WAM media reviewer Tara Kusumoto fell in love with the pure pleasure and practical recipes in Campfire Cookery: Adventuresome Recipes and Other Curiosities for the Great Outdoors. She talked with authors Sarah Huck and Jaimee Young about their favorite camp ingredients and traditions for flavorful camp cooking and life experience. They share tales of open-fire recipe testing gone wrong, reveal their camp traditions, and even describe their variation on the game of charades.
Authors Sarah Huck and Jaimee Young. Photo by Allon Azulai.
I think one of the great things about being outdoors in the wild is that there is a sort of mystery and possibility around every corner. —Sarah Huck
The authors originally met working at a bakery—Jaimee was a pastry chef and Sarah was a cookie decorator. Today, they both test recipes for food writer Melissa Clark. Jaimee also pens a column “Mood Food” for the TheFasterTimes.com, while Sarah edits recipes at Martha Stewart and writes for Shop Smart magazine.
WAM: Your cookbook is a perfect combination of useful recipes and whimsy—it exudes pure pleasure. How did you come up with the idea? Was it as fun to create as it is to read?
Jaimee Young: It started when we were testing recipes together one day in Sarah’s apartment. It was one of those gorgeous hot spring days in April and we just wanted to be outside. We started fantasizing… What if we got to work on a book where all the recipes were tested outside? We had never really cooked outside before, except for on a grill. As adults, we hadn’t done much open-fire cooking. It was almost as if that fantasy lent itself to the character voices we used.
Sarah Huck: Those character voices grew very naturally as we started working on the book. Wouldn’t it be fun to do some foraging and star gazing? We started thinking of all these ideas for sidebars and things you could do outside. It literally became an adventure to write—a creative act of adventure.
JY: …an old-time adventure. I kept thinking of that scene in Out of Africa when she takes all of her fine china out to the savannah. Even though she’s out in the wild, she won’t forfeit the niceties.
WAM: What do you mean by “character voices”?
SH: We used a little bit of an old fashioned voice. We thought of Auntie Mame and Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, where everything is so over-the-top wonderful! The things we wrote about blurred the line between reality and fiction. It felt like so much fun to write because there were no rules. We had to stick to the truth, but at the same time we did whatever felt right. Take the story about Ricotta Tartine and the passengers getting off the train in Bulgaria to roll around in lavender: That actually happened to Jaimee!
We wanted to just have fun with it, like you do when you’re a kid and anything is possible. You let your imagination run wild. That’s not something we allow ourselves to do enough. [Campfire Cookery] is part cookbook, part activity book for grown-ups. Whether you’re camping in the wild or in the backyard or with your kids, it’s an opportunity to have fun.
WAM: What are your favorite ingredients for outdoor cooking?
SH: I did a lot of camping growing up in Wisconsin. [While writing the cookbook], I learned a lot about actually developing recipes outside. It’s so different from hot dogs or hobo packs. There are a few things that worked really well—like meat and anything that tastes better with a good carmelization, because open-fire cooking is such a hot method. Chicken thighs are great over a campfire. So is stew meat that can be slow-cooked. We wrote a whole section on the Dutch oven.
JY: We also had a lot of fun grilling fruit: peaches or nectarines for dessert, a breakfast side, or a snack. We also liked zucchini and vegetables that are harder to cook on a stovetop. With such hot heat, they have an entirely different texture. They cook in no time! I think I went on my first camping trip when I was 30. I went with a bunch of foodies. Our favorite was liquor sauces or reducing red wine.
SH: You know what else is so good? Sardines.
JY: The sardine tartines (French open-faced sandwiches) were Sarah’s idea. We had these beautiful fresh sardines then added oil, salt, and lemon juice. It took no time to make. They were just magnificent.
WAM: Any cookout foibles you can share?
JY: We were testing recipes in the summertime and went to this gorgeous farm in Warwick, New York. But we were taking lots of nature walks and spending time by the campfire. We probably only got one recipe done a day. The rest were done in Sarah’s Brooklyn backyard in the middle of winter.
SH: The farm is 140 acres with bears, deer, wild turkeys, just so much land, and everything you can imagine. We would set up a tent and build a fire pit. A lot of the book was inspired by things we were doing while we were there. We just had a really hard time buckling down. Developing a recipe takes a lot of focus and concentration. It was such a challenge, because the farm was so much fun. By the time we settled into work mode, it was December. Trying to find firewood in the middle of Manhattan was another challenge. So was cooking with hot oil.
JY: We were going to do a french fry recipe. It went up like a bomb.
SH: After that, we made a point to tell people to be careful. We totally underestimated that.
WAM: One of my favorite things about this cookbook is all the extras—like fire crafting, elementary stargazing, and ghost stories around the campfire. What can you recommend adding to our outdoor culinary adventures?
SH: We tried to take things that people may already do and embellish them.
