Ten lbs. bacon, half a ham, 4 cans corned beef, 2 lbs. cheese, 3 lbs.
lard, 8 cans condensed milk, 8 lbs. hard tack, 10 packages soda
crackers, 6 packages sweet crackers, 12½ lbs. of wheat flour,
12½ lbs. of yellow cornmeal, can baking powder, ½ bushel
potatoes, 1 peck onions, 3 lbs. ground coffee, ½ lb. tea, sack salt,
7 lbs. granulated sugar, 3 packages prepared griddle cake flour, 4
packages assorted cereals, including oatmeal, 4 lbs. rice, dried
fruits, canned corn, peas, beans, canned baked beans, salmon,
tomatoes, sweetmeats and whatever else you like.
Be sure to take along plenty of tin boxes or tight wooden boxes to
keep rain and vermin away from the food. Tell your grocer to pack the
stuff for a camping trip and to put the perishable things in tight
boxes as far as possible.
If you are going to move camp, have some waterproof bags for the
flour. If you can carry eggs and butter, so much the better. A tin
cracker box buried in the mud along some cold brook or spring makes an
excellent camper’s refrigerator especially if it is in the shade.
Never leave the food exposed around camp. As soon as the cook is
through with it let some one put it away in its proper place where the
flies, ants, birds, sun, dust, and rain cannot get at it.
Always examine food before you cook it. Take nothing for granted. Once
when camping the camp cook for breakfast made a huge pot of a certain
brand of breakfast food. We were all tucking it away as only hungry
boys can, when some one complained that caterpillars were dropping
from the tree into his bowl. We shifted our seats—and ate some more,
and then made the astonishing discovery that the breakfast food was
full of worms. We looked at the package and found that the grocers had
palmed off some stale goods on us and that the box was fairly alive.
We all enjoy the recollection of it more than we did the actual
experience.
It is impossible in a book of this kind to say very much about how to
cook. That subject alone has filled some very large books. We can
learn some things at home provided that we can duplicate the
conditions in the woods. So many home recipes contain eggs, milk and
butter that they are not much use when we have none of the three.
There is a book in my library entitled “One Hundred Ways to Cook Eggs”
but it would not do a boy much good in the woods unless he had the
eggs. If you ask your mother or the cook to tell you how to raise
bread or make pies and cakes, be sure that you will have the same
ingredients and tools to work with that she has.
It might be well to learn a few simple things about frying and
boiling, as both of these things can be done even by a beginner over
the camp fire. There are a few general cooking rules that I will
attempt to give you and leave the rest for you to learn from
experience.
You use bacon in the woods to furnish grease in the frying pan for
the things that are not fat enough themselves to furnish their own
grease.
Condensed milk if thinned with water makes a good substitute for sweet
milk, after you get used to it.
To make coffee, allow a tablespoonful of ground coffee to each cup of
water. Better measure both things until you learn just how full of
water to fill the pot to satisfy the wants of your party. Do not boil
coffee furiously. The best way is not to boil it at all but that would
be almost like telling a boy not to go swimming. Better let it simmer
and when you are ready for it, pour in a dash of cold water to settle
the grounds and see that no one shakes the pot afterward to stir up
grounds—and trouble.
A teaspoonful of tea is enough for two people. This you must not boil
unless you want to tan your stomach. Pour boiling water on the tea and
let it steep.
Good camp bread can be made from white flour, one cup; salt, one
teaspoonful; sugar, one teaspoonful and baking powder, one
teaspoonful. Wet with water or better with diluted condensed milk.
Pour in a greased pan and bake in the reflector oven until when you
test it by sticking a wooden splinter into it, the splinter will come
out clean without any dough adhering to it.
If you want to make the kind of bread that has been the standard
ration for campers for hundreds of years you must eat johnny-cake or
pone. It is really plain corn bread. Personally I like it better than
any of the raised breads or prepared flours that are used in the
woods. It should always be eaten hot and always broken by the hands.
