e top you invert four
aluminum plates and a small tin milk pan for bread mixing and dish
washing. The latter should be of a size to fit accurately over the top
of the larger kettle. This combination will tuck away in a canvas case
about nine inches in diameter and nine high. You will want a medium-size
steel fry pan, with handle of the same piece of metal--not riveted. The
latter comes off. The outfit as modified will weigh but a pound more
than the other, and is infinitely handier.

There are several methods of cooking bread. The simplest--and the one
you will adopt on a foot trip--is to use your frying pan. The bread is
mixed, set in the warmth a few moments to stiffen, then the frying pan
is propped up in front of the blaze. When one side of the bread is done,
you turn it over.

[Sidenote: Dutch Ovens]

The second method, and that almost universally employed in the West, is
by means of the Dutch oven. The latter instrument is in shape like a
huge and heavy iron kettle on short legs, and provided with a massive
iron cover. A hole is dug, a fire built in the hole, the oven containing
its bread set in on the resultant coals, and the hole filled in with hot
earth and ashes. It makes very good bread, but is a tremendous nuisance.
You have the weight of the machine to transport, the hole to dig, and an
extra fire to make. It also necessitates a shovel.

[Illustration: _Folding Aluminum Reflector Oven._]

[Sidenote: Reflector]

That the Westerner carries such an unwieldy affair about with him has
been mainly, I think, because of his inability to get a good reflector.
The perfect baker of this sort should be constructed at such angles of
top and bottom that the heat is reflected equally front and back, above
and below. This requires some mathematics. The average reflector is
built of light tin by the village tinsmith. It throws the heat almost
anywhere. The pestered woodsman shifts it, shifts the bread pan, shifts
the loaf trying to "get an even scald on the pesky thing." The bread is
scorched at two corners and raw at the other two, brown on top, but
pasty at the bottom. He burns his hands. If he persists, he finds that a
dozen bakings tarnish the tin beyond polish, so that at last the heat
hardly reflects at all. He probably ends by shooting it full of holes.
And next trip, being unwilling to bake in the frying pan while he has a
horse to carry for him, he takes along the same old piece of
ordnance--the Dutch oven.