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Bacon and Eggs on a Stone
You're not a real Camp Fire Girl if you haven't tried this! It sounds easy, but it's an art just the same. We wonder if Robinson Crusoe ever cooked bacon and eggs on a hot rock. You have to find a flat rock, which is to serve as your frying pan and plate. (Beware of shale, or rock that is in layers, because it is apt to explode in the heat.) Build a trapper's stone or log fire, lay the flat stone across the side logs or rocks, and heat it very hot. You will know when it is hot enough by testing it with a piece of bacon or a drop of water, which should sizzle when dropped on its surface. If you wish to heat a number of rocks at once, you can do so by building a large fire and dropping all the stones into the flames, raking them out when they seem hot enough to cook on. In that case, wipe the stones off with a piece of bacon before using them. Put three or four pieces of bacon in a circle or triangle to make a nest for the egg. Then, when the bacon is nearly cooked to your liking, (and you will see that it has properly greased your stone for you) break your egg in the middle of the nest. When the egg is firm enough to turn, take hold of one piece of bacon as a handle, flip the bacon and egg over and let it cook on the other side. A piece of bread with the center removed makes another excellent nest for the egg. Thoroughly grease the stone with butter first. You can flip the egg and bread at the same time. Sometimes, when you are cooking your eggs on a hot rock, a particularly agile egg will slip off the rock into the ashes. As a safety measure, break your egg into your cup and stir it up a bit, then pour it slowly onto the rock in the center of your triangle of bacon strips.
A stone griddle works, but almost every failure comes from the rock rather than the food. Choose it carefully and heat it slowly.
- The rock is the whole recipeUse a dry, dense, unlayered stone — granite, basalt, quartzite. Beyond the shale warning in the text, avoid any stone taken from a streambed or damp ground: trapped water turns to steam inside and the rock can crack apart with force. A stone that has sat in sun and open air for days is the safest bet.
- Heat it graduallySetting the stone at the edge of the fire and working it inward is gentler than dropping a cold rock straight into flames, since sudden thermal shock is what splits stone. Allow time for it to come up to a cooking heat. Note that the text itself offers the quicker method of dropping stones into a large fire and raking them out.
- Target temperatureThe water-drop test the recipe gives only tells you the surface is above boiling. If drops skitter and vanish instantly rather than sizzling, the stone is far hotter, and the white will scorch before the yolk sets.
- A trapper's fireThis means two green logs or rows of rocks laid parallel, a few inches narrower than your flat stone, with the fire burning between them. The stone bridges the gap. Cook over coals, not flame — flame licking around the edges deposits soot on your plate.
- Modern bacon is leanerSupermarket bacon is generally sliced thinner and wet-cured, unlike the slab bacon assumed here, so it may not render enough fat to grease the stone. Use thick-cut, or add a knob of butter to the nest.
- Egg donenessStone holds heat unevenly and there is no way to check the underside. Flip and cook both sides through, as written, rather than leaving a runny yolk — the surface has been in contact with wood ash and unwashed rock.
- Wiping with baconRubbing a rasher over the hot stone is a real cleaning step, not folklore: the fat lifts ash and grit and carries it off. Do it while the stone is hot enough to sizzle, and discard that piece.
- QuantityA flat stone about the size of a dinner plate will take one nest, perhaps two. Figure one egg and three or four rashers per person.
This comes out of the Camp Fire Girls, the American girls' outdoor organization founded in 1910, whose handbooks paired woodcraft with a deliberately plain, hearty style of cooking. Cooking directly on a heated flat stone is far older than any camp manual; it is one of the oldest griddle techniques there is, surviving in the baking stones used for flatbreads across Europe and Asia, and it appears in outdoor and woodcraft literature as proof that a cook needed no pan at all. The Robinson Crusoe aside is telling: books like this one sold self-reliance as adventure, and the appeal of the hot rock was never efficiency but the demonstration that a girl could feed herself with nothing but a fire and the ground underfoot. The warning about shale is the one piece of hard-won practical knowledge in the entry.