COOK AND COOKEE
Any of you who have ever seen a lumber camp will remember something of
how it is constructed. Separate from the main building is the
superintendent’s office, a little cabin built usually of tar paper and
light timber; then there is the hovel, as it is called, in which the
horses and cows are stabled, and finally there is the big main building
where the crew sleep and eat. But separated from the men’s dormitory by
a passageway that leads into the outdoors, is the big room used as
kitchen and dining room. Just beyond this and opening into the kitchen,
is the room in which the cook and his assistant sleep.
In these two rooms in the wilderness, cook and cookee reign supreme.
They are the most important persons in the camp. They are the best
paid. Their word is law. They have a room by themselves, partly for
cleanliness’ sake, and also because the success of the whole camp
depends more or less upon them. But it is not alone the lumber cook and
cookee who make or mar the success of camp life. It is also the cook in
the hotel camp, and even more, the cook in the hundreds of thousands of
home camps which make glad our holiday season. The king pin of life,
physically--and I might say morally, too, for wherever the health is
excellent the morals are likely to be so--is good, pure, abundant food,
properly cooked.
Nowhere is the art of cooking put so to the test as in camp. You have
less to do with; you have bigger appetites to do for and more need
physically for the food you eat. There is one article which, if you are
planning to do more cooking out of doors than can be done in a pot of
water over a fire and a frying pan, you must have, and that is a tin
reflector baker. One year I was caught in the steadiest downpour which I
have ever known while camping. We were on the West Branch of the
Penobscot, in an isolated region at the foot of Mount Katahdin, the
highest mountain in the state of Maine. We had nothing to sleep under
except a tent fly, and the rain drove in night and day, keeping us
thoroughly wet. Our Indian guides managed to make the fire go in front
of the leaky tar paper shack which we used as a kitchen. There was
nothing we could do profitably but cook, so I amused myself cooking. I
managed to bake, in the rain, before an open fire, within that little
tin reflector baker, some tarts which were very successful. Many other
articles, too, were cooked and came out thoroughly edible. That was
indeed a test of the little tin baker which I shall never forget.
There is one sort of kindling fuel unfailingly useful in the woods. Even
the rain cannot dampen its blaze. The fuel to which I refer is
birch-bark. It will light when nothing else will light, I suppose
because of the large amount of oil in it. Even when you take it wet from
the ground, instead of stripping it from a tree--and you can always get
an inner layer of dry birch-bark from a tree--it will burn and kindle a
good fire. A box of matches is a natural possession for a boy, but I am
not so sure that this is true with a girl. Every camper should have a
hard rubber box of matches in his possession, should know where it
is--always in an inside pocket if possible--and should take good care of
it. But to go back to that wet day and the shining little tin baker on
the West Branch at the foot of Katahdin. There are some woods which are
good for rapid, quiet burning and some that are poor, as every
experienced woodsman will tell you. You must keep, until you know it by
heart, a check list of different kinds of wood, just as you must keep a
food check list and other check lists. If it is a big camp fire, which
for jollity’s sake or the sake of warmth you wish to start, and do not
care to keep going for a long time, almost any sort of wood will serve.
Brush tops or slashings will do quite well to start such a blaze.
Hickory is the best wood for use when you want a deep, quiet hot fire
for cooking. There is scarcely any better wood for the camp cook to use
than apple, but that most campers are not likely to be able to get. The
green woods which burn most readily and are best to start a quick fire
with are birch, white and black, hard maple, ash, oak, and hickory. The
older the tree the more pitch there will be in it, and the pitch is an
effective and noisy kindler of fires. Hemlock, spruce, cedar, and the
larch, all snap badly. I have been obliged to use a good deal of cedar
in an open Franklin in my camp study this last summer. It has never
been safe to leave one of these cedar fires without shutting the doors
of the Franklin stove. I have known the burning cedar to hurl sparks the
entire length of the cabin. As the chinking is excelsior, you can
imagine what one of those cedar sparks would do if it snapped onto a bit
of the excelsior. Cabins not chinked with excelsior are usually chinked
with moss, which is almost as inflammable. With woods that snap, the
camper can never be too careful, and no fire made of snappy wood should
ever be built near a cabin or a tent. One spark, and it might be too
late to check the quickly spreading fire.
There is another thing about which the camp cook and all girls camping
need to be very careful, and that is the drinking water. One cannot be
too exacting in this matter, too scrupulous, too clean. Provided there
is spring or lake water about whose purity there can be no doubt, the
question is settled. In this connection it may be said of drinking:
when in doubt, don’t. A quarter of a mile, a half a mile, a mile, is
none too far to go to get the right sort of water. This can be done in
squads, one set of girls going one day and another the next. This water
must be used for the cooking, too. If there is any doubt about the water
supply, it should be filtered or boiled or both. Go into camp ready to
make pure water one of your chief considerations, and never, under any
circumstances, drink water or eat anything, even fish, which may have
been contaminated by sewage. How vigilant one has to be about this an
experience of my own, some months ago, will show you. The pond to which
we were going was indeed in the wilderness, inaccessible except by
canoe. I had walked one long “carry,” paddled across a good-sized
pond--two miles wide, I think--and had been poling up some quick-water.
The “rips” were low, and scratching would better describe the efforts
to which we were put than poling does. My hands became so dry from the
incessant work with the pole that I had to wet them to get any purchase
on it at all. A greased pig could not have been harder to hold than that
pole. When finally we reached the little mountain-surrounded pond for
which we were making up the quickwater, I was hot, breathless,
exhausted. I could think of only one thing, and that was a drink of
water. There were a few camps about the lake, but it did not enter my
mind that they would empty their sewage into it and take their fish and
their water out of it. Yet after I had drunk, the first thing I noticed,
in passing one camp, was that they unmistakably did empty their sewage
into the pond. No evidence was lacking that it all went into the water
not far from where I had taken a drink. It is not a pleasant subject,
but it is one about which it is necessary to speak.
It is well to take in your kit some place, unless you are an
accomplished cook and have it all in your head, a small, good cook book.
The first thing which you should recollect about the rougher sort of
camping is that you will have no fresh eggs or milk with which to do
your cooking. You should have recipes for making your biscuits,
johnnycake, bread, corn-pone, cakes, flapjacks, cookies, potato soup,
bean soup, pea soup, chowder, rice pudding, and for cooking game and
fish. In that veteran book for campers, “The Way of the Woods,” some
good recipes for the necessary dishes are given. Whatever dishes you
plan to make in the wilderness should be simple and few. Anything beyond
the simplest dietary is not in the spirit of camp life, and will only
detract from rather than add to the general pleasure. Those recipes
which seem to me absolutely necessary I will give to you in the next
chapter.