JY: People may normally do charades, so we talk about doing tableaux vivants—group charades where a whole group would re-create a painting or moment in history. You can use costumes or not. Instead of acting it out you freeze frame in an iconic image. It’s an old parlor game from the 19th century. And it looks good in firelight too. Very artsy! Hopefully something that everyone also does is tell a ghost story.
SH: Everyone has at least a few great stories up their sleeves—something that happened to them, or their friend, or in their hometown. We made up this character, “Raymond Duvall,” an escaped mental patient from a local institution. He was this character we would talk about and then almost be afraid of him, even though we made him up! I think one of the great things about being outdoors in the wild is that there is a sort of mystery and possibility around every corner. Wilderness all around you is conducive to activities like fortune telling and ghost stories and tea leaf reading.
WAM: What was your number one lesson learned in writing the cookbook and recipes?
SH: We had a really good publishing experience. Our editor let us do what we felt. After we handed in the first several chapters of the book, she said, “Wow, it’s a lot more magical than I expected. I really love it.” For me, that was a number one lesson: To let ourselves really follow our instinct; to be ourselves. I feel such a sense of pride, and I hope people love it and buy it. But I have this really peaceful feeling about it because we did what we wanted to do. Our minds work really well together. We had the same vision.
JY: I had a sense of fear that people wouldn’t understand it or wouldn’t laugh at my jokes. I learned to discard that and just be myself, and people liked it. Not many cookbooks have this fantastical element, but it’s exactly the cookbook we wanted. There was a lot of heart break. A lot of things went wrong. Bread was so hard to get done. It takes a whole day for the dough to be ready, and every time I’d burn it or under bake it; it was an entire day’s work gone. My main problem was figuring out how to bake it without burning it. I tried all these different things… coals on top, coals on bottom. With the more delicate recipes [like cake], we learned to treat the Dutch oven as a regular oven and bake it in a bowl inside the Dutch oven.
SH: I really like the steam pudding. It’s really good. We poach it in simmering water. The second you take it away from the heat, it deflates, but it’s delicious. It was so rewarding to just figure out all these little tricks we had to do to make it happen.
JY: We used every single tool in our tool kit… our technical didactic side, our crazy silly side, and our side of hard work, like keeping the fire going and chopping wood and setting up the camp site.
WAM: Any advice for people wanting to start cooking outside?
JY: Be patient and keep a sense of humor and, most of all, keep trying. It may not work out the first time and may not be what you thought it would be, but eventually you’re going to get it.
SH: I think I would tell people that it only sounds complicated. Two hundred years ago, that’s how people cooked. There’s really nothing that mysterious about cooking over a campfire. You just need to pay attention.
JY: Bring a bottle of wine…
SH: …and uncork it immediately. You can do anything. Just think creatively. And, of course, the first thing you can do is learn to build a fire.
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Below, the authors share a favorite Campfire Cookery recipe.
Wild Blueberry Steamed Pudding
PROVIDES 6–8 PORTIONS
This is a treat best enjoyed from July to October, when one’s pail of freshly picked wild blueberries runneth over. The wild blues that stud this fluffy cake greet the eye like so many sparkling jewels plucked from a maharajah’s box. It’s a lovely cake to bake in the glowing embers. Set it to cook as the main course is served and, as if by magic, it will be ready by meal’s conclusion.
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces, plus additional for baking)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup whole milk
1 large farm-fresh egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup wild blueberries, gently rinsed and stemmed
4 smooth stones or a folded tea towel, for lining the pot
1. Prepare a medium-high-heat fire, with the flames occasionally licking the grill grate. Let it burn steadily until glowing, ash-covered embers begin to form, about 45 minutes. Then use a coal shovel or other like implement to scrape a bed of embers to the side of the fire pit.
2. Drop the butter into a metal bowl and place it directly upon the grill grate.
Allow the butter to melt, about 1 minute, and transfer the bowl to a resting place to cool slightly.
3. Add the sugar, milk, and egg to the butter and whisk until the mixture is light and frothy. Mix in the vanilla and lemon zest.
4. In a separate bowl, gently whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt just to combine. Dump the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients all at once, and fold with a spatula to form a batter. Don’t be troubled if the texture is still a little lumpy, so long as there are no dry patches.
5. Generously butter a 1-quart metal bowl and scatter half the blueberries in the bottom of it. Scrape the batter on top of the berries. Scatter the remaining berries on top of the batter.
6. Place the baking stones or tea towel in the bottom of the Dutch oven. Rest the
batter-filled bowl on top of the stones or towel. Pour enough water into the Dutch oven to reach halfway up the side of the bowl. Cover the pot and rest it on the bed of glowing embers. Shovel additional glowing embers on top of the lid. Allow the pudding to steam for 40 to 50 minutes, or until it is firm to the touch and a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow the pudding to rest in the pot, uncovered, for 15 minutes before turning it out onto a platter. Cut the pudding into slices and serve.
