go cook on a campfire

on the need for fire, camping, and pull-and-peel twizzlers

This newsletter is a day later than usual because I spent much of my weekend in a $10 camp chair, staring at a fire and the Shenandoah river and eating an illness-inducing amount of cherry pull-and-peel twizzlers.

If you missed last week’s Bite into this, I wrote about feeling frustrated with the endless recipe creation machine and finding solace in the Joy of Cooking, a book every single person should own. This week is really just an extreme extension of the same, about going back to the very beginning of human cooking.

don't google recipes, buy the Joy of Cooking

A cast iron pan set over a rusted grate and a crackling little fire inspires this totally delirious joy for me. The act of sitting and listening to potatoes hissing over flames: a top three human experience.

I love camping. Not in that granola, too-cool-for-school, casually-mentions-camping-like-yea-its-chill kind of way, but with the sheer unbounded enthusiasm of a toddler with her plastic dinosaurs. Pictures of me on camping trips turn my smile into a grin I usually save for the rare moments when I successfully make fun of my brothers.

the grin

I love camping for the wide open sky, the birdsongs, the hinting breeze of resinous lemony turpentine pine. I love it for the intimacy it affords you and your companions. Your friends or your family or a couple of guys you met the day before, given an outdoor setting, a tent, and a midnight fire, will become bonded together for a brief, dark, and starry suspension in time.

I love it for the dirt that gets between your toes and on your eyelids. For the absence of cell service. For the sense of adventure. For the brightly-swatched gear you can buy at REI.

I have a friend who gets annoyed by the fact that I love so many things. I am generally very easy to please, and she is more exacting and has higher standards, and so she is often baffled by the delight I find when objectively life is only okay. But even she goddamn loves a pot on a campfire.

I’ve been trying to decide why the feeling of cooking over fire is such a universally fulfilling experience, and I think it is simply genetic. We are at this point so isolated from the experiences that shaped our genomes over one-million-ish years, and cooking over fire was a) one of the first and most important human experiences, (cooking allowed for brain development and probably defined the differentiation of humanity from other species), and b) one of the experiences we really only lost over the last couple hundred years.

I am not bemoaning the loss of cooking over fire. Billions of people still cook for sustenance using open fires because they don’t have access to the technology and resources for otherwise, and hundreds of thousands of children die every year from the air pollution and accidents these stoves can cause. If you remember the episode of this newsletter where Bite into this visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon, I was particularly struck on that trip by the fact that many of the Washington-era buildings are reconstructions because the originals burnt down in kitchen-related fires. We don’t lose our lives or our homes to kitchen fires anymore in much of the Western world, and that’s only good.

But our bones will always love a campfire. This is also, I believe, why grilling is so universally liked; it’s just a technology-tamed version of campfire cooking.

While grilling intimidates even people who know how to cook, making food on a campfire is so instinctively easy that even those who usually flinch away from cooking themselves a meal know what to do. Saturday evening, wandering around the packed campsite full of families and dudes hanging out and cute couples and toddlers full of joy, I watched as everyone cooked. For some it was hot dogs on a skewer, for our neighbors it appeared to be whole entire fish.

I was hoping that here, I would be able to cite some statistics on American eating habits (who cooks at home, how often, etc.), but I couldn’t find any reliable data that isn’t at least five years old, and any pre-pandemic data related to cooking feels dated to me. (If any of my readers happen to know of recent good research in this area, please share.) I wanted this data because it seemed obvious to me, observing our camping companions on Saturday, that even those who would never usually spend the time to make a meal were doing it that evening. When you’re outside in nature, sitting next to a fire, takeout loses its allure to even the most cooking-averse individual.

I’m not making any argument about it being particularly healthful, by the way. Eating on a camping trip should be purely about joy, which usually implies a higher-than-usual consumption of red meat, candy, and beer. I have a bone-deep association between cherry pull-and-peel twizzlers and camping trips; one without the other is just less, somehow. (While I begrudgingly accept the polarizing nature of the twizzlers’ plasticky chewiness and fake cherry flavor, if that description doesn’t make your mouth water that really sucks for you.) Same goes for s’mores, of course, and for hot dogs.

camping food and camping joy

But what is true about grilling and also true about its more primitive cousin is that vegetables improve even more than the best hot dog when they are charred. Corn, still in its husks, left on the grate for twenty minutes and turned a couple of times, self-steams while its silk burns. A cast iron pan, coated with olive oil, loaded with chopped potatoes, onions, and peppers or zucchini or mushrooms or whatever else suits your fancy, sprinkled with salt, and left over a fire — transcendent for dinner. The same, with eggs cracked over the whole mush in the morning for breakfast, the yolks cooked just enough so that they break and cover the whole thing in warm goo when served — even better.

Drizzle some hot sauce or ketchup, stare at the fire, eat.

Some tips, if you’re now fantasizing about making this happen. A cooler loaded with bacon, eggs, hot dogs, condiments, chopped vegetables, and fruit will always make you happy. An accompanying bag should be supplied with a cutting board, knife, a plastic baggy of kosher salt, a mini bottle of olive oil, s’mores supplies, wooden or metal skewers, something to eat on and with (paper plates, camping plates, plastic mugs, whatever), paper towels, and biodegradable soap. The cast iron pan is essential, because it’s basically indestructible over fire and becomes a better pan when placed on coals and dirt and char and mess. I’ve already made my recommendations for my favorite cast iron in the missive on buying a dutch oven, but here is the link again to the Lodge combo cooker (two pans for $50, a steal at twice the price). If you still can’t stomach that price, a trip to a Goodwill or two should find you a beat up $5-10 cast iron that will do the job just as well.

The rest is just accessories or whatever suits your fancy. You could bring foil and whole potatoes, to bake on the coals. You could do a flank steak on the cast iron (my fantasy for next time). You could do grilled cheeses or a pot of beans and greens. Shrimp skewers. Breakfast sausages. Hamburgers. Eggplants. I love my little camping aeropress and a cheap pot for boiling water, so I can have fancy coffee in the morning (on sale for REI members right now).

I’ll end this by saying that if you’ve never been camping, it’s not worth being intimidated. The cheapest tents and sleeping bags will do the job just fine. Campsite reservations usually only cost $30-$60. You can buy wood on the way. If you’ve never built a fire, watch a Youtube video or buy a firestarter.

Things will go wrong. This weekend alone, our campsite was full and we had to find an emergency backup. I nearly burned all the potatoes in the fire. I cracked a raw egg onto my jacket. But who cares. Other people helped us out. A nice couple lent us their grill grate, a park ranger recommended a new and even better campsite, the group across the way blasted great music. Now I’m home again, smelling like campfire smoke, wondering why I don’t do this more often, and so happy I get to try to sell you all on doing the same.

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Restaurant notes this week

more thin-crust, coal-fired pizza: Martha Dear, Mount Pleasant. You need a reservation, but it’s worth the effort. Yet another Northwest DC pizza rec for those of you who hate on Sonny’s.

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To sign us off this week, two girls biting into the most superior Twizzler…