Pig roast IS NOT pulled pork!!

[RPCookin]

That's one way to do it, Addie, and I'm sure it's delicious. It's just not the only way. One year when I was growing up, we lived on a small farm in Michigan. My mom worked for a small company that had an annual summer company picnic. That summer, they bought a whole pig, from one of our neighbors who raised them, to roast for the party. They buried it in a pit in our backyard and roasted it underground for hours (I'm sure they wrapped it in something but I don't remember). Then they took it out and finished it on a spit over a fire. It was great, with crispy skin and juicy meat.

That's like Hawaiian luau style. When I was in the Army stationed in Colorado Springs, we had a couple of Hawaiian kids in the outfit. We had a unit bash with a truckload of beer (a 2 ton van with 3 spigots on the side of the box and 20 kegs inside). One of those two guys had his mom send a box full of banana leaves from home. They went out to the picnic site about 4 AM with a whole hog, started a hardwood fire in a pit until it was a big pile of coals, wrapped the pig in wet banana leaves, laid it on the coals and buried the whole thing. When that came out of the ground it was fantastic. I don't know how it was seasoned - I was just a dumb kid with no idea what cooking was - but it was good.

 

[Addie]

Watching pigs cooking on TV, I've seen them on spits, split open and roasted over coals split side up and split side down and buried underground. So, sort of like skinning a cat, so to speak, there's more than one way.

Watching that pig turn on the spit, I kept seeing the fat drip off and thought of all the good flavor going right into the fire. It almost gave me a heart attack to watch it. I know the tribe of my grandfather cooks their whole animals like deer and wild pig in the ground. I can't help wonder if it is a skill taught to the Pilgrims also.

 

[GotGarlic]

Prehistoric Europeans cooked whole animals in pits, too.

 

[Chief Longwind Of The North]

I would suspect that the term - firepit came from the practice of making a fire in a pit, then putting in the covered animal and letting it cook.


Seeeeeeya; Chief Longwind of the North

 

[CWS4322]

When I lived in the Midwest, we used to roast pigs in a pit in the ground. We wrapped the pig in wet burlap. Ditto for beef, finished as mentioned earlier. I haven't had any pork or beef that tasty since.