Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great old 'Whole Earth Catalogue' era manual. Buy It., February 22, 2007
`Backpacker's Cookbook' by Margaret Cross and Jean Fiske covers a remarkably complex subject for such a thin book. If you have never backpacked or cracked open the `Boy Scout Handbook' or Colin Fletcher's `The Complete Walker', you may have no notion of how difficult hiking and cooking can be. To be clear, this is not at all the same as tailgating, where you have no limit to how much you can carry, so you have practically no limits on the kind of food you can carry or the kind of dishes you can prepare.
There are three big differences between cooking at home and cooking while backpacking. First, you can use only what you can carry on your back in a pack and actually walk over uneven terrain at the same time. As a small, inexperienced Boy Scout, I was able to pack for an overnight hike with a scant 13 pounds; however, it is much more likely you will need upwards of 40 pounds of stuff for two or more days; especially if the weather is cold or wet or both. Second, walking 10 to 12 miles with forty (40) pounds of gear on your back means you will need to eat far more calories, and that means mostly fast calories, than you eat at home, even while going to work from 9 to 5 (assuming you don't walk or pedal to work). The classic high calorie hiking dish is `gorp' (good old raisins and peanuts) which may contain far more than just two ingredients (M&M's being the favorite add-in). Third, you realistically have less time to cook than normal, because you will be especially tired at the end of the day, and will have to spend time striking camp and packing up to start up at the beginning of the day.
This book covers those issues and more. This scenario is made even more complicated by the fact that in most hiking venues anywhere within 2 hours driving of civilization (Harriman Park northwest of New York City comes to mind), you will be discouraged by our wildlife guardians to not build fires using fuel you may find lying about. This means you need to add close to five pounds of gear for a camp stove and fuel. The best scenario here is that there are at least two people in the hiking party and they can split the stove and fuel between them. Things get REALLY dicey when you are hiking in an area with no ready supply of water. On the Appalachian Trail, for example, there are sources of clean water at every likely campsite. And, this is commonly water piped in from a friendly municipal water supply.
The other side of the coin is when you happen to be backpacking to a remote, but fecund fishing hole. This means not only do you have ample supplies of potable water, you have a practically inexhaustible supply of fresh, healthy protein. The only downside is that you have to tote your fishing gear in with you. But, my experience with `ultralight' fishing gear good for fish up to four pounds will not weigh much more than 2 or three pounds itself. While the shape may be awkward, fly fishing gear may be even lighter (but then, there are those waders!). The authors supply an entire chapter on cooking freshly caught fish.
One of the implications of these considerations is that you will need special equipment to cook on the trail. Fortunately, there is a great business in place for supplying an enormous range of specialized cookware. An excellent starting point is your trusty old local Boy Scout supplier. Not only is their gear made for effective camping, it is typically made for younger people, so lightness is a special characteristic of their equipment (I do suggest however, that you use your imagination. I recall some equipment such as the three piece eating set was made of fairly heavy stainless steel. For a short trip, heavy-duty plastic forks and spoons, two of each, may actually be lighter than the official Boy Scout issue.
One of the most amazing things about the book is the range of dishes the author believes one can actually make on the trail. To be sure, baking does require some highly specialized equipment (a reflector oven) and the questionable open fire, but it can be done, as long as you are especially careful about putting the fire out and assuring yourself that it is dead cold.
One other item which may never occur to a first time backpacker is the fact that all your gear and all your food has to survive in a tightly packed rucksack, and, you need to find all your stuff when you set up camp. This book continues the same traditional advice I learned in Boy Scouts, where everything is stored in its own clearly labeled muslin bag (at least muslin was the material of choice back in the day. I suspect there is a more high tech and lighter material available today, not to mention plastic zip top freezer bags.) This especially means that if you do plan some serious cooking on the trail, bag all the ingredients for each dish together. The good authors give us recipes with this very consideration in mind.
One last consideration is the fact that commercially prepared dehydrated (usually freeze-dried) trail preparations are relatively pricy. I'm surprised that the authors don't borrow some tips from the `Raw' cuisine folks on equipment to use at home to dehydrate food.
The novice hiker really needs this book, but they probably need Colin Fletcher's `The Complete Walker' even more, for sound paring down to the last ounce of weight advice on backpacking.
|
|
|
|
by Colin Fletcher
