
Baking Foods in Camp 
Giese away from frying pan 
foods in camp is good practice and 
one can quickly get to be expert at 
baking with very simple equipment. 
The reflector oven baker gives good 
results and you can make one from 
sheet metal as shown in the drawing. 
It is merely a triangular metal box 
with one end open and with a shelve in 
it to place the foods to be baked. There 
are some excellent types of these ovens 
which can be purchased at 
sporting goods houses at 
small cost ad they are 
built so that they will col- 
lapse and pack into small 
space. 
To get the full benefit of 
the heat from the fire, 
drive some green wood 
sticks slanting into the 
ground and against them 
place some green wood logs 
or sticks which are large 
enough so that they can be 
piled one on top of the 
other to form a back for 
the fire. Dry wood, split so that it 
will burn quickly and give quick heat, 
should be laid ends up against the back 
logs. Be sure that you have a good 
supply of firewood on hand so that once 
you start to bake you can finish up 
the job without having to hunt around 
for additional fuel to finish up the 
baking. 
The oven should be placed on the lee 
side of the back logs and better still 
in a place where there is little or no 
wind, because wind is apt to drive the 
heat away from the oven and you 
want all available heat from the fire 
to be reflected into the oven opposite 
the back logs. A metal handle on the 
top or end of the baker will allow you 
to move the baker toward or away 
from the fire as cooking progresses. 
It is easy to get good results because 
you can watch the food cooking and 
control the heat by moving the oven 
toward or away from the fire. Most 
all foods that can be fried can be 
baked. Instead of fried potatoes, cut 
up some boiled potatoes into pieces, 
place them in a pie tin with butter 
600 
and bake them. When making biscuits, 
grease the bake tin and they will taste 
better than any home made ones Baked 
potatoes are the very best kind to eat 
and they are easily made in the baker 
in quick time with a fast hot fire. Slit 
the baked potatoes at the top, sprinkle 
some salt on the open end and eat 
them right out of the skins. They 
taste a lot better this way and a 
bit of butter melted into them as 
you eat along will give them a decided 
tang. 

You can make a nice egg omelet, 
baked, too, by stirring up some eggs 
and baking them in a tin. A good camp 
dish is tomatoes, macaroni and cheese 
mixed and baked. 
Baked chicken, baked fish and many 
other baked foods are quite possible 
with the reflector baker and after all 
it is a method as old as the hills. Your 
early ancestors used to do all their 
cooking in front of a fire place and the 
Indian used this method too, but he 
made his own fireplace much as you 
do when you get the back logs ready 
for the reflector baker. The Indian 
used to pick out a large rock for the 
back reflector, and if you are lucky 
enough to make camp where there is 
a good sized rock which you can use 
for this purpose you will save a bit 
of time in not having to make a back 
log support. However, if you are mak- 
ing camp for a stay of a few days, the 
time spent in making back logs for 
cooking will be well repaid in the 
“eats” produced and will get you away 
from the frying pan which usually 
gives too much grease to the foods and 
affects the digestion if practiced too 
long at a time in camp. 
A good help for camp baking would 
be some of your home cook books which 
will give you ideas for camp baking of 
foods in that it will state different 
varieties of foods that can be baked 
and how to get them ready for cooking. 
Another good practice is to eat plenty 
of vegetables, and as you are in the 
country where fresh ones are available, 
make the most of the supply. 
W. A. KIMBALL, 
White Plains, N. Y. 
Wayside and Fireside 
Tent 
H UNTING. fishing and 
travel generally con- 
stitute the reason for 
camping, and the pleasure 
of camping can be marred 
by having the wrong kind 
of shelter. For late fall 
wood camping. where an 
all night fire is kept go- 
ing. I like the Baker tent. 
It is a half wall tent in 
shape, open to the fire and the roof 
reflects the heat down upon the bed. 
It has an awning that can be closed 
down. As Kephart says, ‘When wood 
is plentful and mosquitoes scarce, then 
for me the open lean-to or Baker tent 
before a hardwood fire with the free 
breath of the forest filling my lungs.” 
The camp-fire tent is useful for the 
same purpose, only it is deeper, being 
a three quarter size wall tent. Now if 
either of these tents were used in the 
open the wind could play havoc with 
them. 
Last winter when figuring what tent — 
we were to use for our trip of 1924, 
my wife and I formed a shelter that 
stood up very well. Condensed, the 
pow wow amounted to this: The A 
or wedge tent was probably the first — 
It is likely that the first — 
idea in tents. 
form of shelter erected in the wood 
was like a lean-to, with one slope, and © 
in the open with two slopes like a tent- — 
fly. With the coming of chilly weather 
the woods camper added ends to his 
lean-to, to check the draught and con- 7 
serve the heat from the fire in front. 
