Camp cookery (Kephart)

ping the slices in whipped eggs and frying them. With milk, make milk toast: heat the milk, add a chunk of butter and son\e salt, toast the bread, and pour milk over it. Stale bread may also be dipped into smoking hot grease. It will brown immediately. Stand it edgewise to drain, then lay on hot plate. Cut into dice for soups. Fried Quoits. — Make dough as for biscuit. Plant a stick slanting in the ground near the fire. Have another small, clean stick ready, and a frying-pan of lard or butter heated hissing hot. There must be enough grease in the pan to drown the quoits. Take dough the size of a small hen's egg, flatten it between the hands, make a hole in the center like that of a doughnut, and quickly work it (the dough, not the hole) into a flat ring of about two inches inside diameter. Drop it flat into the hot grease, turn almost immediately, and in a few seconds it will be cooked. When of a light brown color, fish it out with your little stick and hang it on the slanting one before the fire to keep hot. If the grease is of the right temperature, the cooking of one quoit will occupy just the same time as the molding of another, and the product will be crisp and crumpety. If the grease is not hot enough, a visit from your oldest grandmother may be expected before midnight. (Adapted from Lees and Clutterbuck.) Fritters. — A dainty variety is added to the camp bill-of-fare by fritters of fruit or vegetables, fish, flesh, or fowl. They are especially relished in cold weather, or when the butter supply is low. Being easily made and quickly cooked, they fit any time or place. The one essential of good and wholesome fritters is plenty of fat to fry them in, and fat of the right temperature. (The best friture is equal parts of butter and lard.) Set the kettle where the fat will heat slowly until needed; then closer over the fire until a bluish smoke rises from the center of the kettle. Drop a cube of bread into it; if it turns golden-brown in one minute, the fat is right. Then keep the kettle at just this temperature. Make batter as follows: Fritter Batter. — 1 pint flour, 4 eggs, 1 tablespoonful salt, 1 pint water or milk, 3 tablespoonfuls butter or other grease. Blend the salt and the yolks of the eggs (or desiccated egg). Rub the butter into this; then the flour, a little at a time; then the water. Beat well, and, if you have time, let it stand a while. If fresh eggs are used, now beat the whites to a stiff froth and stir them in. When using, drop even spoonfuls into the fat with a large spoon. When golden-brown, lift fritter out with a forked stick (not piercing), stand it up to drain, and serve very hot. The base may be almost anything: sliced fruit, minced game or meat, fish or shellfish, grated cheese, boiled rice, grated potato or green corn, etc. Anything cut to the size of an oyster is dipped in the batter and then fried; if minced or grated it is mixed with the batter. Jam is spread on bread, covered with another slice, the sandwich is cut into convenient pieces, and these are dipped in the batter. Plain fritters of batter alone are eaten with syrup. Those made of corn meal instead of flour (mixed with warm milk and egg) are particularly good. The variety that can be served, even in camp, is wellnigh endless.