Old Tech for Some Fancy Cooking at the Campsite: Dutch Ovens in Modern Camping

So you are headed for the hills camping. Got the cooler packed with the old standbys do you? Hot dogs, marshmallows, premade hamburger patties? All ready for the great outdoors.

Just because you go to the woods to camp does not mean you have to leave nice cooking behind. Scrambled eggs and sausage in the morning, baked chicken, biscuits and cobbler in the evening, something good for lunch... Wait a minute! BAKED chicken? BISCUITS? COBBLER? You need an oven for that stuff! It cannot be cooked in the middle of the woods you say? Yes indeedy it can and it don't take no new fangled contraptions neither. You can learn to do it with something your grandma would have probably recognized. A Dutch oven.

I am not talking about one of those things, which you may have seen, that you stick in a regular oven. The kind that is basically a pot, maybe cast iron, with a lid that just sits in the oven and bakes something. Nope, a real Dutch oven has three legs, usually is round and has a lip around both the top and inside of the lid. It can be made of cast iron or aluminum and it gives you the ability to do some real cooking in the great outdoors.

Dutch ovens go way back, originating in the late 1600's in, of course, Holland. They really came to be an American "thing" during colonial times and moving westward. The Dutch oven can be used as a basic cooking pot, suspended above the campfire by its bailing wire handle or as a full fledged oven, sitting amid the coals on its tripod legs. After the advent of the electric oven, the Dutch oven then underwent a change, losing its legs and lipped lid, growing smaller to fit in the electric oven. Few people who used them from the 1950's onwards would ever guess their pioneering origins. Today a dedicated few still use original type Dutch ovens.