To cut it with a knife will make it heavy. The ingredients are simply
one quart of yellow meal, one teaspoonful of salt and three cups—one
and one-half pints—of warm water. Stir until the batter is light and
bake for a short hour. Test it with the wooden splinter the same as
wheat bread. It may be baked in an open fire on a piece of flat wood
or by rolling up balls of it, you can even roast it in the ashes. A
teaspoonful of sugar improves it somewhat and it can be converted into
cake by adding raisins or huckleberries. For your butter, you will use
bacon grease or gravy.
Indian meal, next to bacon, is the camper’s stand-by. In addition to
the johnny-cake, you can boil it up as mush and eat with syrup or
condensed milk and by slicing up the cold mush, if there is any left,
you can fry it next day in a spider.
The beginner at cooking always makes the mistake of thinking that to
cook properly you must cook fast. The more the grease sputters or the
harder the pot boils, the better. As a rule, rapid boiling of meat
makes it tough. Game and fish should be put on in cold water and after
the water has boiled, be set back and allowed to simmer. Do not throw
away the water you boil meat in. It will make good soup—unless every
one in camp has taken a hand at salting the meat, as is often the
case.
All green vegetables should be crisp and firm when they are cooked. If
they have been around camp for several days and have lost their
freshness, first soak them in cold water. A piece of pork cooked with
beans and peas will give them a richer flavour. The water that is on
canned vegetables should be poured off before cooking. Canned tomatoes
are an exception to this rule, however.
Save all the leftovers. If you do not know what else to do with them,
make a stew or soup. You can make soup of almost anything. The Chinese
use birds’ nests and the Eskimos can make soup of old shoes. A very
palatable soup can be made from various kinds of vegetables with a few
bones or extract of beef added for body.
The length of time to cook things is the most troublesome thing to
the beginner. Nearly everything will take longer than you think.
Oatmeal is one of the things that every beginner is apt to burn, hence
the value of the double boiler.
Rice is one of the best camp foods if well cooked. It can be used in a
great variety of ways like cornmeal. But beware! There is nothing in
the whole list of human food that has quite the swelling power of
rice. Half a teacupful will soon swell up to fill the pot. A
tablespoonful to a person will be an ample allowance and then, unless
you have a good size pot to boil it in, have some one standing by
ready with an extra pan to catch the surplus when it begins to swell.
There are certain general rules for cooking which may help the
beginner although they are not absolute.
Mutton, beef, lamb, venison, chicken, and large birds or fish will
require from ten to twenty minutes’ cooking for each pound of weight.
The principal value of this is to at least be sure that you need not
test a five-pound chicken after it has been cooking fifteen minutes to
see if it is done.
Peas, beans, potatoes, corn, onions, rice, turnips, beets, cabbage,
and macaroni should, when boiled, be done in from twenty to thirty
minutes. The surest test is to taste them. They will be burned in
that many seconds, if you allow the water to boil off or put them in
the middle of a smoky fire where they cannot be watched.
Fried things are the easiest to cook because you can tell when they
are done more easily. Fried food however is always objectionable and
as little of it should be eaten as possible. You are not much of a
camp cook if a frying pan is your only tool.
A bottle of catsup or some pickles will often give just the right
taste to things that otherwise seem to be lacking in flavour.
In frying fish, always have the pan piping hot. Test the grease by
dropping in a bread crumb. It should quickly turn brown. “Piping hot”
does not mean smoking or grease on fire. Dry the fish thoroughly with
a towel before putting them into the pan. Then they will be crisp and
flaky instead of grease-soaked. The same rule is true of potatoes. If
you put the latter on brown butcher’s paper when they are done, they
will be greatly improved.
Nearly every camper will start to do things away from home that he
would never think of doing under his own roof. One of these is to
drink great quantities of strong coffee three times a day. If you find
that after you turn in for the night, you are lying awake for a long
time watching the stars and listening to the fish splashing in the
lake or the hoot owl mournfully “too-hooing” far off in the woods, do
not blame your bed or commence to wonder if you are not getting sick.
Just cut out the coffee, that’s all.
V