I Cooked the Breakfast That Fed a Logger for 14 Hours. It Cost $1.20 and I Was Full Till Supper.

Two frozen breakfast bowls for $6.40. Five and a half ounces each, gone in six bites, hungry by ten. In October of 1974 a cook we called Shorty fed forty loggers breakfast at the Cranberry camp for thirty-eight cents a head, and that plate carried me from four-thirty to supper with a crosscut saw in my hands. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, nineteen of them eating off the long table at Cranberry. I never cooked in a camp. I ate in one, I paid for it out of the envelope, and this morning I cooked that plate on my own stove with a scale on the table. The five pieces, weighed and priced: buckwheat cakes from an overnight crock (3 oz flour, 3 cakes, 36 cents) - salt pork soaked and rendered from a cold pan (2 oz, 44 cents, and the grease you keep) - potatoes boiled last night and fried in the pork (6 oz, 15 cents) - coffee boiled with an eggshell (10 cents) - and the fifth piece no cookbook prints, the spoon that made forty men not complain. One pound three ounces. About a thousand calories. One dollar and twenty cents. The honest part: I'm 71 and not cutting timber, so I ate half at breakfast and half at noon. Low salt diet, soak the pork twice and cut it to one slice. Your doctor outranks me and he outranks Shorty. Tell me two things: what you paid for breakfast this week, and who in your family ate off a long table, logging camp, coal camp, railroad or Navy mess. The one that gets the most stories is the one I cook next. Eat it hot, friend. It keeps you. Not medical advice. Hot grease: metal cup, never plastic, never near the edge. #logging #campfood #buckwheat #saltpork #oldways #woodstove #frugal