Campfire cookery for soldiers, scouts, campers, hikers, hotels, restauranters, boarding houses, auto tourist ..

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

This 1921 volume by Harry B. Clyatt is a specialized cookbook aimed at feeding large groups outdoors, from Boy Scout troops to soldiers, hotel kitchens, and auto tourists on the road. Rather than presenting recipes as fixed formulas for a family table, the book centers on a practical problem: how to reliably scale meals for many people using camp conditions and limited equipment. Its core innovation, evident from the surviving section, is a system of basic cooking units for meats, dairy, fowl, fish, and vegetables that allows a cook to calculate quantities and costs for groups of varying size, with 100 scouts used as the working example throughout. The recipes themselves are straightforward camp fare, covering breakfast dishes, hearty meat preparations, vegetables, salads, and simple desserts. Readers today will find it less a collection of elaborate dishes and more a logistical manual for mass outdoor catering in the early twentieth century, blending practical cookery with arithmetic. It offers a window into how institutional and recreational cooking was organized before modern food service standards, reflecting assumptions about labor, fuel, and provisioning that shaped early scouting and camping culture in America.

The surviving material consists of a single continuous section (numbered 2 in the source material) spanning pages 10 to 28. It moves from breakfast dishes through main courses of meat, poultry, and fish, then vegetables, salads, and desserts. The section closes with reference tables: basic cooking units organized by food type (beef, veal, mutton, lamb, pork, dairy, fowl, fish, vegetables) and a cost price chart, which together function as the practical toolkit for scaling recipes up or down.