Indian meal, next to bacon, is the camper’s stand-by.  In addition to the johnny-cake, you can boil it up as mush and eat with syrup or condensed milk and by slicing up the cold mush, if there is any left, you can fry it next day in a spider.

The beginner at cooking always makes the mistake of thinking that to cook properly you must cook fast.  The more the grease sputters or the harder the pot boils, the better.  As a rule, rapid boiling of meat makes it tough.  Game and fish should be put on in cold water and after the water has boiled, be set back and allowed to simmer.  Do not throw away the water you boil meat in.  It will make good soup—­unless every one in camp has taken a hand at salting the meat, as is often the case.

All green vegetables should be crisp and firm when they are cooked.  If they have been around camp for several days and have lost their freshness, first soak them in cold water.  A piece of pork cooked with beans and peas will give them a richer flavour.  The water that is on canned vegetables should be poured off before cooking.  Canned tomatoes are an exception to this rule, however.

Save all the leftovers.  If you do not know what else to do with them, make a stew or soup.  You can make soup of almost anything.  The Chinese use birds’ nests and the Eskimos can make soup of old shoes.  A very palatable soup can be made from various kinds of vegetables with a few bones or extract of beef added for body.

The length of time to cook things is the most troublesome thing to the beginner.  Nearly everything will take longer than you think.  Oatmeal is one of the things that every beginner is apt to burn, hence the value of the double boiler.

Rice is one of the best camp foods if well cooked.  It can be used in a great variety of ways like cornmeal.  But beware!  There is nothing in the whole list of human food that has quite the swelling power of rice.  Half a teacupful will soon swell up to fill the pot.  A tablespoonful to a person will be an ample allowance and then, unless you have a good size pot to boil it in, have some one standing by ready with an extra pan to catch the surplus when it begins to swell.

There are certain general rules for cooking which may help the beginner although they are not absolute.

Mutton, beef, lamb, venison, chicken, and large birds or fish will require from ten to twenty minutes’ cooking for each pound of weight.  The principal value of this is to at least be sure that you need not test a five-pound chicken after it has been cooking fifteen minutes to see if it is done.

Peas, beans, potatoes, corn, onions, rice, turnips, beets, cabbage, and macaroni should, when boiled, be done in from twenty to thirty minutes.  The surest test is to taste them.  They will be burned in that many seconds, if you allow the water to boil off or put them in the middle of a smoky fire where they cannot be watched.