Some of us well-versed in fairy tales may remember a tale about the soldier who made Stone Soup for a King. Starting with nothing, the soldier proclaimed the plain water “delicious” and asked for just a little bit of onion to accompany it. After that he asked for just a bit of sausage, carrot, cabbage, potato…

And he won the King’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Of course.

Did you know that Hot Stone Soup is actually a ‘thing’, however? Put more emphatically, it was a ‘thing’ for prehistoric people.

The Skin Bowl

Stone Age people did not have metal to make saucepans or ladles, so they improvised. They made a bowl by scraping a depression in the ground, then lining it with animal skins. They would then add cold water and hot rocks.

The Burnt Bowl

Another way of making a bowl was to place embers on a wide piece of solid wood. As they slowly burned down the embers would eat into the underlying wood. When this cooled it could be scraped out by hand or with sticks.

The bowl below is a fortunate depression in a large rock. Prehistoric people would have used large boulders with holes in if they were available!

The Wrong Rocks To Use In Fire

Our Neolithic ancestors would then search for the right rocks.

The wrong rocks are ones with air gaps or water in them. This includes flint and, yes, house bricks! House bricks may explode if put on fire. They have air gaps in them. As the air is heated it expands and forces the brick apart.

As water in rock gaps is heated, it creates steam and causes an explosion. Water can be very powerful!

I have to admit, my father would put bricks in the fire as hot water bottles for us when we went camping. He would wrap a hot brick in a woollen jumper and place it down the bottom of our sleeping bags. Luckily, none of them exploded.

Best not to risk it! Engineering bricks are a better bet, but not failsafe.

The Right Rocks To Use In Fire

The best rocks to use are igneous rocks. These are rocks that were made by fire – usually volcanic. So :

• granite
• basalt
• lava rock

These are all good. Check your local garden centre if you don’t live in a volcanic region!

Personally, I like to use river cobbles. These need to be bone dry. River cobbles were used by the ancient Celts for their sweat lodges. You can get them from rivers, or buy them in a bag from Homebase.

(Sweat lodges, in case you don’t know, involve lots of mother-naked warriors/hippies cramming together in a small dome full of steam. It was a way of getting clean in times past, and singing chants is a big part of connecting with your fellows.)

Avoiding placing a slippery arm on someone else’s privates is another kettle of fish, however!

Using river cobbles in fire

River cobbles are dense, fairly spherical and heat evenly as long as you cover all of the rocks with embers top and bottom.

1.Make a deep bed of embers in your fire, Use wood (just in case any of you were thinking about using coal or charcoal). These burn hotter and there’s more chance the stones will crack.

2. When the flames die down, add roughly 6 medium river cobbles and cover with embers.

3. Leave them for at least 10 minutes.

4. Remove a cobble with BBQ tongs. If it hisses when placed in the soup, it’s ready.

5. Put at least 3 cobbles in the soup at a time. remove when they stop bubbling and hissing. Leave these to dry near, but not on, the fire.

6. Rotate the stones that are in the fire so there is always some that are heating up.

7. Your soup should be cooked in roughly 10-20 minutes if its thinly sliced veg and mushrooms. If you’ve got pieces of burdock root or meat in there, it will take longer – roughly 30 minutes.

Hot Stone Wild Greens Miso Soup Recipe

You need:

1 handful of wild forageable greens per person (wild garlic, hogweed, yarrow, cleavers etc)
Wild mushrooms
3 tbsp Miso paste
4 pints water
Fried garlic/ 1 med fried onion to taste
Salt, pepper or horseradish sauce

You also need some kind of ‘Stone Age’ bowl. Here I’ve used my fruit bowl, which is both very expensive and made of elm. A wooden bowl made of one piece of wood is best. I used my Mum’s wooden salad bowl before when running this course, and it broke as it was made of pieces of wood glued together. Sorry Mum…

(Go the whole hog and make the skin pot if you have skins.)

1. If using dry mushrooms, make sure they are soaked and rehydrated for an hour beforehand.
2.Shred the wild greens and add to several pints of cold water inside the wooden bowl.

3.You may like to cheat and add fried garlic, this is up to you!
4.Stir in the mushrooms and the miso paste.

5. Grate some burdock root or horseradish root and add for a kick and some carbohydrates! You can add fresh beans, peas, fish…but be aware that the smaller the pieces, the faster it will cook.

6. Add hot stones in a cycle until your soup is cooked. Add seasoning.

How to serve your Stone Age Soup

The traditional way to drink this soup is to use straws made from hollow animal bones or hollow stemmed edible plants. Everyone just drinks out of the wooden bowl or skin pot at once. No backwashing allowed!

If this is a bit too extreme post Covid, you are allowed a bowl and metal spoon.

Bon appetit!

xx Hedgewitch Kat xx