20 Single-Pot Camping Meals Every Cowboy Knew

Two winters back, I was in a hunting camp up in the high country when the cold shut down the stove I had trusted to feed four grown men. The freeze-dried pouches were sitting there ready to go, but without a working stove, they weren't much use. What fed us that night was a black iron pot, a shovel, a fire, a sack of pinto beans, and a slab of bacon. I've been eating out of Dutch ovens on the Rolling Plains of West Texas since before I could see over the rim of one. I still own a camp stove, and I still use it. But I've never forgotten what the old wagon cooks understood. The fire was the woodpile. The coals were the stove. In this video, I'm walking through 20 meals that can be cooked in a single pot over a fire — from pinto beans, chili, jerky stew, beef hash and chuckwagon potatoes to sourdough biscuits, hoecakes, spotted pup and dried apple cobbler. I'll tell you which ones were genuinely good, which ones men ate because there wasn't anything else, and the little details that made the difference between a good camp meal and something you just choke down because you're hungry. I'll also show you why number eight can save supper when you forgot to soak the beans, where an old cook kept his sourdough starter on a freezing night, and the coal rule that makes or breaks everything you bake in a Dutch oven. And I'll cover something the old cooks got wrong: food safety. Coals stay outside the tent. Meat stays cold until it cooks. And some traditions are better left in the past. Twenty meals. One pot. No fuel canister required. That night in hunting camp, four men ate beans and bacon out of a pot that cost less than the stove did. Nobody asked for a freeze-dried pouch. The old cooks weren't built different than you, friend. They just knew where to put the coals. Tell me what came out of the pot at your granddaddy's camp or your grandmother's stove — the dish nobody makes anymore. I read every one. And the story that gets talked about most is the one I cook next. #DutchOvenCooking #CampCooking #CowboyCooking #CastIronCooking #OutdoorCooking #CampingFood #SurvivalFood #Chuckwagon #WildernessCooking #TraditionalCooking