COOKING.
Every scout must, of course, know how to cook his own meat and vegetables and to make bread for himself without regular cooking utensils. For boiling water a scout would usually have his tin "billy," and in that he can boil vegetables or stew his meat, and often he will want it for drinking and will cook his meat in some other way. This would usually be done by sticking it on sharp sticks and hanging it close to the fire so that it gets broiled; or the lid of an old biscuit tin can be used as a kind of frying-pan. Put grease or water in it to prevent the meat getting burnt before it is cooked.
Meat can also be wrapped in a few sheets of wet paper or in a coating of clay and put in the red-hot embers of the fire, where it will cook itself. Birds and fish can also be cooked in this manner, and there is no need to pluck the bird before doing so if you use clay, as the feathers will stick to the clay when it hardens in the heat, and when you break it open the bird will come out cooked, without its feathers, like the kernel out of a nutshell.
Another way is to clean out the inside of the bird, get a pebble about the size of its inside, and heat it till nearly red-hot, place it inside the bird, and put the bird on a gridiron or on a wooden spit over the fire.
Birds are most easily plucked immediately after being killed.
Don't do as I did once when I was a tenderfoot. It was my turn to cook, so I thought I would vary the dinner by giving them soup. I had some pea-flour, and I mixed it with water and boiled it up, and served it as pea-soup; but I did not put in any stock or meat juice of any kind. I didn't know that it was necessary or would be noticeable. But they noticed it directly—called my beautiful soup a "wet peas-pudding," and told me I might eat it myself—not only told me I might, but they jolly well made me eat it. I never made the mistake again.
Camp Kitchen.
To boil your "billy" or camp kettle you can either stand it on the logs (where it often falls over unless care is taken), or, better, stand it on the ground among the hot embers of the fire, or else rig up a triangle of three green poles over the fire, tying them together at the top and hanging the pot by a wire or chain from the poles. But in making this tripod do not, if there is an old scout in camp, use poplar sticks for poles, because, although they are easy to cut and trim for the purpose, old-fashioned scouts have a fancy that they bring bad luck to the cooking. Any other kind of wood will do better.
This is as good a kind of camp kitchen as any, it is made with two lines of sods, bricks, stones, or thick logs, flattened at the top, about six feet long, slightly splayed from each other, being four inches apart at one end and eight inches at the other—the big end towards the wind.