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Outdoor Cooking Equipment

The minimum primitive equipment consists of an ax and a knife. Nature furnishes the rest, stones to heat, leaves and clay to wrap meat in before roasting it in the ashes, and green twigs to cut into gadgets. These gadgets are legion, depending on what your imagination can devise out of the shapes and sizes forest greenery comes in. The simplest is a cabob stick, sharpened at one end for threading through meat. A stick that branches like a snake's tongue can be turned into a toasting fork, by leaving enough of the two little branches for prongs and sharpening them. A slightly heavier stick that also splits into two equal branches can be made into a hand-hold broiler by cutting the branches off at the right length, bending them so they make an oval like a tennis racket, and twisting them around each other until they stay that way; half a dozen limber twigs can then be roughly woven across the center, and the broiler is ready to use until the day when the twigs dry out and burn through.

A twig that separates into 3 branches makes a perfect swizzle stick to twirl between your palms, using the branch prongs as whipping paddles in liquids. It's good not only for swirling in green swizzles and other potent drinks, but for beating everything else. Swizzle sticks are used in tropical countries for whipping hot chocolate and they're equally good for beating up powdered eggs or powdered milk, thus taking the place of the egg beater that quite a few sensible campers consider indispensable.

Just go on from here until your ax and knife have furnished you with fuel and equipped your kitchen. But like any poor savage you won't be content long without some sort of pot to hang over your fire. And here's where the ax and knife come in again, to help fix up a crane out of a sapling laid across two forked sticks driven into the ground. And then you must have a strong short forked stick for a pot hook, and cut a notch in it to hitch the pot handle into.