90 THE TRAPPER'S ART. 



be a satisfaction to know that flesh, fish, and fowl, are fresh 

 from their native elements, and have not hung in the market 

 two or three weeks before coming on the table. 



The ways of cooking in camp are as various as in the 

 Kitchen at home. Fresh fish can be fried in butter, lard, or 

 the fat of the deer ; or they can be boiled, or broiled and but- 

 tered. Venison can be fried, or broiled in cutlets, or roasted 

 before a camp-fire in joints, or stewed a la fricassee, or boiled 

 into soup with potatoes. Squirrels, ducks, partridges, wood- 

 cock, quails, pigeons, prairie fowls, and any other game that 

 comes to hand, can be fried, broiled, or boiled as well in the 

 woods as in the best hotel. 



The very best way of cooking fish and fowl ever devised is 

 familiar to woodsmen, but unknown to city epicures. It is 

 this : Take a large fish — say a trout of three or four pounds, 

 fresh from its gambols in the cool stream — cut a small hole 

 at the neck and abstract the intestines. Wash the inside 

 clean, and season it with pepper and salt ; or if convenient, 

 fill it with stuffing made of bread-crumbs or crackers chopped 

 up with meat. Make a fire outside the tent, and when it has 

 burned down to embers, rake it open, put in the fish, and 

 cover it with the coals and hot ashes. Within an liour take 

 it from its bed, peel off the skin from the clean flesh, and you 

 will have a trout with all its original juices and flavors pre- 

 served within it ; a dish too good, as Izaak Walton would say, 

 "for any but very honest men." 



Grouse, ducks, and vai*ious other fowls can be cooked de- 

 liciously in a similar way. The intestines of the bird should 

 be taken out by a small hole at the vent, and the inside 

 washed and stuffed as before. Then wet the feathers thor- 

 oughly, and cover Avith hot embers. When the cooking is 

 finished, peel off the burnt feathers and skin, and you will find 

 underneath a lump of nice juicy flesh, which, when once 

 tasted, will never be forgotten. The peculiar advantage of 

 this method of roasting is that the covering of embers pre- 

 vents the escape of the juices by evaporation. 



Everybody knows how to cook potatoes and make tea and 

 coffee, and anybody fit for a trapper must " know beans," and 



