Outdoor Cooking

Duck Blind Stew

Ever notice how much you associate outdoor cooking
with your fishing, hunting, and camping adventures? That
25-pound striper taken from a pounding surf becomes mixed
up with all the other linesides you’ve caught. But the
taste of striped bass steaks cooked over a driftwood fire lingers on. After you’ve done it once, an eight-pointer
is just another deer. But you remember that first breakfast
of venison liver, with the eggs over easy, and pine
knots exploding in the stove.
No matter what the main purpose of the trip, it seems, the
food you ate, and how it was prepared, is what really feeds
the feasts of memory.

I called an old buddy to check on what he had going for the coming fall, and we got to remembering. You know how that goes. You start out making plans, and, next thing you know you’re walking the paths of memory.

One thing he reminded me of were the times we’d spend all day in a duckblind, with the wind driving ice crystals against our faces, and even the dogs huddled against the chill. Long about mid-morning one or the other of us would break out the single-burner cookstove and put up a pan of duckblind stew.

There was no set recipe. Just a mid-morning egg dish. A couple or three eggs, beaten, would go into a skillet with some chopped onions, and sliced, canned potatoes. Maybe some cubed ham, or crumbled up sausage---whatever we’d thought to bring. With grated cheese melted over the whole thing, some store-bought buns, and fresh made coffee, and it was just the ticket to warm you up on a frosty morning.

As I think back down the years it’s amazing how much I associate outdoor pursuits with good eats. Mostly, as with duckblind stew, there’s nothing particularly upscale about outdoor cooking. But the circumstances turn a plebian dish into a meal fit for any gourmet’s table.

A lot of those outdoor cooking meals involved fresh-caught fish. There were the traditional shore lunches prepared by guide Grant Schliewe, for instance, as we floated West Michigan’s smallmouth streams. Batter-fried bass or walleye filets, skillet-fried potatoes, baked beans, all prepared over a sandbar fire.

I’ll never forget the special steelhead dish I prepared along the banks of a well-fished stream. Once the fire and ingredients were ready I called to my buddy, Dave. “Get me a small one, about four pounds.” Dave’s spawn bag hadn’t bounced 12 feet along the bottom when the fish hit. Two ounces over four pounds, and an amazed audience who couldn’t believe we caught them to order.

There’s nothing special about much outdoor cooking – say trout, dusted with cornmeal and fried in bacon fat. But when you’ve ridden a mountain horse cross-country to a lake at 8,200 feet in the Rockies, and those trout are so fresh they curl when they hit the hot oil, and L.C. Trimber is telling tall tales as he minds the skillet, well, it doesn’t taste any better than that.

I remember my last visit to Paul Richter’s hunting club. While his guests hunted wild boar and exotic game, Paul and I made a squirrel hunt. Later, his hunters would dine on blackbuck steaks and saddle of boar and a ragout of water buffalo. I could have joined them, except I was doing my share of demolishing a platter of squirrel fricassee prepared as only Donna Richter knew how. To this day I swear I had the best of it.

We hunted wild Sika deer on Bart Switzer’s farm, Friend Wife and I, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. A freak cold front dropped the temperature to 13 degrees. I remember the frigid weather well. But even more, I remember the outdoor cooking - warming up with steaming bowls of Bart’s oyster stew, followed by his incomparable crab cakes.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been upscale hunting and fishing camps, with food to match. The meals served by the French chef at the Miramichi Inn rival anything found in Paris. What that man does with partridge is a thing to behold. And his woodcock appetizer should be declared illegal.

There were quail fit for royalty at Live Oak Plantation; quail we had shot that very afternoon on a classic, mule-wagon hunt. And the crab omelet in that exclusive bistro in Oregon, when we’d crossed the bar to chase Pacific salmon. And a whole string of 5-star restaurants along the Biloxi strip, when we came in off the Gulf.

Lots of fancy food in fancy places as I hunted and fished and camped across the land. But what I remember most isn’t the haute’ cuisine. Rather, I mostly recall the basic outdoor cooking, the plain food, and the circumstances of its serving.

The duck hunting in the swamps of Louisiana ranks second to none. But more than the great waterfowling, I remember the seafood gumbo stirred up by Paul Dubbison, and the dirty rice, and Warren Coco cutting chairs out of a sweet gum tree because there weren’t enough seats for everyone.

There was the time we’d left the lunch box in the boat. But the blind was built on an oyster bar---arsters, as they say on the Chesapeake. So we shucked oysters right off the bar at low tide, and dined on them; cold as your mother in law’s heart, and salty-sweet as homemade sin. Talk about outdoor cooking!

I can’t remember a single one of the great entrees I’ve enjoyed while hunting at White Oak Plantation. But I remember well their lemon bread, warm from the oven and soaking up the melting butter. The pineapple cheese casserole at the Mallard Nest, in Arkansas comes to mind too, as do the biscuits & honey at Deer Creek Outfitters in western Kentucky.

Good companions enjoying the green world are spice enough for any food. Take a mid-day break with your buddies. While one of them lights the fire you dig out some brats, and kraut from the cooler and heat them in an old black skillet. Serve it up with a cup of coffee, a wedge of cornbread, and a soupcon of swapped lies.

You don’t make memories like that in a fine restaurant!