Acknowledgments

A heartfelt thank-you is due to all the folks whose homes were invaded and lives disrupted during the photography for Cooking with Fire: Tim and Joy Csanadi, Eric and Christine Cody, Hannah Whipple and Justin Keegan, Julie and Michael Burrey, Stephen Feeney, Frank and Sally Albani, and Betsey Frawley and Jim Litton. Special thanks also to Brian Taylor and Cherie Mittenthal of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill for letting us photograph the construction of their oven — and the great good sportsmanship of all the workshop participants.

Thanks to Kofi Ingersoll and Erin Koh at Bay End Farm in Buzzards Bay, as well as Tammy and Mike Race, for coming up with beautiful ingredients at clutch moments. Also David Marsh, for catching the world’s best scallops.

Thanks to Mark Atchison, Jack Pitney, Pret Woodburn, Martha Sulya, and especially, George Paré for forged iron cooking gear, and Bruce Frankel of SpitJack for other hearth-cooking equipment and pithy insider information.

I really lucked out the day Carleen Madigan called me out of the blue and introduced me to this book idea. She has been a good-humored and patient collaborator, as well as a champion daub-mixer at oven-building time. I am inutterably grateful to art director Alethea Morrison for her gorgeous and detailed work creating the physical artifact called Cooking with Fire. Joe Keller’s outstanding photography speaks for itself but cannot communicate what a pleasure he and his assistant Jeffrey Stiles were to work with.

Thanks to Julie and Leo Marcoux — in general, for a lifetime of love and support, and in particular, for imparting to me their respective passions for cooking and history.

This book would have been inconceivable without the extraordinary skills, enthusiasm, and creativity of my husband, Pret Woodburn. The process confirmed that there’s almost nothing he can’t build or eat.