Cooking Like the Dutch

The Dutch do a lot of things well, like building large walls that keep water from flooding their land, or getting girls and guys to each pay for their fair share of the date, or creating breathtaking fields full of tulips that seem to stretch on for days. One of the best things the Dutch have done, though, is they’ve taken an oven, made it compact, highly portable, and relatively easy to clean, and then called it after themselves: the Dutch oven. Brilliant.
Some of the best food I’ve ever tasted was cooked in a Dutch oven, as well as some of the worst. The problem with Dutch ovens is, they are often used during scouting campouts, and Boy Scouts have very short attention spans, especially while on a campout, and they forget that Dutch ovens don’t have a timer or shut off automatically when the food is done. Dutch oven cooking is an art, and like any art, there are some people who are artists and others who are dabblers. I am a dabbler, which means I can create some good stuff as long as I have a recipe, but I lack the imagination and know-how to make a dish from scratch. I’m okay with that as long as the people writing the recipes are true artists.
A few weeks ago I camped out with some friends and they brought along a large Dutch oven. We didn’t use it for any of our main dishes, just desserts. As we ate our fajitas or hobo dinners, we could smell sweet aromas coming from the cast-iron fire pot, and dinner was only whetting our appetites for dessert. The first night, my friends made a chocolate mud cake, or something like that. It was delicious, but I don’t know how they made it. The second night, though, I helped make apple crisp, and it was heavenly.
My friend and I chopped up about 12 green apples, threw them into the Dutch oven, and then poured 2 tablespoons of lemon juice over the top. We mixed up in a separate bowl ¾ of a cup of sugar, a ½ a cup of brown sugar, a third of a cup of flour, 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon, ¾ of a teaspoon of grated nutmeg, ¼ of a teaspoon of ground cloves, ¾ of a teaspoon of salt, and a dash of love. We poured that mixture over the apples and stirred it up so everything was coated nicely. Then came the topping: 2 cups of brown sugar, 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of oatmeal, and 1 cup of melted butter. After mixing that together well, we poured it over the top and put the lid on. We then placed the Dutch oven over 14 hot briquettes on a concrete pad, and placed about 20 more briquettes on the lid and let the Dutch oven sit for an hour. Even though the recipe would have probably been sufficient for 12 people, the six of us polished it off within 15 minutes, it was so delectable. (By the way, for all you fellow dabblers, the previous recipe along with many others can be found at the following website address: http://papadutch.home.comcast.net/~papadutch/.)
Dutch oven cooking is like the teatime of camping. You throw some ingredients into the cookware, put it over some heat, sit back, relax, chew the fat, chew some more fat, and then whatever it is you’re cooking is done cooking. There’s no rush (unless a bear has smelled the food you’re cooking) and you can enjoy the outdoors and the quiet of nature while telling ghost stories as you wait. Crumpets, anyone?