"The success of outdoor cookery depends largely on how a fire is built and how it is managed. A camper is known by his fire. It is quite impossible to prepare a good meal over a higgledy-piggledy heap of smoking chunks, a fierce blaze, or a great bed of coals that will warp iron and melt everything else."Those words were published a hundred years ago, excerpting Kephart's Camp Cookery in the August 1910 issue of The Outing.
Fire is fire. It doesn't observe leaps in technology or whims of rhetoric. Elemental and constant, fire is fire.Kephart's guidance reflects the savvy of a woodsman and the thoroughness of a librarian. He devotes much of this century-old primer to the selection of fuel -- how different woods split and how they burn, how to gather them and the coals they yield.
His simple wisdom is as valuable today as it was then.
Firemaking is the most important woodcraft skill. Beyond cooking and comfort, knowing how to build a fire quickly can be a lifesaver. Each of us should learn firemaking and practice it often, especially under less-than-perfect conditions -- cold, wet, windy and when fuel is scarce.
For those who haven't yet graduated from "a higgledy-piggledy heap of smoking chunks," that 1910 article wouldn't be a bad place to start.
(Many volumes of The Outing, along with the classic Forest & Stream, have been preserved on Google books. To go directly to "How to Build a Camp Fire" by Horace Kephart, click here.)
