A Good Two-Man Outfit
Get for a two-man outfit two tin cups with the handles riveted, not soldered. They will drop into the aluminum coffee pot. Omit the soup bowls. Buy good steel knives and forks with blackwood or horn handles. Let the forks be four-tined, if possible. Omit the teaspoons. Do not make the mistake of tin dessert spoons. Purchase a half dozen of white metal. All these things will go inside the aluminum coffee pot, which will nest in the two aluminum kettles. Over the top you invert four aluminum plates and a small tin milk pan for bread mixing and dish washing. The latter should be of a size to fit accurately over the top of the larger kettle. This combination will tuck away in a canvas case about nine inches in diameter and nine high. You will want a medium-size steel fry pan, with handle of the same piece of metal—not riveted. The latter comes off. The outfit as modified will weigh but a pound more than the other, and is infinitely handier.
There are several methods of cooking bread. The simplest—and the one you will adopt on a foot trip—is to use your frying pan. The bread is mixed, set in the warmth a few moments to stiffen, then the frying pan is propped up in front of the blaze. When one side of the bread is done, you turn it over.
Dutch Ovens
The second method, and that almost universally employed in the West, is by means of the Dutch oven. The latter instrument is in shape like a huge and heavy iron kettle on short legs, and provided with a massive iron cover. A hole is dug, a fire built in the hole, the oven containing its bread set in on the resultant coals, and the hole filled in with hot earth and ashes. It makes very good bread, but is a tremendous nuisance. You have the weight of the machine to transport, the hole to dig, and an extra fire to make. It also necessitates a shovel.
Folding Aluminum Reflector Oven.
Reflector
That the Westerner carries such an unwieldy affair about with him has been mainly, I think, because of his inability to get a good reflector. The perfect baker of this sort should be constructed at such angles of top and bottom that the heat is reflected equally front and back, above and below. This requires some mathematics. The average reflector is built of light tin by the village tinsmith. It throws the heat almost anywhere. The pestered woodsman shifts it, shifts the bread pan, shifts the loaf trying to "get an even scald on the pesky thing." The bread is scorched at two corners and raw at the other two, brown on top, but pasty at the bottom. He burns his hands. If he persists, he finds that a dozen bakings tarnish the tin beyond polish, so that at last the heat hardly reflects at all. He probably ends by shooting it full of holes. And next trip, being unwilling to bake in the frying pan while he has a horse to carry for him, he takes along the same old piece of ordnance—the Dutch oven.
