Great American Camping Cookbook

Chapter 1 DINING WITH SAVAGES Original American Camp Cooking This is truly the land of Epicures. ARTIST GEORGE CATLIN, 1832 IN THE WINTER of 1609-1610, when England's first colonists were starving to death at Jamestown, Virginia, Captain John Smith trekked to the nearest Native American village to beg, barteror stealfood. "Extreme wind, rain, frost and snow caused us to keep Christmas amongst the Savages," he gloomily recorded in his diary, expecting little. To his amazement, the "Savages" (Powhatans) proved lavishly generous and gregarious hosts. "We were never [made] more merry, nor fed on more good oysters, fish, flesh, wild fowl and good bread," he wrote, "nor ever had better fires in England than in their dry, warm, smoky houses." In fact, if Smith's and other contemporary accounts are accurate, he feasted on choice Chesapeake or Chincoteague oysters up to one foot long. Blue crabs were so big that "one provided a feast for four men." Fish included gourmetcaliber sea trout, weakfish, bluefish, and channel bass (red drum), some in excess of 40 pounds. Smith and his men were served venison loins, spitroasted and seasoned with the black, sodiumrich residue of boileddown hickory bark, which substituted admirably for salt. Leaner cuts were basted with clear bear fat or served with a dipping sauce made of "no end of oil from walnuts and acorns, which they know how to extract very well." Fat ducks and geese were plentiful. The "good bread" Smith noted was made of a grain he'd never seen beforecornground into fine meal; mixed with boiling water, walnut oil, and dried berries into a stiff dough; wrapped in leaves; and baked in hot coals. For dessert, there were sunflower seeds and hickory nutsaltogether new to himas well as "Very sweet" chestnuts. Afterward, the Powhatans invited him to smoke the cured leaves of a small, hardy native tobacco plant (Nicotianna rustica) that, soon exported to Europe, proved to be the salvation of Jamestown. Stuffed, Smith and his men returned to the colony. By spring of 1610, subsisting on food bartered or taken outright from the natives, they were among the last 60 colonistsof the original 215left alive. This same scenario played itself out repeatedly among the first Europeans to penetrate the North American wilderness. Much to their astonishment, they found the natives' food and cooking far better, more varied, and infinitely healthier than their own. Hernando de Soto and his Spanish conquistadors, who rampaged through the American Southeast in search of gold a halfcentury before Smith's Englishmen arrived at Jamestown, learned this lesson quickly. De Soto's nine ships landed 600 men at Tampa Bay in the spring of 1539. They carried with them over a year's worth of state-of-the-art, preserved European provisions: salted beef, pork, and herring; wheat flour in watertight casks; barrels of rice and dried peas; and kegs of onions, cabbage, and turnips pickled in brine. To furnish fresh meat on the hoof, they brought a herd of live cattle and a dozen pigs, the latter the first seen on the North American continent. It did them little good. The salted meat and pickled vegetables, leeched of vitamins and nutrients, resulted in scurvy. In Florida's heat and humidity, the flour and peas went blueblack with mold and swarmed with weevils. Without forage, the cattle soon died. About all that remained were the swine, which de Soto jealously guarded as his last-resort, emergency provisions. In ruthless fashion, he fed his expeditioCookman, Scott is the author of 'Great American Camping Cookbook ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780767923088 and ISBN 0767923081.