The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [119]
“I’ll give this meat to Wolf,” Ayla said, looking down at what was left of the wolverine.
“I was wondering what you were going to do with it,” Jondalar said.
“I’ll wrap the hide up now, with the head inside, and make us an evening meal. Maybe tonight I can start scraping the skin,” Ayla said.
“Do you have to start on it tonight?” Jondalar said.
“I’ll need the brains for softening it, and they’ll go bad fast if I don’t start using them soon. This is such beautiful fur, I don’t want to spoil it, especially if it is going to be as cold next winter as Marthona thinks it will.”
They started to leave, but Ayla spied a patch of plants with coarsely toothed heart-shaped leaves growing about three feet tall in the rich, moist soil along the stream they were using for water. “Before we go back to camp, I want to collect some of those stinging nettles,” Ayla said. “They’ll be good to eat tonight.”
“They sting,” Jondalar said.
“Once they are cooked, they don’t sting, and they taste good,” Ayla said.
“I know, but I wonder how people first thought of cooking nettles for food. Why would they even think of eating them?” Jondalar said.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever find out, but I have to find something to pick them with. Some big leaves to cover the hands so the nettles won’t sting me.” She looked around, then noticed a tall, stiff plant with showy thistle-like purple flower heads, and big heart-shaped soft, downy leaves growing from the ground around the stems. “There’s some burdock. Those leaves feel like fine buckskin, they’ll work.”
“These strawberries are delicious,” Zelandoni said. “A perfect ending to a wonderful meal. Thank you, Ayla.”
“I didn’t do much. The roast came from the hind quarters of a red deer that Solaban and Rushemar gave me before we left. I just made a stone oven and roasted it, and cooked up some cattails and greens.”
Zelandoni had watched Ayla dig a hole in the ground with a small shoulder bone that had been shaped and sharpened at one end and used like a trowel. To remove the loose dirt, she transferred it by small shovelfuls onto an old hide; then gathering the ends together, she hauled the hide away. She lined the hole with stones, leaving a space not much bigger than the meat, then built a fire in it until the rocks were hot. From her medicine bag, she took out a pouch and sprinkled some of the contents on the meat; some plants could be both medicinal and flavorful herbs. Then she added some of the tiny rootlets growing out of the wood avens rhizome, which tasted like cloves, along with hyssop and woodruff.
She wrapped the red deer roast in the burdock leaves. Then she covered the hot coals in the bottom of the hole with a layer of dirt so they wouldn’t burn the meat, and dropped the leaf-wrapped roast in the little oven. She piled wet grasses on top and more leaves, and covered it all with more dirt to make it airtight. She topped it with a large, flat stone that she had also heated over a fire, and let the roast cook slowly in the residual heat and its own steam.
“It wasn’t just cooked meat,” Zelandoni insisted. “It was very tender and had a flavor that I wasn’t familiar with, but it tasted very good. Where did you learn to cook like that?”
“From Iza. She was the medicine woman of Brun’s clan, but she knew more than the healing uses of plants; she knew how they tasted,” Ayla said.
“That’s exactly how I felt when I first tasted Ayla’s cooking,” Jondalar said. “The flavors were unfamiliar, but the food was delicious. I’ve gotten accustomed to it now.”
“It was also a smart idea to make those little cooking bags out of the cattail leaves, then putting the nettle greens and the green cattail tops and shoots in them before putting them in the boiling water. It was so easy to pull them out. You didn’t have to fish around