The Great American Camping Cookbook [Paperback]

Scott Cookman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2007

Bad cooking ruins more camping trips—America’s most popular outdoor vacation activity—than anything else except rain. The Great American Camping Cookbook offers the delectable remedy: a camp cook’s guide to the fresh, natural “comfort foods” of the good old days. Whether your camp is a civilized weekend cottage, a rustic hunting or fishing cabin, or a primitive canoeing or backpacking bivouac, this book can help anyone make meals as vibrant as the outdoors itself.

Start the day with Wild Rice Pancakes or fresh-baked Cornmeal Blueberry Biscuits. Sit down to a classic shore lunch of Beer-Battered Smallmouth, Campfire Potatoes and Hush Puppies, or simple sorrel-stuffed trout. On rainy days, simmer up a pot of real Corn Chowder or Camp-Style Bean Soup. For memorable main courses, serve up a substantial Modernized Brunswick Stew, Blackened Yellow Perch, or Sautéed Walleye with wild rice and mushrooms. For side dishes, try fresh Camp-Baked Beans, spit-roasted Acorn Squash, or Sand-Baked Potatoes. Then savor a legendary Hot Buttered Rum or Camp Old-Fashioned as a nightcap.

In addition to recipes, The Great American Camping Cookbook offers a wealth of easy-to-follow advice on making perfect camp coffee and camp breads, calculating food portions, and composing provisions lists to assure variety and avoid forgotten essentials. The colorful history of American camp food and cooking—from the Jamestown settlement, Lewis and Clark, and Daniel Boone to Ernest Hemingway and John McPhee—adds fascinating lore to this essential guide to eating well in the great outdoors.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Roughly one third of American families go camping at least once each year, according to longtime Field & Stream contributor Cookman (Ice Blink, Atlantic), and they've all got to eat. In this breezy and informative collection, part cookbook and part camping lore, Cookman proves time and again that healthy, tasty food and camping are not mutually exclusive. Eschewing processed foods for the real thing, Cookman offers a list of staples to pack (apples, lemons, cheese, ham) as well as lighter, smarter alternatives-for instance, why bother hauling soda when powdered Kool-Aid will do the trick? His provisions lists will cover most outings and are scaled for various group sizes and lengths of time. Operating from that basic stock of ingredients, he offers recipes for everything from campfire classics like Biscuits and Gravy, Pan-fried Trout and Baked Beans to Squash Fritters and Wild Rice Pancakes. Given the breadth of his recipes and their ease of preparation, this will be a welcome resource for camp cooks.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“An indispensable guide for the outdoor enthusiast who craves real, soul-satisfying food, the kind that makes, not breaks, a camping trip.”
—Slaton White, former editor of Field & Stream

“Cookman's simple campfire fare is American cuisine at its finest.”
—Robb Walsh, author of The Tex-Mex Cookbook

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter (May 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767923081
• ISBN-13: 978-0767923088
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #481,223 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #48 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Outdoor Cooking > Camping & Hiking

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tasty compilation, August 30, 2007

By 

Michael F. Kennedy (Roanoke, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great American Camping Cookbook (Paperback)

While picking out an armful of books at a used bookstore in my neighborhood, I dithered over whether to by this book; it may be a used bookstore, but it's not a cheap used bookstore.

This turned out to be my favorite of the four or five books I bought that afternoon. I heartily recommend it to anyone who has occasion to cook in the outdoors.

Most of my camping has been while backpacking, and most of my meals have been quick, simple and required little more than reconstituting oatmeal or soup or a freeze-dried meal with boiling water.

Now I have young children and until they get the strength and the desire to go backpacking, most of my camping will be car camping. Boy, could I have used this book this summer! Imagine had I known how to make bannock bread rather than trying in vain to get an edible biscuit from a roll of Pillsbury dough burned in a field-expedient oven? Imagine if I had taken an iron skillet in the field (I use them all the time at home) rather than some lightweight aluminum thing that burns the food every time?

What if I had actually caught a trout?

This is an eminently readable book. Pick it up and start reading and you'll find it hard to put down. The author gives us excerpts from many famous Americans' writings about cooking and eating in the wild and there is much we may learn from them.

If you're only going backpacking, this may not be the best book for you (but then again, I never buy just one book on any subject), though backpacking is covered, too. But if you can take a skillet and some perishable food on your trip, this, I think, is the book to have.

Now you should know this, I haven't had a chance to try any of the recipes yet. So until I have tried some of them, I'll give it four stars. It deserves that just for being interesting and well written.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and Inspirational Camp Cookbook, January 6, 2008

By 

A. Birden (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Great American Camping Cookbook (Paperback)

I researched many other camping cookbooks before ordering this one. I actually bought it as a gift for my sister's boyfriend, an avid camper and kayaker who has all the gear. It was hard to think of something to get for him that he wouldn't already have. This book was perfect! He loves to cook and experiment over the campfire. I knew it was a hit because as soon as he opened it, he started reading through it right away. (all his other gifts were in a pile on the floor) The best part for him was a chapter on cleaning and cooking fish (he likes to fly fish). There were some excellent and easy recipes. I had looked into other camping cookbooks, but the recipes seemed very complicated. I was trying to find something that wouldn't require packing a grocery cart full of ingredients. The recipes in this book are simple, and many of them draw on ingredients you could pick up at a farmer's market on your way to the campground.

5.0 out of 5 stars Tasty recipes and a fun read, August 2, 2011

By 

SeaShell (WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great American Camping Cookbook (Paperback)

As other reviewers have mentioned, this book is more than just a recipe book, and is a fun read in and of itself, especially to those with an interest in history. Some of the tips the author provides for carrying food on a trip are very useful - others might not come in handy for most travellers. For example, one tip for carrying an egg safely without refrigeration is to carry it in a bandana under your hat, as you aren't likely to forget it is there and crush it. This is probably true, but somehow, I don't see myself trying that anytime soon.

On to the recipes - first off, there is a lot of pork in this book, country ham and dry-cured bacon to be specific. Out of curiosity, I tried searching out these items locally to see how easy they were to find, and my only option was to order them over the internet. Since the majority of my group of campers was restricted from eating pork anyway, I opted to skip the recipes that could not be easily adapted to do without that ingredient. That knocked about 1/2 of the recipes in the book off my list.

Still, there was plenty to try. Homemade baked beans were good, but a tad too sweet for my liking - maybe because they lacked the salty pork that the recipe called for. I'd make it again, just with less sugar. Cornmeal banock was delicious, and the author's tip to mix the dry ingredients in a ziplock before leaving and just add water when it was time to cook were ingenious. My only complaint with the homemade beef jerky is that my crew ate it all before the trip even started. And the section on camping-friendly alcoholic drinks was much appreciated. A few sips of hot buttered rum, and the adults were able to forget a day filled with children whining about all the miseries camping, and just enjoy the great outdoors. I highly recommend.