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Camp Pork and Beans
1/2 POUND PORK SAUSAGE I BIG SPUD, CUT UP I ONION, SLICED I CAN PORK AND BEANS Brown sausage in skillet, add potato and onion, cover and cook 5 minutes, then pour on the beans, with 1 splash of water, cover again and cook 12 minutes, stirring whenever the spirit moves you.
A one-skillet camp supper that depends entirely on how small you cut the potato. Everything else is forgiving.
- Dice the potato smallA "big spud, cut up" will not cook through in the 17 minutes of total heat the recipe allows unless it is in 1/2-inch dice or smaller. Cut it fine, or par-boil it before it goes in the pan.
- SausageBulk pork sausage, broken up as it browns, is what is meant here — not links. Half a pound renders enough fat to cook the potato and onion, so no additional oil is needed. If you use lean modern sausage, add a spoon of oil.
- Canned pork and beansThe recipe gives no can size; a standard can of the sort intended is roughly the same as today's 15- to 16-ounce can. Most American canned pork and beans are sweetened, often with molasses or brown sugar, so hold off on salt until you have tasted the finished pan.
- The splash of waterProbably to give the covered pan some steam and keep the bean sauce from catching on a hot skillet. A few tablespoons, no more, or the dish turns soupy.
- Heat control over a fireHeat control -- If you are cooking over a fire, brown the sausage over the flames, then move the skillet to the edge of the coals for the covered stages. Sweetened bean sauce over direct flame can scorch before the potato is done.
- CoverA lid matters more than it looks — the potato and onion are steaming, not frying. A plate or a sheet of foil will do if the skillet has no lid.
- YieldTwo generous portions, or three alongside bread. Doubling works in a 12-inch skillet, but brown the sausage in two batches.
Canned pork and beans made this kind of camp cooking possible: by the late nineteenth century commercially canned beans in tomato or molasses sauce were cheap, shelf-stable and heavy enough to be worth their weight only because they required no soaking, no long simmer and no fuel beyond a few minutes' reheating. Outdoor cookbooks of the twentieth century are full of recipes like this one, where the can is treated as an ingredient rather than a meal and stretched with whatever keeps well in a pack basket — sausage, onions, potatoes. The offhand instruction to stir "whenever the spirit moves you" is characteristic of the genre's voice, which assumed a reader cooking tired, in poor light, with one pan and a fire that would not hold a steady temperature.