GRUB: American Camp Food & Cooking
By Scott Cookman

Back in 1922, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The rock that wrecks most camping trips is the cooking." A great deal has changed – and a great deal hasn’t – since then. More Americans than ever are flocking to the backcountry. The Travel Industry Association of America says some 65 million of us go camping every year. All of them still must cook for themselves. And nearly all continue to do it badly. They take too much food or too little, usually of the wrong kind. They abandon fresh foods for processed ones. Unpracticed at cooking over wood fires, they build bonfires big enough to burn heretics just to poach an egg. Happily, there’s a solution. Since 1997, Scott Cookman has shared his 30 years of camp cooking experience with the 1.5-million readers of Field & Stream. Now, in GRUB: American Camp Food & Cooking, Cookman offers readers a complete camp cook’s companion in 80,000 words, including scores of fail-safe recipes plus charming camp sketches by the author. Cookman’s secret for avoiding bad camp cooking today is incorporating yesterday’s comforting good, clean, pure flavors and methods. GRUB dishes up the rich history, recipes and lost art of American camp cookery to bring unforgettable eating in the wild to a whole new generation.

Americans’ interest in food overall – and camp cooking especially – continues to grow at a record pace. Prime-time viewers of the Food Network top 650,000. Dian Thomas’s self-published Roughing It Easy: A Unique Ideabook for Camping and Cooking has sold over 1,000,000 copies since 1994. The renowned National Outdoor Leadership School’s cookbook (NOLS Cookery, 1997) is now in its fourth printing and June Fleming’s classic The Well-fed Backpacker (1986) in its third. Given Cookman’s platform as a frequent Field & Stream columnist, GRUB has the potential to do as well or better.

In addition to writing for Field & Stream, Cookman has written food history features for America’s Civil War and Army. Other feature articles by Cookman have appeared in Atlanta, Backpacker, Boundary Waters Journal and other magazines. He’s the author of two books: Ice Blink (Wiley, 2000), which traced the cause of Sir John Franklin’s disastrous 1845 Arctic expedition to botulism poisoning in its canned food supply, and Atlantic (Wiley, 2002), which chronicled the legendary 1905 Kaiser’s Cup transatlantic yacht race. On the latter, The Wall Street Journal said: "Mr. Cookman has turned an extraordinary story into a rollicking good read." Cookman holds a B.S. in Journalism News, was an executive speechwriter at IBM, copy director at Source Communications, and creative director at Atlanta-based ad agency Metaphor.