Equipped with these articles and what you carry in your knapsacks and what you wear, there is almost no wilderness in which a girl cannot have a good time, improve her health, and be the wiser for having entered the wilderness.
Any of you who have ever seen a lumber camp will remember something of how it is constructed. Separate from the main building is the superintendent’s office, a little cabin built usually of tar paper and light timber; then there is the hovel, as it is called, in which the horses and cows are stabled, and finally there is the big main building where the crew sleep and eat. But separated from the men’s dormitory by a passageway that leads into the outdoors, is the big room used as kitchen and dining room. Just beyond this and opening into the kitchen, is the room in which the cook and his assistant sleep.
In these two rooms in the wilderness, cook and cookee reign supreme. They are the most important persons in the camp. They are the best paid. Their word is law. They have a room by themselves, partly for cleanliness’ sake, and also because the success of the whole camp depends more or less upon them. But it is not alone the lumber cook and cookee who make or mar the success of camp life. It is also the cook in the hotel camp, and even more, the cook in the hundreds of thousands of home camps which make glad our holiday season. The king pin of life, physically--and I might say morally, too, for wherever the health is excellent the morals are likely to be so--is good, pure, abundant food, properly cooked.
Nowhere is the art of cooking put so to the test as in camp. You have less to do with; you have bigger appetites to do for and more need physically for the food you eat. There is one article which, if you are planning to do more cooking out of doors than can be done in a pot of water over a fire and a frying pan, you must have, and that is a tin reflector baker. One year I was caught in the steadiest downpour which I have ever known while camping. We were on the West Branch of the Penobscot, in an isolated region at the foot of Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in the state of Maine. We had nothing to sleep under except a tent fly, and the rain drove in night and day, keeping us thoroughly wet. Our Indian guides managed to make the fire go in front of the leaky tar paper shack which we used as a kitchen. There was nothing we could do profitably but cook, so I amused myself cooking. I managed to bake, in the rain, before an open fire, within that little tin reflector baker, some tarts which were very successful. Many other articles, too, were cooked and came out thoroughly edible. That was indeed a test of the little tin baker which I shall never forget.