By: Blonde Two
I enjoyed many things camping as a Girl Guide. The smell of canvas, the twang of a mallet and being expected to know, at breakfast, the number of potatoes you were likely eat at teatime.
I did not however, enjoy dampers.
If, at the tender age of eleven, I had been more of a wordsmith, I would have rechristened these unappetising lumps ‘dampeners’, because of their lowering effect on the appetite.
At the South West Outdoors Festival, I challenged the nice Ranger man to convince me that his dampers were something different to the charred, uncooked, grey mess-on-a-stick that I remembered. His response was to give me a stick, some dough (packet and water mix) and some glowing ashes. I had a quick ‘how to roll a sausage’ lesson, followed by a ‘how to twist your sausage round a stick’ lesson and then I got on with it.
What resulted was actually quite tasty (taste was something that childhood dampers never had). It cooked in about ten minutes and was crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle. I was pleasantly surprised and Blonde One and I enjoyed a tasty snack!
I was in the Scouts. At camp each patrol rotated being: on cooks, on water, and on firewood. I as a patrol leader (of course) and my patrol would have to cook for the day on an open fire for about thirty. I can’t remember much about what we ate except for making enough porridge to fill a good sized bath, stirring, stirring, stirring, with smoke in your eyes, whilst supervising the others trying to do the same with rafts of bacon and fried bread. At the age of thirteenish it was a hugely stressful experience. And yes, we had dampers too as you well describe them, but today you had more patience to wait until they were properly cooked, thus making the best of a bad job.
Our scoutmaster was good at admin. but useless at anything hands on and we were left to do it for ourselves with virtually no instruction or adult help.
I loved the patrol cooking at camp, but we had some wonderful leaders plus their equally knowledgeable husbands. My Granny was a District Commissioner and I can remember being very proud when she came round once to inspect my cooking and gadgets!
Dampers – the taste is in the mixture and the state of rawness is in the method of cooking. The ones you made in camp probably did not contain enough salt, any pepper or mustard or were too wet! Do you remember that we saved syrup tins, poked holes in their bottoms and lids and peeled our sticks, threading the stiff damper mix round the sticks and threading them into the tins? (I don’t think we made ‘sausages’ first, which seems like an excellent way of getting them to stay on the sticks!) I have passed on the tin idea to your forestry sister & saved tins for her. Now my imagination is running with the flavour idea. Grated cheese in the mixture? Chilli pepper? Worcester sauce? Definitely savoury rather than sweet, as sugar would burn before the dampers cooked? Happy dampering! B2’s GM
I think the ones I made in camp were made of glue!
Dampers – hugely yummy! But they must be cooked inside a treacle or syrup tin “oven” so that they keep just the right amount of moisture; and you remember your 5 best burning woods? Well don’t use them for the stick! Mind you, with all the fatal tree diseases spreading across the country at the moment, sticks may soon be a thing of the past. Large chunks of countryside near me are going to lose their ashes and oaks are diseased too.