Rock Cuisine

We’ve all heard of stoneware, a kind of dense pottery fired at high heat. There’s also such a thing as stone cookware, cooking utensils actually carved out of stone.

The usual material is soapstone. It’s soft and easy to carve when freshly mined, so it might not seem the best thing to cook on, but it was the usual material for frying utensils in the medieval Middle East. Today, metal frying pans have mostly taken over in that part of the world, except in Yemen.

A Yemeni migla doesn’t look much like a frying pan, though. It doesn’t have a handle, so it makes us think of a casserole or an ashtray, depending on its size. There are villages in the northwestern part of the country that specialize in carving miglas, using nothing but adzes and files. The artisans aim to get the stone about a quarter of an inch thick all the way around.

By its nature, the surface of a stone utensil is full of pits and irregularities, so it has to be seasoned like an old-fashioned iron frying pan by being oiled and set over heat for many hours. The oil finally breaks down into a black substance known as polymer that seals all the pores.

The Yemenis claim that food tastes better cooked in one of these blackened ashtray-like things than food cooked in a metal pan. And the amazing part is that the stone stands up to heat quite well. In Yemeni restaurants, cooks casually put miglas on burners amid flames leaping a foot or more in the air.