25 Lost Campfire Cooking Methods Our Grandparents Swore By

In the summer of 1898, a Maine guide named Dale Merrick fed a party of eight a full hot dinner on the shore of Moosehead Lake — baked trout, hot bread, beans, and coffee — from a single fire, with no stove, no oven, and one iron pot. His clients had come up from Boston expecting cold sandwiches in the woods. They ate better that night than they had in the city. But the secret his mother swore was the whole of camp cooking, the one at number one, had nothing to do with food at all. Every method Dale used that night, our grandparents swore by. And most of them are gone now — traded for a canister stove and a foil pouch. Most people think cooking outdoors means boiling water in a bag and calling it supper. The truth is our grandparents cooked better on an open fire than we do with all our gear. Number nineteen bakes a whole fish in a jacket of mud, with no pan at all. Number six was a living thing Dale's mother kept alive for fifty years and fed like a pet. And the secret at number one is the reason anybody ever built a fire and cooked on it in the first place. These twenty-five methods fed the logging camps, the wagon trains, and every family that ever ate outdoors, and Dale Merrick learned them all at his mother's elbow. Hit that subscribe button, because most of this was never written in a cookbook — it was learned by the fire, one meal at a time. Let us count down the twenty-five lost campfire cooking methods our grandparents swore by.