Fill your kettle, caldron, or pot half full of water and hang it over the fire. While the water is getting ready to boil, get busy with your vegetables, preparing them for the stew. Peel the dry outer skin off your onions and halve them, or quarter them, according to their size; scrape your carrots and slice them into little disks, each about the size of a quarter, peel your potatoes and cut them up into pieces about the size of the meat, and when the caldron is boiling, dump in the vegetables. The vegetables will temporarily cool the water, which should not be allowed to again boil, but should be put over a slow fire where it will simmer. When the stew is almost done, add the salt and other seasonings. There should always be enough water to cover the vegetables. In a real burgoo we put no thickening like meal, rice, or other material of similar nature, because the broth is strained and served clear. Also no sweet vegetables like beets.

When the burgoo is done, dip it out and drink it from tin cups.

ROAST BEAVER TAIL

Roast beaver tail is considered a special delicacy. Many of the old wilderness men hang the flat trowel-like tails of the beaver for a day or two in the chimney of their shack to allow the oily matter to exude from it, and thus take away the otherwise strong taste; others parboil it as advocated for porcupine meat, after which the tail may be roasted or baked and the rough skin removed before eating.

BEAVER TAIL SOUP

Beaver tail soup is made by stewing the tails with what other ingredients one may have in camp; all such dishes should be allowed to simmer for a long while instead of boiling rapidly. As a man who was hunting in North Michigan once said:

Although I am a Marylander, and an Eastern Shore one at that, and consequently know what good things to eat are, I want to tell you that I’ll have to take off my hat to the lumber camp cook as the discoverer, fabricator and dispenser of a dish that knocks the Eastern Shore cuisine silly. And that dish is beaver-tail soup. When the beaver was brought into camp the camp cook went nearly wild, and so did the lumbermen when they heard the news, and all because they were pining for beaver-tail soup.

The cook took that broad appendage of the beaver, mailed like an armadillo, removed from it the underlying bone and meat, and from it made such a soup as never came from any other stock.

LUMBERMAN’S BAKED BEANS

Wash the beans first, then half fill a pail with them, put them over the fire, and parboil them until their skins are ready to come off—they are now ready for the pot. But before putting them in, peel an onion and slice it, placing the slices in the bottom of the bean pot. Now pour half of the beans over the onions and, on top of them, spread the slices of another onion. Take some salt pork and cut it into square pieces and place the hunks of pork over the onions, thus making a layer of onions and pork on top of the beans. Over this pour the remainder of the beans, cover the top of the beans with molasses. On the top of the molasses, put some more hunks of pork, add enough water to barely cover the beans. Over the top of all of this spread a piece of birch bark, then force the cover down good and tight.

Meanwhile a fire should have been built in the bean hole. When the fire has burnt to hot cinders, the cinders must be shoveled out and the bean pot put into the hole, after which pack the cinders around the bean pot and cover the whole thing with the dead ashes, or as the lumbermen call them, the black ashes.

If the beans are put into the bean hole late in the afternoon and allowed to remain there all night, they will be done in time for breakfast; the next morning they will be wholesome, juicy and sweet, browned on top and delicious.

A bean hole is not absolutely necessary for a small pot of beans. You can cook them in the wilderness by placing the pot on the ground in the middle of the place where the fire had been burning and then heaping the hot ashes and cinders over the bean pot until it makes a little hill, which you then cover with the black ashes and leave until morning.

HOW TO BARBECUE VENISON OR SHEEP

First dress the carcass and then stretch it on a framework of black birch sticks, for this sweet wood imparts no disagreeable odor or taste to the meat.

Next, build a big fire at each end of the pit, not right under the body of the animal, but so arranged that when the melted fat drops from the carcass it will not fall on the hot coals to blaze up and spoil your barbecue. Build big fires with plenty of small sticks so as to make strong red hot coals before you put the meat on to cook.

First bake the inside of the barbecued meat, then turn it over and bake the outside. To be well done, an animal the size of a sheep should be cooked at least seven or eight hours over an open fire. Baste the meat with melted bacon fat mixed with any sauce or sweet oil you may have or with nothing at all, for bacon fat itself is good enough for anyone. You might even use hot salt water.

HOW TO COOK VENISON

If you want to know how real wild meat tastes, drop a sleek buck with a shot just over the shoulder. Dress the deer and let it hang for several days; that is, if you wish the meat to be tender. Cut a steak two inches thick and fry some bacon, after which put the steak in the frying pan with the bacon on top of it and a cover on the frying pan. When one side is cooked, turn the meat over and again put the bacon on top, replace the cover and let that side cook. Serve on a hot plate and give thanks that you are in the open, have a good appetite, and that you are privileged to partake of a dish good enough for a king.

SOURDOUGH’S JOY

Slice bacon as thin as possible and place a layer over the bottom and around the sides of the Dutch oven like a piecrust. Slice venison, moose meat or bear steak, or plain beef, medium thin and put in to the depth of 2½ inches, salting each layer. Chop a large onion and sprinkle it over the top, cover with another layer of bacon and one pint of water and place the lid on top. Fill the hole half full of hot embers, place the Dutch oven in the center, and fill the space surrounding the oven full of embers. Cover all with about 6 inches of dirt, then roll yourself up in your blanket and shut your eyes—your breakfast will cook while you sleep and be piping hot in the morning.

DOUGHGOD

First fry some bacon or boil it until it is nice and soft, then chop up the bacon into small pieces quite fine, similar to hash. Save the grease and set the bacon to one side; now take a pint of flour and half a teaspoon of salt, a spoonful of brown sugar and a heaping spoonful of baking powder, and mix them all while they are dry, after which stir in the water until it is in the form of batter; now add the chopped bacon and then mix rapidly with a spoon; pour it into a Dutch oven or a pan and bake; it should be done in thirty-five to forty minutes, according to the condition of the fire.

When your fire is built on a hearth made of stones, you might brush the ashes away from the hot stone and place your doughgod on it, cover it with a frying pan or some similar vessel, and put the hot cinders on top of the frying pan. You will find that it will bake very nicely and satisfactorily on the hearthstone.

In the old-fashioned open fire-places where our ancestors did their cooking, a Dutch oven was considered essential. The Dutch oven is still used, and is of practically the same form as that used by Abraham Lincoln’s folks; it consists more or less of a shallow dish of metal, copper, brass, or iron, with four metal legs that may be set in hot cinders. Over that is a metal top which is made so as to cover the bottom dish, and the edges of the cover are turned up all around like a hat with its brim turned up. This is to hold the hot cinders which are dumped on top of it.