Bread and cheese and coffee make a good combination, as of course do cake and coffee, any sort of coffee and cake. Bread and sardine and coffee go down very well, to say nothing of fried trout. Directly you get your fish, scrape it and clean it, a dirty job, but you get used to it, wash it and fry it. If you can eat it within a quarter of an hour of its swimming in the stream you get some of the hidden and lost potentialities of trout, the inner worth of those delightful pink spots, those scales your color-loving eye is loath to scrape. However, remember the coffee. It can simmer gently while you fry. Bully beef is redeemed by coffee, so is Maconochie. Eggs go well, but they must be fried. Boiled eggs go better with tea. Wash them and then boil them in the same water from which you will make the tea. It improves the tea. But be careful of the eggs as they boil that they do not dance together and crack one another. For in that case your tea water will be spoiled.
In Poland, and in Border States and in Russia there are excellent hard bannocks which soften when heated. You slit them and insert butter. In Russia they are called bubliki; they sell them in the East End of all great cities. They go remarkably well with tea.
In Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, there are excellent oaten and rye cakes. They are delightful with Indian tea and milk; not so good with China tea.
America, marvelous country, provides the greatest variety of breakfast foods, cakes, and pies in the world. What can compare with pumpkin pie, blackberry pie, peach pie? You go into an unromantic-looking “ville” or “burg,” and surely come away with an unbroken round of pie to civilize the camp cuisine.
On a long tramping expedition one is bound to study to some degree the body and its needs. The Army marches on its stomach, so do you. An attack of indigestion can make a strong man almost too weak to move. Beware of the cakes of bread sold in the market place in Mohammedan cities, what in Central Asia the Sarts and Uzbeks bake. They are difficult to swallow, even with wine, and once inside become a stiff indigestible mass. Millet bread is also difficult to assimilate. Maize flour bread is also upon occasion bad to tramp on. On the other hand, no harm comes from any variety of wheaten and oaten biscuit. One of the tramp’s temptations is toward wild fruit. He can easily make himself very unwell by eating unripe or bitter ripe fruit—even when boiled with sugar. Again, if the coffeepot gets dirty inside and brown curds adhere to the side you will find you are drinking something rather upsetting with your coffee. There is no need to scrub the outside of the coffeepot but cleanliness within should be de rigueur. Dried apricots, when obtainable, are ideal to take on tramp, but they should be washed before cooking. The stones should be broken and the kernels thrown in with the flesh of the fruit and some sugar—an ideal dish.
Potatoes are difficult to carry, but when obtained can be easily cooked under the seemingly dead ashes of your camp fire. They are greatly enjoyed, as all know who have even on a picnic roasted them and dandled them timorously in their fingers. It is just as well to hoist them out of the ashes on the end of a sharpened stick. If the stick will not go in, the potatoes are probably not yet cooked.
Similarly, various birds, having been plucked of feathers, can be cooked under the ashes. The fire ought to have been burning an hour or so, and have accumulated much ember before cooking a bird is tried. But a hollow may be found for your chicken and the ashes carefully raked and heaped over it.
Perhaps, however, the best way to cook a young chicken is to fry it. It is easily fried over the glowing embers and is immensely tasty. Chicken, with a tang of wood smoke is a feast! One cannot think of having a chicken every day. But enough has been said to show that the cuisine of the out-of-door life is not utterly primitive. There is a variety of good things for those who are not ascetics. And besides all these good things there enter by chance into the ménage mushrooms, so shockingly overlooked by town-bred folk; wine, especially the vin du pays, which is sometimes almost a free gift to the wanderer; honey just taken from the bee; Devonshire cream if you are in the English West Country, and also bountiful cider. There are good cheeses; though out of door all cheese is good. You can take your fresh petit Suisse along with you in France; your Gruyère, your Stilton—there is some good cheese in every country, and all manner of rough cream cheeses in the mountains. Goat-milk cheese is apt to make one very thirsty, so one should have wine to go with it. In America there is the never-to-be-forgotten strawberry shortcake. You can also get a brick of ice cream if you carry a chilling box. In Turkish villages you can go into the restaurants and lift such delicacies as stuffed peppers—even the thought of them is an appetiser. The bon viveur can carry with him his petit verre. Upon my honor, this tramping business is not altogether an “eating of roots in the desert.” Still, when provisions run out and you are far from human habitation, you may be reduced to eating grass. That is the reverse side of the picture.
CHAPTER NINETEEN