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.

“Bathed in beer” ordinarily describes a way to cook bratwurst. According to today’s NY Times travel section story (free registration required), several breweries in Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic offer spa treatments where one soaks in beer baths for healthier skin. Presumably, dilated blood vessels and an elevated pulse spur a wicked beer buzz.

I especially like the beer taps installed tubside. Suddenly, the idea seems less white trashy (well, except for guys who take their toddlers drinking) but sensible, desirable, and obvious in a why-didn’t-I-think-of-that way. But the taps also indicate what’s wrong with America these days. While Austrian engineers were quietly solving the thermodynamic contradiction of chilled beer served from hot tubs, the marketing geniuses at Anheuser-Busch spent millions developing a caffeine, guarana, and ginseng infused beer that nobody asked for. Misguided “innovation,” if you ask me, and another example of European brewers kicking our asses.

Roland Schlager for The New York Times

The Vegemite / Marmite post spawns a new category on You Gonna Eat That? called “Your goods are odd.” These are posts about unusual foods, at least to my sensibilities. They don’t have to have shock value, or be Fear Factor candidates. That’s Eddie Lin’s turf over on Deep End Dining. Check out his very entertaining blog if you haven’t already.

Props to Marlene and Beth for coming up with the name, “your goods are odd.” We’re all hardcore cyclists, which is a mostly male world. For single women, the odds of finding a likeminded guy are good. But while their odds are good, the goods are odd. If you don’t know any bike geeks, this may not make sense. Ladies: substitute “bike geek” with “comics geek” or “music geek” and imagine yourself scoping out all the hot ass at ComicCon or the NAMM convention. Makes sense now?

Diplomacy starts at breakfast. We’d live in a much better world if we could accept other nations’ concepts of breakfast. After chowing down on someone else’s idea of good meal, we could attempt to tackle heavier differences of opinion.

Most Europeans think peanut butter is disgusting. Americans look with suspicion as Brits spread Marmite on their toast, even though we have no idea what it is. The Brits look at Vegemite, the Aussie analog, as a weak substitute for the “real” thing. We sneer across the ocean at each other like we’re smearing excrement on our breakfast, and I gotta say: don’t be hatin’. It’s only a toast spread.

Australia vs. England

An Aussie gave me a tube of Vegemite on my bike tour this past summer. (Thanks, David!) They pack it in convenient tubes so travelling Aussies can spread the love overseas. Of all the Americans David shared this tube with, I was the only one who liked it.

Curiously, we had two Brits on the bike tour. When I asked them if how Marmite was different from Vegemite, they acted as though it was vastly different. Is it? I had to see. I picked up a jar at the local Cost Plus World Market to find out.

They’re both yeast extract pastes made from the spent sludge that settles out during the beer brewing process. Brewer’s yeast is high in vitamin B, so these pastes were marketed as a nutritional flavor supplement in the famished years of the Big Wars. For a traditionally flavor-challenged cuisine like England’s, I’m not surprised this markedly improved palatability. [ed - oh, I’m sorry, I was supposed to be diplomatic]

Texture wise, think brown wallpaper paste. Flavor wise, think really salty brown wallpaper paste. Vegemite isn’t quite as strong, that’s true. It doesn’t leave stinging salty welts on my tongue like Marmite. Vegemite includes malt extract, so it has a rounder, mild malty sweetness that I prefer.

As if to prove that even bad press is good press, the Marmite company has two separate websites for both lovers and haters of its product. There are links to fan websites like the Marmite FAQ, which show photos like this. I’m speaking as an American again, and this is just wrong:

Photo courtesy the Marmite FAQ

The Vegemite website admits that their product took almost 15 years to gain acceptance in Australia. When you’re pitching one brand of dead yeast paste against another, these things take time.

I figure I’ve done my small part for global diplomacy already. First, I introduced Gurlfren to natto, and she loves the stuff. Now, I’ve adopted Vegemite into my breakfast repetoire. Some foreign born person walks the streets of America right now, waiting to try grits for the first time. Don’t screw it up by taking them to Denny’s. Make it with love, butter, and little bit of good cheese, and spread the joy of a uniquely American breakfast food.