By Gary Topping–
My wife Marianna and I were the recent and grateful beneficiaries of a kind offer from our chief blogger Mike O’Brien and his wife Vicki to join them for a guided tour of the old monastery grounds at Huntsville, Utah and a catered dutch oven lunch. It was a memorable experience as Mike explained the geography of the monastery and shared his reminiscences of growing up there after his father abandoned the family. The monks were both friends and father figures, and Mike’s efforts to preserve as much as possible of the old estate is his tribute to their influence.
To Marianna and me, additionally, the dutch oven lunch brought back memories of hundreds of meals of years gone by. Marianna was a commercial river guide for nine years in the Grand Canyon and on other rivers where almost everything was cooked in dutch ovens.
For myself, I still possess and cherish my mother’s dutch oven which is probably older than my eighty-two years. We were an avid outdoors family, but my mother disliked cooking over campfires and preferred to prepare as much food as possible in her comfortable kitchen before we left home, then bring it to the campsite to be warmed up in her dutch oven. Once when I was a kid we were on a fishing trip in the Salmon River country of northern Idaho. We got into camp late, and one of my uncle’s fishing buddies, Eddie Smith, found my mother’s dutch oven full of baked beans and made himself a baked bean sandwich! It became a favorite family joke.
My own dutch oven experience began some forty years ago while I was doing research for my book Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country. In addition to library and archives research, I happily embraced the obligation to explore the country itself in southeastern Utah and the Four Corners states.. During those explorations I met the cow boss of the Lazy TY outfit in the wild country around the Hall’s Crossing marina, Eric Bayles (pronounced BAY-less). It was one of the fundamental friendships of my life. He asked me to join him and some other cowboys on a winter ride, when they would make sure that no cows had gotten snowed into a box canyon where they would run out of food. I did two of those weeklong trips, that January and the following one, where we lived off pack horses and ate out of dutch ovens. It was an unforgettable experience in which I intimately encountered from horseback the country I was studying as well as experiencing nineteenth century cowboying.
After that, I always cooked in dutch ovens on my fishing trips. Eric used 12 inch ovens to feed four of us, but I found I could also feed four with more manageable 10 inch ones. I would make a stew or some other main dish in one of them and baking powder biscuits in the other. (Eric carried a big jar of sourdough starter, but I found baking powder less trouble.)
A lot of dutch oven cooks use charcoal briquets, and briquets make a lot of sense because simply by counting the number you use, you can control the temperature almost as precisely as a thermostat. I never did; the places I fished were usually plentifully stocked with dead trees that made great firewood, although cutting and splitting firewood did cut into my fishing time. (When I fished with my brother, that was just fine with him because he could handle the fishing responsibilities while I gathered the wood.)
If you want to learn to cook with dutch ovens, take my advice on a few things. First, do your cooking only over coals and off to one side of the fire. You see in movies a lot of times where somebody has a piece of meat on a spit that he is cooking over a roaring fire with flames shooting way up in the air. That’s a recipe for a scorched exterior and a raw interior. And if you cook off to the side, you can keep replenishing your fire while pulling out whatever coals you need. Also, with biscuits: make sure you cover the entire bottom of the oven. Biscuits need the sides of the oven to push against when they rise; otherwise, they rise out instead of up. I made that mistake one time when I was fishing with my brother and my son on the Big Wood River in Idaho: the biscuits turned out more like communion wafers than biscuits, and my brother never let me live that one down. Finally, put most of the coals on the lid rather than beneath the bottom. For a ten inch oven, I put only about a cupful of coals under the bottom, and pretty much cover the lid. You can probably trust the biscuit bottoms to brown rather than burn, and you can check to tops by lifting the lid once in a while. For a timer, I use a tin cup half full of bourbon; when the whiskey is gone, it’s time to eat!
Good luck and good eating!
(Photo: Gary and his brother getting ready to fish the North Umpqua River in southern Oregon, ca. late 1980s, before a delicious dutch oven meal.)
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
