19th century California cattle ranchers threw massive beef barbecue parties that lasted for days and fed hundreds of thousands of guests. At a time before refrigeration allowed for distant shipments of fresh meat, California ranchers raised cattle primarily for their hides and tallow. The meat was a byproduct, and these parties were a way to get rid of all of it in one big, beef blowout.

The Culinary Historians of Southern California recently threw a picnic for their members at the Palomares Adobe in Pomona that recreated the mostly lost art of earth pit cooking. Californios brought this technique from northern Mexico, where it is still practiced today, but in America, it’s a rarity to see people cooking this way. Charles Perry, the Historians’ President and an LA Times food writer, invited me to help tend the fire the night before the picnic.

John Rabe of KPCC covered the event for his weekend radio show, Offramp. Listen to his podcast (RealPlayer format), or my audio file of Charles Perry describing the pit and the cooking process (wav format).

The Palomares Adobe, a historic preservation of a prominent 19th century cattle rancher’s home, built an area for the specific purpose of cooking earth pit barbecue. It’s on the left of this photo. Here, culinary historian Richard Foss makes kindling.

The pit is five feet deep, and lined with steel. We’d eventually fill this hole almost all the way with burning logs.

Over the course of the night, we burned down most of the oak logs in the background.

After five hours, the pit is mostly full of flaming logs, and the red hot steel indicates a temperature near 1100 degrees F.

Meanwhile, the oregano and garlic seasoned beef roasts (top round and shoulder clod) have been double wrapped in cotton sack cloth and burlap, and marinate in vinegar.

We laid down a steel grate on top of the burning logs, and added the meat to the pit. The steel plate, at left, covers the pit and smothers the flames. A layer of earth is placed on top to seal out most of the air. Managing fire temperatures in a hole in the ground is a whole different game than using modern barbecue equipment!

After ten hours of slow cooking over a smoldering bed of oak coals, the beef is ready to serve.

The meat is unswaddled…

… and has cooked so tender that it falls apart with a nudge. There is no smoke ring, but it’s absorbed an almost tannic, oaky, smoke flavor different from any Southern barbecue I’ve eaten.

Slow cooked barbecue isn’t just about the food that ends up on the plate, but all the things that happen when people slow down, tend a fire together, and cook for hours on end. Before webcams and YouTube, strangers sat around fires and entertained each other with great conversation, and I enjoyed this other lost art with the Culinary Historians. Sitting next to an unlikely campfire set a few hundred feet from Pomona’s busy Arrow Highway, we travelled back in time to glimpse how Californians from another era might have socialized and feasted.

See the rest of my Flickr photo set here.