North America · Volume 29, Salmon, Cedar and the Acorn World · Cooked by cue
Bentwood Box Clam and Shellfish Bake
Northwest Coast, Tlingit, Haida, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth and Coast Salish territory, Canada and USA
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 216 sources in the brief
As tradition built it
Bentwood Box Clam and Shellfish Bake
Ingredients
No written recipe exists for the bentwood box bake: it is cooked with hot stones by cue, and the chapter gives the method as it is told on the coast.
- clams
- mussels
- prawns
- scallops
- chunks of salmon, cod or halibut
- to cover water
- as available fire-heated rocks
Method
- Fill a cedar bentwood box, a single plank kerfed and steamed until pliable then folded and sewn or pegged at the seam, with water.
- Heat rocks red-hot in an open fire, lift them with tongs or paddles and drop them into the box, swapping in fresh hot rocks as they cool, to bring the water to a sustained boil with no metal pot required.
- Add clams, mussels, prawns, scallops and chunks of salmon, cod or halibut.
- Lay a woven mat over the top to hold in the steam.
Notes
Clam gardens, rock-terraced intertidal beds built and periodically aerated to expand and improve clam habitat, are the reason the shellfish itself was reliably abundant enough to bake this way through the winter months.
This chapter treats exact rock-to-water ratios and timing as unresolved: the broad technique is confirmed across several sources rather than one single, detailed, named-nation account.
What a modern chef changes
The bentwood box's held heat, in a Big Green Egg
Rung 2: Bentwood box and hot-rock stone-boiling
Ingredients
- bed of heated stones
Method
- The genuine mechanism, sustained, controlled boiling heat with periodic fresh thermal input and no metal vessel, is close enough to a bain-marie or a held sous vide bath that this chapter allows itself one honest technical translation.
- Load a Big Green Egg with a deflector plate and a bed of heated stones to reproduce the enclosed, indirect, moisture-trapping environment far better than a conventional oven.
- Load the shellfish in stages by individual cooking time, exactly as the bentwood box method requires.
- Take this as this chapter's own extension of a documented mechanism, not as something a named Northwest Coast chef has been recorded doing with this specific equipment.