fire. The process is seen 

 in the sun drying of animal and vegetal food for preservation, in which 

 the action of the sun's rays performs other offices than drying the 

 tissues. It is found in modern practice that exposure of fresh fruit 

 in glass jars to the rays of the sun is as efficacious for preserving as 

 the water bath or boihng. 



Cooking by absorbed heat under conditions of good insulation is 

 effected by the fireless cooker. With the adjuncts of heated irons or 

 stones, the resemblance to the pit oven is apparent. The preservation 

 of heat by insulation has long been known, and the efforts to prevent 

 loss by radiation has occupied engineers and inventors and has pro- 

 duced a remarkable series of devices. The classical reference in 

 Juvenal's satires to the custom of the Jews of keeping food warm 

 over the Sabbath in baskets of hay suggests the hay cooker, which 

 preceded the fireless cooker. 



BOILING 



Boiling is accomplished through the indirect application of heat 

 by means of water. It may be described as a tertiary apphcation 

 of heat. We have here again the question of vessels which will not 

 break under the action of fire. This exigency was first relieved by 

 the invention of pottery in the Neolithic. 



They did not boil food in the Homeric Age, but they heated water 

 in a brass kettle, according to Virgil (in lines following 176 in B. 1), 

 who may have introduced a custom of his own times. 



With the introduction and working of metals boihng was much 

 facilitated. There were, however, soapstone vessels in localities 

 where this material was available, as at Santa Barbara, CaUfornia, 

 where many well-preserved specimens of ollas have been taken from 

 ancient sites containing no traces of pottery. Soapstone pots with 

 thick walls from archeological sites in the eastern and southern In- 

 dian areas of the United States always occur with pottery, and it is 

 not certain that they were used for boiling. The Eskimo cook in soap- 

 stone pots of rectangular bowed shape suspended over the lamp. 

 The Bering Strait Eskimo used pottery vessels for cooking food. 



The Carriers (Athapascan) of Stuart Lakes, British Columbia, 

 roasted meat or fish on a wooden spit passed through and stuck in the 



