Campfire cooking

5.35 pounds. This is the weight of a Lodge brand 10.25” cast iron pan. Lodge says their cast iron pans can withstand heat up to 650ºF, but the actual limit is much higher, closer to 900ºF. Anyway — great tool for open-fire cooking, obviously.

In the summer of 2021, for the first time since the spring of 2016, I went camping. Alex, Reese, and I zoomed up the highway on the west side of the Hudson from New York City to an undisclosed location in the hills above Lake George. Alex did the zooming, driving the rental car all the way (and, three days later, back again). Most importantly, we ate dumb-simple food cooked in a cast iron nestled in the fire.

Potatoes sliced thin and fried inch-deep in butter. Revelatory — among the best potatoes I’ve ever had. Pork chops, similarly baptized in butter. We’d little seasoning to speak of — no more than a couple of those tiny salt-and-pepper seasoning packets that come in a plastic sleeve with plastic cutlery and a paltry napkin. Hot sauce. And these weren't some lyrical local spuds seasoned of sublime terroir; we'd been to Walmart. But the butter, there on the shore of the pond, us full of beer and whiskey, was seasoning enough to sate.

Three years since, Emma and I have been camping nearly a dozen times, always with a cast iron, always cooking potatoes in butter, always cooking meat in butter. Mushrooms, sometimes. It’s a joy — an hours-long activity. Build the fire. Burn it down to coals. Place rocks and new logs so you can position the pan just so. Sometimes, we use just wooden skewers as utensils, though I’ve packed a bag with knives, tongs, a spatula, and spoons. Life, sometimes, is about flipping potato slices one by one.

Last Sunday, waking in our tent on the shores of a Vermont pond (also near the shore of Lake George, but on the other side) after a dinner of smoked bratwurst, sliced potatoes, and sliced onion steamed on the fire in beer, finished with butter, tossed on a pita (warmed on the grate above the fire), with mayo and mustard, I felt like shit.

Yes, I’d had a few beers the night before — that was part of it. We’d been to bed around 10, and I’d woke around 6, shortly before the sun began to bake our tent. But this feeling was unacceptable — too much potato, too much meat, too much butter. Not necessarily in the long-term gout sense, just in the sense of a load needing lightening. This culinary chapter had to end.

That night, our last of the trip, after working through our snack roster throughout the day, dinner was halloumi cooked in the cast iron on the fire.

This is all just to say: I love camp cooking. Pushing the coals around. Listening for sounds of doneness. The wall of heat. The room for error; you’re hungry, you’re out in the woods, you’re going to enjoy what you cook. Next time, I’m bringing shishitos.