From Heated Stones to Tabletop Grills: Twelve Ways People Cook Over Fire and Coals

Stone boiling needs no fire under the pot at all: heated rocks are dropped into a water-filled container, and the stones often have to be reheated again and again before the water is hot enough. Archaeology on the Northern Plains dates its first use to about 4,800 years ago.

An earth oven is a pit in the ground that traps heat to bake, smoke or steam food. The earliest known example, found in Central Europe, is dated to 29,000 BC, and archaeologists treat such cooking pits as a sign of human settlement.

Curanto carries the buried oven into a living tradition. On Chiloe, stones are heated in a campfire until red hot, then seafood, potatoes, meats and sausages are laid on them in a pit about half a meter deep and covered with pangue leaves and turf.

Barbecue is the umbrella term for cooking with live fire and smoke. The word traces to barabicu, a Taino and Arawakan term for a wooden frame that held meat over flames, and the style ranges from hours of low smoking in the United States to minutes of fierce grilling elsewhere.

This stop shows how far barbecue has spread. It varies by the meat, the sauces, rubs and marinades, how much smoke matters, and the fuel and equipment used, and it is documented on every inhabited continent from Africa and East Asia to Oceania.

Asado is both a method and a social occasion in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and southern Brazil. A cook called an asador tends the fire and turns the beef, pork, chorizo and morcilla, seasoning with little more than salt and keeping dripping fat off the coals.

Churrasco is the Portuguese and Spanish word for grilled beef and mixed meats. In Brazil it is often cooked on large skewers over charcoal embers, and the restaurants built around it, called churrascarias, bring cuts to the table directly from the skewer in the rodizio style.

Robatayaki means fireside cooking in Japanese. Fishermen in Hokkaido cooked communally around a hearth, and the style spread until more than ten thousand robatayaki restaurants operated across Japan by 1965, with diners seated around a central charcoal grill.

Gui is the Korean family of grilled dishes, and its name comes from the verb gupda, to grill. The meat or fish is cooked tableside over charcoal, then cut into bite-sized pieces and eaten wrapped with rice, fresh greens, sliced garlic and ssamjang sauce.

Yakiniku descends from Korean barbecue. Diners grill bite-sized pieces of beef, offal and vegetables themselves on a gridiron set into the table, then dip them in a tare sauce, and the modern form took shape in Korean-run restaurants in Osaka and Tokyo around 1945.

Shaokao is the Chinese translation of barbecue: heavily spiced meats and vegetables on skewers grilled over an open flame and sold at street stalls and night markets. Lamb skewers, called yangrouchuan, are the best known version.

Mu kratha, meaning pan pork in Thai, closes the path with a shared charcoal pan. Originating in Thailand and known as mookata in several neighboring countries, it has been described as resembling Korean barbecue combined with a Japanese or Chinese hot pot, and it spread through the region as buffet dining grew popular.