Home » Food & Drink » Outdoor Cooking » Cookie was Right - the Dutch Oven's All You Need

Cookie was Right - the Dutch Oven's All You Need

© Steven C. Karoly

The Dutch oven is just as important to today's camp cooks as it was to the cowboy cook of a century ago. Cookie, as the cowboys affectionately knew him, relied on the Dutch oven to feed a dozen or more men at roundup time. Without it, the cowboys would've been predestined to a monotonous diet of salt pork, hardtack and coffee.

Cookie couldn't carry a wood stove. Every square inch in the chuckwagon was already dedicated to hauling chuck, "irons" (that's cast iron kettles and skillets in cowboy parlance) and bedrolls. Instead, the campfire became his stovetop. And a round cast iron kettle became his oven, stockpot and frying pan.

Although the camp stove is popular in many camps today, cooks still find that the Dutch oven is the most adaptable piece of camp cookware.

Dutch ovens today

Though many years removed from the trail drives of the Old West, campers like Mark Harmon of Ogden, Utah still praise its versatility: "I can cook potatoes and eggs in the morning, bake bread or cook a roast in the afternoon, and then bake a pineapple upside down cake for dessert. All in the same oven! What other piece of cookware ... can do that."

You'll find the Dutch oven among cookware in many campgrounds. Although you won't find many coffee pots hanging over a cooking fire, you'll see present-day Dutch oven cooks using the kettle that hasn't changed much since cookie fed his cowboys.

The Dutch oven was his "the most important utensils of the cook's equipment," according to Ramon F. Adams, author of Come An' Get It: The Story of the Old Cowboy Cook. Harmon agrees: "I like the fact that I can cook on the top of a propane fired stove, in the coal bed of the fire pit or buried in the ground."

Adams says the "very large, deep, thick iron skillet with three legs under the bottom and a heavy lid with upturned lip fitting the top" could be used as a skillet or oven. In it, cookie baked his signature dish -- sourdough biscuits.

And he pan fried thick, freshly cut steaks and made gravy so the cowboys could sop up it up with the golden brown biscuits. Today's fare is more varied. Harmon's favorites prepare are pineapple upside down cake and chicken potato casserole.

Harmon has been around Dutch ovens for most of his 40 years. After watching his parents cook in cast iron on childhood camping trips, he says, "So it only seemed natural that I started collecting cast iron when I started my own family."