We often hear how good the things taste that have been cooked over the camp fire.  Perhaps a good healthy appetite has something to do with it, but it is pretty hard even for a hungry boy to relish half-baked, soggy bread or biscuits that are more suitable for fishing sinkers than for human food.  A party without a good cook is usually ready to break camp long before the time is up, and they are lucky if the doctor is not called in as soon as they get home.

There is really no need for poor food in the woods.  Very few woodsmen are good cooks simply because they will not learn.  The camp cook always has the best fun.  Every one is ready to wait on him "if he will only, please get dinner ready"

One year when I was camping at the head of Moosehead Lake in Maine, I had a guide to whom I paid three dollars a day.  He cooked and I got the firewood, cleaned the fish and did the chores around camp.  His cooking was so poor that the food I was forced to eat was really spoiling my trip.  One day I suggested that we take turns cooking, and in place of the black muddy coffee, greasy fish and soggy biscuit, I made some Johnny cake, boiled a little rice and raisins and baked a fish for a change instead of frying it.  His turn to cook never came again.  He suggested himself that he would be woodchopper and scullion and let me do the cooking.  I readily agreed and found that it was only half as much work as being the handy man.

The basis of camp cooking is the fire.  It is the surest way to tell whether the cook knows his business or not.  The beginner always starts with a fire hot enough to roast an ox and just before he begins cooking piles on more wood.  Then when everything is sizzling and red-hot, including the handles of all his cooking utensils, he is ready to begin the preparation of the meal.  A cloud of smoke follows him around the fire with every shift of the wind.  Occasionally he will rush in through the smoke to turn the meat or stir the porridge and rush out again puffing and gasping for breath, his eyes watery and blinded and his fingers scorched almost like a fireman coming out of a burning building where he has gone to rescue some child.  The chances are, if this kind of a cook takes hold of the handle of a hot frying pan, pan and contents will be dumped in a heap into the fire to further add to the smoke and blaze.

When the old hand begins to cook, he first takes out of the fire the unburned pieces and blazing sticks, leaving a bed of glowing coals to which he can easily add a little wood, if the fire gets low and a watched pot refuses to boil to his satisfaction.  When the fire is simply a mass of red coals he quietly goes to cooking, and if his fire has been well made and of the right kind of wood, the embers will continue to glow and give out heat for an hour.

Of course, if the cooking consists in boiling water for some purpose, there is no particular objection to a hot fire, the fire above described is for broiling, frying and working around generally.