The Ethyl A. Pigg Memorial Cooker

Cooker on Porch
View from the cooking side on the all-season porch.

The Pit

The Ethyl A. Pigg memorial cooker may not look much like a barbecue pit but it provides heat for the house in winter and is ready to smoke cook meat over hardwood coals year round regardless of the weather. Until the energy crisis in the seventies, we always grilled our steaks on a cast iron Sportsman grill in the fireplace (in those days, true barbecue or smoke cooking was just not something that you did at home). Then we stuck wood stoves in the fireplaces and had to start grilling outside. This put severe limitations on when we could enjoy steak cooked over charcoal. When I was designing the house, I wanted to include an indoor cooker of some kind but could find no plans or guidance so I designed a big masonry wood stove with cooking grates. I then tried to convince our housewright and skeptical masons that it would work.

fireplace
The chimney wall of old brick laid in Flemish bond is designed to radiated heat from the two flues. The fire door for the cooker is on the left and the fireplace on the right. The mantle is walnut with full dovetails.
The floor is true random width pine with runs up to 17" wide.

The heater/cooker is basically a see-through fireplace with cast iron doors. The door on the family room side is located just above the hearth for tending the fire and for viewing it from the room. On the porch, the door is higher and provides access to the cooking area. We used two 24" chimney dampers so that the draft could be controlled from either room and the closed damper functions as a smoke shelf. Outside combustion air can also be adjusted from either side.

The firebrick lined interior is 24 1/2" wide and 26" deep to accommodate two 12" x 24" cast iron grates on each of four levels. Brick ledges extend 1" into the firebox to hold the grates and are beveled to allow the grates to pivot up for changing levels. The bottom level is used for the option of elevating a fire and the other levels are for cooking. Centered just below the dampers and 3 1/2' above the floor, a 1 1/4" iron rod provides a place to hang pots or meat.

Finding the right doors proved to be quite a problem! They should be air tight wood stove type doors and at least 16" square for easy access. We wanted an arched top 16" wide single door or 24" wide double door made of cast iron. Locally made steel doors were an option but they would not have been compatible with our early colonial house design. There are still a few foundries around which would pour anything we wanted but we could not locate a pattern. Most of the small foundries have gone out of business and the patterns have been lost. After months of searching, we finally gave up and used single barbecue doors . They are cast iron with an arched top but are only 12" wide. As they are not air tight, they tend to smoke if the upper dampers are closed too tightly. These are minor problems you do not want to smother or smolder a cooking fire and I have gotten 40 pound hams and 20 pound turkeys into the cooker with no problem. I will probably have the proper doors made next year.



cooker


In practice, we start the fire when it starts turning cool in October and keep it going all winter. The thick masonry acts like a thermal flywheel. It absorbs heat and radiates it to the porch and (to a lesser extent) the house. The radiant heat is wonderful and the porch is the best place to be on a cold winter morning. Any time I want to cook, it is simply a matter of regulating the fire - letting it burn down to coals and either adding seasoned smoking wood or pre-burned from the fireplace.

In summer, I light the fire far enough ahead of time to warm the brick some and get coals. If I am really in a hurry I light some charcoal. There is so much mass that the brick absorbs the heat so that the house does not heat up, even with an extended burn.

The fire can be regulated for slow smoke cooking which, as I found out, is an art in itself. The first time I tried to barbecue was for a going-away party for our eldest daughter, Shelley, who had joined the Air Force. Shelley had been responsible for raising our dinner, Ethyl the pig, and everyone had mixed emotions about eating a pig with a name and personality whether they had known Ethyl or not. On the morning of the party, I fired up the cooker with hickory and then discovered that a forty pound shoulder would barely fit through the cooker door. With Ethyl finally in the cooker and the fire adjusted I went about my business for a couple of hours. While I was gone Ethyl started heating up and dripping fat on the hot fire. When I checked on her I was met by a roaring wall of flame as someone yelled "Dan done cremated Ethyl!". I tried to regulate the fire but had too much hot burning wood so during the day I had to extinguish Ethyl several more times. As it turned out, we had the party and the pork was just a little crisp on the outside but delicious. Shelley did take exception to my toasting the pig first though.

Since that first experience, I have learned to keep a low, slow cooking fire off to one side and my cooking has steadily improved. The first time I barbecued chicken, it had been cooking along nicely for about a half hour when I realized that I really did not know when it should be ready. I asked a friend if he knew about the folks on TV who say "we do chicken right". After an affirmative answer, I asked, "Well ---, How long do you reckon they cook it?"

Two years have passed since the cremation of Ethyl. I have become somewhat of a BBQ addict, having read the Jamison's Smoke and Spice and having joined two Barbecue mailing lists and a chat network. I have also chased the Smoke Ring around cyberspace. The Ethyl A. Pigg Memorial Cooker has proven to be a fantastic success and is used almost every day, if only to cook hot dogs for lunch. I believe that brick cooks better than most steel pits because of the mass. I can cook briskets for 17 hours without them getting dry or I can crank up the fire and cook a standing rib roast to rare with a crust. We roast oysters when we can get them and smoke cook fish to perfection. Maybe if I gain weight and grow a beard, I can become a real "pitmaster"!

Dan Gill
Revised 7/13/97

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