COOKING

[RikJohnson]

I was flipping through my copy of _The Art of the Two Towers_, a great reference book and noticed one pic of the hobbits, one of which (Sam?) was hauling a cauldrom and frying pan on his back.
This brought to mind a lot of thoughts, the most recnet being about China.

Modern Chinese cooking is a reaction to a major problem, the deforestation of China! Al lthe great forests of china were being clear-cut for exactly the same reasons we in America clear-cut our own. People buy mesquite by the ton for bar-b-que flavor not realizing that the mesquite cane fro ma centuries old grove that was clear-cut for a) wood to sell or b) room for a sub-division.

But the problem in China was simple...
How to cook your food using less wood!

Seeing that cauldrom on Sam's back made me think. I can cook in a pot of water using my Jet-Boil in a couple minutes. BUT, try to cook in a pot large enoguh to feed 5 people over a wood fire and we'll be waiting all night for the stew to cook!
Plus only a fool triesto cook over a fire. You cook over coals which takes some time to produce.
I've watched too many people burn meat over a campfire and too many people who thought that they could create a bed of coals quickly (we ate at 10 pm that night). Thus I was pondering that picture.

The Chinese solved that problem of maing a meal for a family quickly with minimal fuel.
How?
By chopping everything into very small pieces and cooking it in a frying pan! and the wok is little more than a frying pan with a round bottom.

Which means that if we are to cook over a fire, which can be done, just not well, we should dump the pot and focus mainly on a round-bottomed frying pan!

Thoughts and experiences please???

[Chris Russo]

It depends on what you're cooking and how. The Boy Scouts have a saying: "Flames for boiling, coals for broiling."

Mostly of my packed-in trekking food tends to be dried stuff that gets boiled into a stew: dried corn, jerky, and beans. Flames and a pot serve quite well in this regard: I suspend the pot over the flames via a tripod and simmer for an hour. (15 min if I use lentils and cous-cous instead of beans and corn, but it feels less period.)

However, for fresh-caught or fresh-found food, especially meat, nothing except the spit beats the frying pan. In 2011 my April trek caught several trout and foraged many wild leeks: we were all glad for the six-inch cast-iron skillet we had packed in. That's when you want to cook over coals, which as you point out, take a while to make.

That's why I prefer a corn-boiler-and-frying-pan combo, not unlike this: http://www.crazycrow.com/mm5/merchant.m ... 20-300-000

It's worth pointing out, though, that on none of my treks has my cookfire been the only purpose for the fire. Yes, it took an hour to make the stew, and more than that to make a good bed of coals. But we were going to keep the fire going all night as a watchfire and for warmth anyway (there was snow on the ground the next morning), so it did not go to waste.

[Greg]

The problem with selecting frying as the best option for cooking is that, in period, far more dishes were boiled and/or roasted than were fried, and, as Chris mentioned already, roasting is more efficient than frying. Add to that how ridiculously loud a frying pan can be, a ranger in the wild isn't going to always want to pull out one of those. Boilers can be quite light to carry around, but a frying pan is guranteed to be heavier, for a couple of reasons.

That pan Chris linked is pretty cool, but frying pans to be used as frying pans, if you'll pardon my being repetitive, shouldn't be made of tin-lined copper. The tin-to-copper attachment process can't handle the high heats necessary for browning meat, etc., and will bubble and separate from the copper, making it not food safe. They really oughta make that lid out of mild or high carbon steel, if they truly want it food safe, etc.

Back onto the topic of efficient camp cooking, copper is the most conductive useful metal we know of, and as a result makes the most heat-efficient cookware in existence. A tiny pile of small coals will get a boiler rolling in no time.

My last little comment...though both that painting and Peter Jackson's film version show a cauldron of sorts being used to cook with, a chapter in The Two Towers titled "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" specifically states that Sam carried a pair of nesting frying pans with folding handles. This doesn't mean boilers are out, persay, but it does mean that there wasn't actually a cauldron present. The fact that Sam wasn't frying anything in them, but rather used the shallow pans to stew a rabbit points to the usefulness of boiling.

[Chris Russo]

That pan Chris linked is pretty cool, but frying pans to be used as frying pans, if you'll pardon my being repetitive, shouldn't be made of tin-lined copper. The tin-to-copper attachment process can't handle the high heats necessary for browning meat, etc., and will bubble and separate from the copper, making it not food safe. They really oughta make that lid out of mild or high carbon steel, if they truly want it food safe, etc.

Agreed--or cast iron, though that's much heavier. I think this is the actual skillet I have, and while it wasn't made to serve as a lid, it fits my larger boiler perfectly (6" diameter). It's probably a lot like what Sam stewed his coneys in.

http://jas-townsend.com/folding-frying-p-103.html

Another issue with frying over boiling is, you usually need some kind of grease. Packing in a vial of oil is possible, but it's another thing that can spill, break, and needs to be carried. (I usually just bring a small slab of cured bacon to grease the pan beforehand.)

To be honest, though I still bring my skillet, I've used my boiler much more often.

[wulfgar]

Often in Civil War reenacting, a canteen half is used for cooking. Federal canteens were two halves soldered together, when the solder is melted off, you wind up with two wok shaped frying pans. There is an example if you scroll down on this page.
http://www.blockaderunner.com/Catalog/catpg26.htm
Cooking something without burning takes a little practice, but they work really well once you figure out that you don't need alot of heat, just a nice small bed of coals.