About the Book
Outdoor Cooking (The Greystone Press, New York, 1940) is by “the Browns” — Cora, Rose and Bob — a mother, a wife and a husband who between them turned out a shelf of food books in five years. Robert Carlton Brown had been a pulp writer, an avant-garde poet and a coffee planter in Brazil before he settled into cookery; the jokes are his, and the title page admits that parts of the book first ran in Collier’s and Esquire.
It is a genuine field manual under the comedy. Thirty-eight chapters take the fire itself as the first subject — cook fires, the bean hole, ashes, the spit, the home barbecue setup — and only then move on to what goes over it: burgoo by the ten gallons, clambakes, mulligans, hen fruit, a whole sheep, and a chapter of blossoms in which you are invited to eat your state flower.
The recipes print their ingredients in small capitals in two columns, which is how the book looked and is why the scan needed unusual care; every one of them is here as the Browns set it down.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked against the scans.