How did people traditionally making cooking pots in a place with no clay?

So, I recently watched this video:



And it was great; very interesting.  However, I live in a place where the soil is pure sand.

Are there any traditional alternatives to pottery, in a place with no clay?

We still have a few people alive here who learned to cook in the pre-European way.  Not many, but there are also photos in the archives, paintings (emily carr for example), written accounts and oral accounts of how they used to cook on the coast here.  Reading the journals of Captain Cook and some of his shipmates, you can see a lot of accounts of different cooking methods. I can't remember his name, but the ship's doctor's journals go into even more detail than cooks' journals and logs. So it's kind of funny to me to hear the video say that we have to guess how people cooked before.  Some of those ways suggested are way more work and dangerous than we can see from these accounts.

There's very little clay on our Island.  The usual way to cook is to not use a cooking pot.  Roasting, searing, wrapping in moist leaves and putting on top of the coals at the end of the fire for a gentle steam, make a hole in the ground and light the fire, get it nice and hot, then burry the food over top of the fire.  Smoking was another way - make a little hut-like structure to hang fish and other things over a smoking fire was very popular.  But mostly steaming wrapped in leaves was really popular at least in the general area where I live.  

When a pot was required, a basket was woven and depending on the materials available, it could be just bark or it could be different materials and coated with sap on the outside.  Whatever was needed to make it waterproof.  Skins were used in some areas - I think Mongolia still has places that use this.  We have evidence in East Anglia (England) where they used bladders when cooking pots were scarce or the people were too poor - but they learned this from Arab cultures in what is now Spain and the food can be traced back a few more hundred years through the Middle East.  (and forward to the Highland Clearances to eventually become haggis)

But on the coast here, they used mostly baskets (lots of cultures and lots of variation between families) made waterproof in some way.  

There were special cooking stones passed down from mother to daughter - and also used as (the local equivalent of what we would call) dowery and trade items.  These were heated in the fire, then placed in the water in the basket until the water came to a scant boil.  

This method is extremely dangerous as rocks heated in this way can explode.  The people with the skill to find good rocks were highly prised.  The rock not only needed to not explode, but also needed to retain and transfer heat in the desired way.  There was quite a science to it and when one of these rocks were found they were treated as precious.  

Thank you!  That is all very interesting.  And helpful!

You know, now that I think about it, have people ever used big stones with indentations as a type of combination stove / cooking pot?  That seems like it might be a useful idea.  If you had a really large one, you could put uncooked food in the indentation on top, start a fire all along the outside of the big rock, and douse the fire when the food was done (or almost done).

Do you think that would work?

Emily Sorensen wrote:...have people ever used big stones with indentations as a type of combination stove / cooking pot?

Absolutely, they have! Many of the nordic countries have a tradition of carving soapstone into bowls and pots. The making of such fire-capable soapstone vessels also occurred in the eastern US, Canada, Africa, and possibly many other regions steatite/soapstone naturally occurs! These pots have been used by various cultures directly over fires, and have also had hot rocks put into them for indirect cooking -- practice varies by region, time, and probably by the situation/individual.

I was under the impression that wooden or bark bowls were sometimes used. The thing I remembered seeing was that if the bowl was filled with water then it wouldn't catch fire until all the water had evaporated. like in this video...



Some pretty old European cultures made cooking pots and cauldrons from metal. Also most cultures had the ability to trade for pottery if they wanted it.


But not all open fire cooking methods require a pot that holds liquid.

Another thing that I know was done was in some places flat-ish rocks were heated by or in the fire and used as a skillet or plancha.

Salt crusted meat  is also a thing. As is pit roasting or smoking.

The Coastal Salish tribes of Native Americans like to skewer salmon on sticks in a y shape and hot smoke their fish that way. Cedar planking is also not a new cooking technique.

And there's always skewering things on sticks and turning them over the fire.

Emily Sorensen wrote:Thank you!  That is all very interesting.  And helpful!

You know, now that I think about it, have people ever used big stones with indentations as a type of combination stove / cooking pot?  That seems like it might be a useful idea.  If you had a really large one, you could put uncooked food in the indentation on top, start a fire all along the outside of the big rock, and douse the fire when the food was done (or almost done).

Do you think that would work?

I have a stone cooking pot from Korea where they still keep that tradition.   It's incredible at making very specific dishes.  The advantage is it retains heat and can cook a second dish.

The disadvantage is like the cooking stones, the rock needs to be chosen with care or it can explode.   It needs to be heated specifically or risk exploding.   They have thousands of years with this tradition,  so they have perfected it.  But it wasn't a common everyday cooking method.

Using the pot is tricky as it requires so much extra fuel and time to heat the pot before the food starts to heat up. Fuel gathering takes a lot of energy.

Blocks/ chunks/ slabs of salt (particularly Himalayan) are another thing that was (and still is, in some places) used for cooking 'vessels'. I've had salmon baked on Himalayan salt, and it was very flavorful, without being overly salty, as one might think.

Baskets woven from flax, banana, palm leaves, and bull kelp bags are amongst the cooking vessels used in micro/Polynesia, NZ.

Similar to some of the methods mentioned in Raven's post.

Here is an interesting take on the nz use of kelp

https://brunyfirepower.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/cooking-in-kelp-bags-maori-style/

they probably traded for them with others who lived in areas with clay and mastered the skills to make pots.  peoples of the past were not sedentary they roamed around extensively.

Terry Pratchett describes in his books a leather cauldron that would be used in more rural areas of the UK.  The water stops the leather from burning as it boils.   Something like the bladder mentioned above.

I think baskets were used so much in "primitive" societies for so many uses, including cooking, steaming, storing, collecting, etc., they were indispensible and the skill for making them was also extremely necessary. I find it ironic that in "modern" times it became an insult, when people would say "Kids today are wasting their time getting degrees in basketweaving."

There is a hypothesis that pottery began with people smearing clay on baskets to help waterproof them, with fire burning off the basket and hardening the clay. True or not, there is no place habitable by humans that does not contain some kind of fibrous plant material that can be used to make baskets.