|
|
|
Cooking and Catering by Joy Phillips This chapter clearly falls into three parts:
In
our experience, no stove beats an
open
fire. When circumstances permit, this is undoubtedly the most
economical
way to cook. It gives the widest range of temperatures, is the most
fun,
and saves on the fuel you have to carry in your boat. By "open fire" we
do not mean a blazing bonfire. There is no point in risking life, limb
and the forest, for the sake of a cup of coffee. An old saying goes:
"White
man build big fire—sit far; Indian build small fire—sit close".
Materials for a small fireplace abound in our Great Lakes wilderness. Two logs of a maximum diameter of six inches, or some of the local rock, quickly form a fireplace about two feet long and six inches wide, which is ample. As a sailor you will, of course, be aware of the direction of the wind even on shore, and you will set your fireplace to catch the draught. As a responsible user of the wilderness, you will put it close to the water's edge and away from the forest. (But you may have no choice: when the water is high, the beaches are narrow.) There
will be times when you camp in
places
where it would be foolhardy or illegal to light a fire—or even
impossible.
We had one overnight stop on a beach about two feet wide, and we cooked
on our little stoves with one foot in the water. For such occasions,
and
for wet days, you need to carry a stove. Over the years, we have sailed
with people who carried an astonishing variety of camp stoves. We have
tried several ourselves, and our last is the nearest to satisfactory.
Considerations
in order of importance are:
1. Compactness Most
people take a two-burner stove;
with our
preference for open-fire cooking, we carry a single kerosene- burning
Primus
or Optimus as auxiliary. It fits in a securely closed gallon paint can.
We also carry a kerosene- burning hurricane lamp as a source of warmth
and comfort, and for drying the inside of the tent. Gasoline we regard
as too dangerous to carry because of the risk of explosion in any space
where it could leak or a few drops could spill. The compressed gases
(butane,
propane etc.,) require heavy containers which are also magnetic, but
with
a suitable stove they are very convenient and give good heat.
For cooking in the tent you require a stove that will not flare up and set fire to your tent or melt the sail wound around the boom. No one stove has all the advantages and you have to choose the best compromise for yourself. If you ever cook on the boat inside the tent, you should have a fire extinguisher, type B1. Remember to have the matches in a separate waterproof container, with more dry matches in reserve. Compactness and light weight are also considerations in choosing your cooking pans. Rejects from your kitchen may be cheap, but very inconvenient to stow in the dinghy lockers. A set of nesting cooking pots is a good investment. Ours packs a lot into a small space—three cooking pots, two Teflon-coated lids which double as frying pans, two handle-grips which fit all these, a coffee pot, four aluminum plates and four plastic cups. (To keep the outsides of the pots fairly easy to clean after use on an open fire, the old campers' trick of smearing them with soap works well.) You need knives, forks and spoons, and it is a good idea to pack these in a roll similar to that used for tools—a straight piece of cloth with pockets to slip the items in, a flap to fold over, and the whole rolled up with a rubber band to hold it. Ours is made of terry-cloth so that everything comes out dry even if it went in wet. Your
choice of kitchen utensils is
up to you,
but there are some we find invaluable:
Don't
forget the can-opener. These are
items
from our standard list, which goes on from year to year with changes
dictated
by experience. Such a list will vary with individual preferences, but
some
more "don't forgets" are:
Food
is such an individual thing
that it is not easy to say much about it, but if ever there were a
place
for convenience foods, a cruising dinghy is it. Cans of food are bulky
and magnetic, but unavoidable if you are serving a conventional diet.
(One
couple we sailed with went on a vegetarian diet and opened only two
cans
in two weeks, both of them milk.)
Tear the labels off, write the contents on the ends of the can with a grease-pencil, and stow them under the floorboards. Keep a record in the log-book of what's there, port and starboard, and think ahead when you have gone to the trouble of lifting one floor board, so that you get out supplies for two or three days. Many "perishables" are surprisingly long-lived without ice:
Milk
and raw meat are the two
perishables which
have to be used up within thirty-six hours, if you are lucky enough to
find somewhere to buy them.
Anything stored under the floorboards must be securely packaged. The packages will be in water part of the time, and if the contents get out, it will be a mess, and may clog the bailers or bilge pump. Bread can go mouldy. Ours is homemade, and I bake it longer than usual and at a lower-than-usual temperature when it is destined for a cruise. Our pride and joy in the bread department is Anadama bread (see Appendix C for recipe). The story goes that there was once a salty old sea-captain in Maine, whose wife was named Anna, and he always referred to her as "Anna, damn 'er". Anna had one great talent - she could make bread that did not go mouldy as fast as the bread that other wives made. Her recipe has come down to us as Anadama bread, and it does keep longer than ordinary bread, whether white or whole grain. You would not want it as a steady diet, for it has a robust flavour, but it is very welcome towards the end of a two-week cruise when there have not been any stores. Apart from store-bought crackers, crispbreads and hard-tack, another bread substitute is griddle scones (see Appendix C). That brings us to staples:
Lastly,
forget your diet. You are using
so much
energy, especially in camp, that the chances are you will lose weight
even
if you eat like a horse, so take plenty of snacks. A mixture of dried
fruits
and nuts, including candied papaya if you can get it, is a treat. We
always
have ample supplies of light fruitcake and some other sturdy cake such
as gingerbread, and generous supplies of cookies. Take candy - a toffee
is comforting on a wet day when the rain is seeping round the hood of
your
foul-weather jacket, and a peppermint or fruit drop goes beautifully
with
a fine sunny day. You're on holiday - relax and enjoy yourself.
|