The traditional tool of most camp cooks is the frying pan. 

 Wingy never used a frying pan except for very small trout, break- 

 fast eggs, or his Olympian hashes. He used a grill. Boil, bake, or 

 broil. That was his law, and the cases of indigestion it has saved 

 are uncounted. Greasy foods infuriated him, offending his finer 

 sensibilities. Wingy boasted that no bicarbonate of soda would 

 be needed by anyone who ate his food. 



Some great simplifier has remarked that cooking is the appli- 

 cation of heat to edible raw materials. He does not say how to 

 create this heat. How do you build a broiling fire? And what 

 woods make the best coals? 



If you don't have charcoal, use dry hardwood. Hickory, apple, 

 ash, maple, beech, birch, and oak are all good, with hickory first 

 choice. These woods will burn to coals, and when the coals are a 

 little brighter than cherry red, it's broiling time. 



But if there's no hardwood, you can broil with softwood not 

 over it, but vertically against its flame. White pine burns with a 

 bright flame, down to a feathery white ash. So does poplar. Most 

 cedars and spruces snap and throw sparks. The pitchy pines burn 

 with an orange flame and throw off oily smoke. Stand your 

 broiler vertically, or leaning a little toward the flame, and about 

 eight inches from it. The result is almost as good, and far better 

 than the frying pan. 



Wingy's fire was never larger than his minimum requirement. 

 If it were noon, a hot-tea-and-sandwich meal, his fire would be 

 exactly the size of the bottom of his tea boiler or about 6 inches 

 across. The wind would be away from him, which is to say toward 

 the back side of the fire. 



If his meal required space for two pots and a broiler for meat 

 or fish, he cut his wood 16 inches long, and his fire would be only 

 6 or 8 inches wide, at the base. It hurt his pride to waste any heat, 

 or wood. More important, he could get right snug to his cook 

 fires without frying his knuckles or singeing his eyebrows. 



One of our most revered meat-packing houses (Swift 8c Co.) has 

 come out definitely for seasoning broiled meats after cooking, 

 not before. Wingy knew this all the time. His arguments: salt 

 makes the juice run out of meat, and it also cooks away, while 



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