et much help from cook-books, or the scores
of recipes published in various works on outdoor span. Take, for
example, Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing. He has more than seventy
recipes for cooking fish, over forty of which contain terms or names in
French. I dare say they are good--for a first-class hotel. I neither
cook nor converse in French and I have come to know that the plainest
cooking is the best, so that it be well done and wholesome. In making
up the rations for camping out, the first thing usually attended to is
bread. And if this be light, well-made bread, enough may be taken along
to last four or five days and this may be eked out with Boston
crackers, or the best hardtack, for a couple or three days more,
without the least hardship. Also, there are few camps in which some one
is not going out to the clearings every few days for mail, small
stores, etc. and a supply of bread can be arranged for, with less
trouble than it can be made. There are times however, when this is not
feasible, and there are men who prefer warm bread all the time. In this
case the usual resort, from Maine to Alaska, is the universal flapjack.
I do not like it; I seldom make it; it is not good. But it may be
eaten, with maple syrup or sugar and butter. I prefer a plain water
Johnnycake, made as follows (supposing your tins are something like
those described in Chapter II): Put a little more than a pint of water
in your kettle and bring it to a sharp boil, adding a small teaspoon
full of salt and two of sugar. Stir in slowly enough good corn meal to
make a rather stiff mush, let it cook a few minutes and set it off the
fire; then grease your largest tin dish and put the mush in it,
smoothing it on top. Set the dish on the outdoor range described in the
previous chapter, with a lively bed of coal beneath--but no blaze.
Invert the second sized tin over the cake and cover the dish with
bright live coals, that bottom and top may bake evenly and give it from
thirty-five to forty minutes for baking. It makes wholesome, palatable
bread, which gains on the taste with use.

Those who prefer wheat bread can make a passable article by using the
best wheat flour with baking powders, mixing three tablespoonfuls of
the powders to a quart of flour. Mix and knead thoroughly with warm
water to a rather thin dough and bake as above. Use the same
proportions for pancake batter. When stopping in a permanent camp with
plenty of time to cook, excellent lig