To make soup, dip out a heaping cupful of the boiled beans, mash them to a paste, then pour the liquid from the boiled beans over the paste and stir until well mixed; if too thin add more beans; if too thick add hot water until of the right consistency, place the soup over the fire to reheat, and serve very hot. To bake beans, remove the pork from the drained, partially cooked beans, score it across the top and replace it in the pot in midst of and extending a trifle above the surface of the beans, add 1 cup of hot water and securely cover the top of the pot with a lid or some substitute. Sink the pot well into the glowing coals and shovel hot coals over all. Add more hot water from time to time if necessary.
Beans cooked in a bean hole rival those baked in other ways. Dig the hole about 1-1/2 feet deep and wide, build a fire in it, and keep it burning briskly for hours; the oven hole must be _hot_. When the beans are ready, rake the fire out of the hole; then sink the pot down into the hole and cover well with hot coals and ashes, placing them all over the sides and top of the pot. Over these shovel a thick layer of earth, protecting the top with grass sod or thick blanket of leaves and bark, that rain may not penetrate to the oven. Let the beans bake all night.
Sliced bacon freshly cut is best; do not bring it to camp in jars or cans, but cut it as needed. Each girl may have the fun of cooking her own bacon.
Cut long, slender sticks with pronged ends, sharpen the prongs and they will hold the bacon; or use sticks with split ends and wedge in the bacon between the two sides of the split, then toast it over the fire. Other small pieces of meat can be cooked in the same way. Bacon boiled with greens gives the vegetable a fine flavor, as it also does string-beans when cooked with them. It may, however, be boiled alone for dinner, and is good fried for breakfast.
Game birds can be baked in the embers. Have ready a bed of red-hot coals covered with a thin layer of ashes, and after drawing the bird, dip it in water to wet the feathers; then place it on the ash-covered red coals, cover the bird with more ashes, and heap on quantities of red coals. If the bird is small it should be baked in about one-half hour. When done strip off the skin, carrying feathers with it, and the bird will be clean and appetizing. Birds can also be roasted in the bean-pot hole, but in this way, they must first be picked, drawn, and rinsed clean; then cut into good-sized pieces and placed in the pot with fat pork, size of an egg, for seasoning; after pouring in enough water to cover the meat, fasten the pot lid on securely and bury the pot in the glowing hot hole under a heap of red-hot coals. Cover with earth, the same as when baking beans.