Step into the ancient kitchen of humanity with How Would You Like Your Mammoth?—a journey back to when grilling mammoth was just a Tuesday night cookout. In this sneak peek from the book, we’re transported to the era of the Clovis folks, the OG hunters who knew a thing or two about bagging mammoths. Picture it: chilling on a hill, waiting for mammoths to swing by for a drink, armed with spear tips sharper than your wit. When the mammoths arrive, it’s game time—spears fly, mammoths drop, and the feast begins. But how did they cook those beasts? Join us as we dig into the juicy details of mammoth cuisine, from the sizzle of the grill to the aroma of slow-cooked mammoth stew. As the fire crackles and stories flow, we can’t help but wonder: what did a bite of grilled mammoth taste like to our ancient ancestors?
A kitchen requires two things: a heat source and tools for chopping and preparing food. But to cook a meal, you also need someone to acquire the ingredients. The astonishing success with which human beings developed is all thanks to a seemingly simple concept: cooking.
Humans were once unremarkable moochers who cowered behind bushes, hearts racing, while a pair of wild saber-tooth tigers tore a bison to shreds, and hyenas demolished the scraps. Only when the animals were finished would they scurry over to the well-gnawed bones and break them open with an axe in order to slurp out the marrow. (Cracking open bones and scraping out their contents might seem a little rough and archaic, but you can still find beautifully engraved silver marrow spoons, once ubiquitous in genteel Victorian manor houses, in numerous well-stocked antique shops; long and slim, they are perfect for reaching into the nooks and crannies of any bone.) And yet, it was these less than auspicious creatures who managed to cook their way to the top of the food chain. It’s important to add that bone marrow is unusually high in protein, supporting the proper growth of the human brain. These growing mental capacities enabled humans to devise increasingly complex tools and ultimately led them to the idea of taming fire. And, voilà—a few hundred thousand years passed, and human beings were now capable of cooking, stewing, roasting, and smoking meat and vegetables, which, when raw, were hard to digest, less pleasant to eat, and sometimes even poisonous. (The concept of smoking foods may well have emerged after humans torched some forest or other and then gathered up the carcasses of a few animals boasting a particularly intense smoked flavor.)
And then, around twenty thousand years ago, the last Ice Age caused the sea in the region that would one day be known as the Bering Strait to freeze over so solidly that an adventurous set of human beings were able to cross it to reach the American continent. These people developed into extremely successful hunters, and it was likely their cavalier love of meat that drove the mammoth, the elk moose, and the ground moose to extinction. Their culture was given its name from the first location where their stone spear tips were found: Clovis, in modern-day New Mexico.
As well as the sheer physical necessity of eating, food has also always carried a social dimension, the core of which has changed from one era to the next. Sometimes, togetherness was paramount when people gathered around a table, while sometimes the food that was presented signified a person’s social hierarchy. In some periods, the focus was all on the moment when the food was served, while another generation might suddenly take an interest chiefly in cooking for all those lovely little moments— sizzling melted butter, a steaming sauce boiling over, or basting a roast. The culinary minds of our Clovis big-game hunters may have revolved around a stage that comes somewhat earlier in the process, namely tracking and bringing down the animal itself.
Hunting a mammoth required planning, knowledge of the surrounding area, and plenty of patience. The Clovis hunters would typically seek out a hill by a river or water source where they had a good view and wait for a herd of mammoths to come to drink. While they waited, they would often occupy themselves by producing more lethal flint spear tips. These spear tips were relatively small, elongated, and razor sharp, with grooved bases. To pass the time, some of them would also scratch a decorative geometric pattern or a pretty flower onto a pebble.
The spear tips would be attached to light throwing spears and hurled at the first unlucky mammoths that appeared. The spear tips’ grooves were a particularly advantageous feature because they immediately caused heavy bleeding in any animal, no matter where they struck. This meant that the hunter did not need to be a particularly brilliant shot; he would simply have to wait nearby until the mammoth grew so woozy from blood loss that he could get close enough to finish it off. The hunters would then cut up the colossal creatures at the kill site and carry them away, while the river ran a flaming red.
We can’t say how the meat was ultimately prepared, or whether there were prized, delectable cuts—for instance, braised mammoth shoulder on a bed of wild herbs and fruits. How a mammoth of this kind tasted is another lost secret. For decades, a certain New York men’s club claimed its members had dined on a piece of mammoth flesh, preserved in Arctic ice, in 1951, until unfortunately, subsequent DNA analysis proved that the diners at this Ice Age feast had merely eaten green sea turtle.
We can assume, however, that mammoth meat is rather tough, requiring long cooking. Perhaps it was a familiar evening scene for the Clovis people to sit around the fire, working away on their latest garments of mammoth hide and chatting about their day, accompanied by the wafting scent of slow-cooked mammoth, which soon got bellies rumbling. Until, eventually, someone asked the age-old question: Is dinner ready yet?