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Cooking hoe cakes on an open fire

An open fire is the oldest means of cooking! Here, reenactors make hoe cakes -- small corn cakes small enough to be baked on the back of a farmer's hoe, as they originally were.

Duration: 
1:52
Transcript: 

Video Transcript

Woman (00:09)
After building our fire, we're going to let the wood burn down to these hot white ashes. With these hot white ashes, we're then going to lay bricks on top of the ashes. The bricks will heat up so we can cook some hoe cakes out here.
Woman (00:29)
So you take your spoon and just drop it. Just like this.
Boy (00:33)
Okay, just anywhere?
Woman (00:34)
Yeah.
Woman (00:40)
We're pouring the grease from cooking our ham, we cooked our ham in this pan, I'm pouring the grease left over from that into this pan here so we can fry our hoe cakes up.
Girl (00:54)
I'm moving the hot white coals up toward the pan to keep it hotter and to make the hoe cakes cook faster.
Woman (01:20)
Very good.
Man (01:23)
A lot crispier than **. They taste like pancakes.
Boy (01:25)
Mm hm.
Woman (01:27)
After we're done making our hoe cakes, we have to clear out the fire by removing all of the bricks and then we have to let all the fire smolder out to prevent fires from around the house. Now we've just got to let these coals cool so that we can put the fire out safely.
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