FOREST AND 
STREAM 
421 
Good and Bad Cooks and Cooking In The Woods 
Too Often Both are Bad, But There Is No Earthly Reason Why-A Few Cautionary Observations by 
One Who Has Been There 
IKE the man who hastened to 
take the affirmative side of the 
proposition that honesty is the 
best policy—because he had 
tried both—the writer may be 
excused for saying something 
about good and bad cooking in 
the woods. He, also, has tried 
both, and has had both kinds tried on him. The 
old-fashioned camp cooking idea was simple. It 
involved merely the theory and practice of slap¬ 
ping a lot of fat pork in a pan, mixing up an in¬ 
digestible mess of dough in any old receptacle 
that happened to be handy and raising Hades 
generally with otherwise good food. 
We used to think in the early, but not the 
salad days, that grease, ashes and indigestion 
were compensated for and made bearable by the 
lot of fun which long trips into the wilderness 
included. But as years went by and the ex¬ 
perience and reflection attendant upon sleepless 
nights began to bear on the case, the conclusion 
was that the man who goes into the woods and 
suffers physiological distress or semi-starvation, 
deserves all that he gets—or don’t get. 
One of the time-honored traditions that must 
be shattered, and which gets what may be called 
the “merry hoot” from those who have been 
there, is that all cooking in the woods is good. It 
is not. On the contrary, jail or worse yawns 
for wreckers of human health who sometimes in 
the woods pose as cooks. When the writer stops 
to think of the hundreds of pounds of exquisite 
trout and succulent game he has seen spoiled by 
woods cooking; when he thinks back over a rec¬ 
ord of seas of grease and dough that have been 
inflicted on the city innocent, he wonders some¬ 
times that there are any guides of a certain stripe 
still unstriped. Marvelous indeed must be the 
soothing influence of the outdoors that has re¬ 
strained some of the victims from rising up in 
their might and throttling the cause of their culi¬ 
nary troubles. 
Do not think, gentle reader, that good cooking 
is impossible in the woods. That is the place 
to get it, but the secret does not come by inspira¬ 
tion. Also the man who can cook is more than 
a mere toiler; he is an artist gifted of the wood’s 
gods themselves. More power and long life to 
him, as certainly a longer life will come to those 
happy enough to fall under his deft influence. 
Making still another reservation, it is not al¬ 
ways bad cooking alone that spoils wilderness 
journeys. Even good cooking of the wrong food 
points the way to indigestion. It is foolish for 
any man of sedentary habits to assume that he 
can break away from town, plunge into the woods 
and begin to live as does the horny-handed guide, 
who usually is no more than a human digesting 
machine anyhow. He cannot do it—that is. he 
cannot do it and be happy. 
By ‘Old Camper.” 
•Tow it may make this article look like a sci¬ 
entific treatise to begin to talk offhand about cal¬ 
orics, proteins, carbohydrates, etc., etc., but to 
squeeze the science out of these observations and 
get down to the elementary facts of the case, 
what right has the city man to break away from 
civilization and celebrate by an initial stowing 
away where it is supposed that the most good will 
result, of two or three pounds of greasy beans, a 
corresponding quantity of still greasier pork and 
a case-lining of half-baked dough, hastily mixed 
up in a bread pan? It is no wonder that visions 
of terror form the dreams during broken slum¬ 
ber following such a repast, and that the wak¬ 
ing moments are fully occupied with figuring out 
the exact location of each new pain. 
Do not do it. Even if the rest of your party 
look on you as a tenderfoot, be choice about what 
you take into your system, until Nature knows 
of the harder work you are doing and fortifies 
you to the extent that you can stand something 
stronger. In these days of desiccated vegetables, 
evaporated fruits and condensed foods generally, 
to say nothing of the supplies of fresh stuff 
Shades of Nessmuk! Where Did “Old Camper” 
Find This Tea Kettle? 
which are not half as hard to get or lug along 
as some old saddle back of a woodsman would 
have you believe, there is no reason for eating 
the soles of your shoes and living generally as 
the foolish seem to like to do. Neither is it 
compulsory that you live off the country as you 
go through it. The men who say they do this 
are either liars or have been reduced to the level 
of the wandering Indian, who usually starves 
half of the time and renders himself useless the 
other half because someone hands him a meal, or 
mayhap he has been lucky enough to run across 
game or fish. 
Do not be afraid to be a tenderfoot in the 
matter of eating; do not be afraid to insist that 
your guide shall follow your wishes as long as 
you are reasonable in asking him to do things not 
beyond his capability or circumstances. Twenty 
pounds additional of food when packed is much 
easier to carry than a smaller burden in the 
stomach in the shape of something that you can¬ 
not digest. If this is plain speaking, it is still the 
truth, and for that matter the outgrowth of 
bilious experience. 
Let the man who boasts of being able to sub¬ 
sist on rock tripe and a few green weeds, or a 
few dried weeds if it happens to be in the win¬ 
ter season, do all the boasting and all the sub¬ 
sisting that it may please him to endure. You 
do not have'to do it; no white man or white 
woman has to, and those who ignorantly allow 
others to make them stand for it, are to be pitied. 
To change to the pleasant side of the sub¬ 
ject, woods cooking properly done is about the 
best cooking in the world; first, because it is the 
simplest, and second, because those to whom it 
is offered usually have that finest of all sauces, 
an honest appetite and hunger. 
This continent may have been, and probably 
was, opened to civilization through the medium 
of fat pork or its logical combination, “hog and 
hominy.” At that, it is also true that our an¬ 
cestors would have lived longer and been much 
happier if they had had less pork, or rather less 
grease and more broiled meat food. And they 
could have had the latter oftener if they had 
wanted it, so that the excuse of necessity does 
not hold here. 
Is it not true, putting the question up to you, 
Forest and Stream reader, that your own woods 
experience has consisted of too much fat grease 
and too little of real food? You cannot go into 
the wilderness calculating ahead like the captain 
of an ocean steamer that you will need so many 
pounds of heat-producing fuel to keep things 
moving for a certain length of time, but you can 
at least rearrange your dietary to your own hap¬ 
piness and comfort. 
I know without being reminded that after hav¬ 
ing been on a week or two weeks’ trip in the wil¬ 
derness anything tastes good and it is also true 
