Gastro Obscura’s Summer Cookout columnist Paula Marcoux is a food historian and the author of Cooking With Fire. Throughout the summer, she’ll be sharing recipes and stories from the luminous history of open-fire cooking. Ah, there’s nothing quite like an aromatic loaf of freshly baked bread, still crackling and steaming from the oven. But for archaeologists, that option—so enticing to normal people—might be a second choice to a fragment of bread that has been incinerated with a human corpse, then entombed for a millennium or two. Perhaps that sounds grim,…
