I Was Shown At A Young Age The Art Of Getting A Proper Fire And How To Keep It Burning
When I was a youth I joined the Cub Scouts at the age of 8, and at 10 I went on my first camp as part of the preparation for moving up to the Scouts the following year. It was an eye-opener, I adored it and the best thing was that the site we went to, which wasn't very far from home but distant enough away to feel remote and exotic, allowed open fires to be build by each tent.
The initial thing we had to do was to dig a large hole, a job for the junior campers, naturally, and then we had to go down into the woods to search the surroundings for wood and other suitably burnable material to build the pyre. We were allowed to use matches (I can still hear Baden-Powell's teeth gnashing) but nothing else and the cubs were delegated the job of trying to light it.
Of course we just chucked everything in and set about going through the matches we were given with no joy at all, at which point the patrol leader (scout troops are divided into patrols with a leader and an assistant) cleared everything away and demonstrated to us how to make a little pile of twigs and sticks which were padded with paper and other quick burning materials. The match was applied and as the fire took hold of the wood, bigger sticks were applied and the flames fanned briefly and that was it. After that we were able to keep the fire lit for the whole weekend. We used it for boiling water for drinking and washing up but best of all, when it burnt down sufficiently, we put grills over it and cooked on it.
It was the first time I'd experienced a barbeque which these days sounds a bit silly, but at that time (in the mid seventies) people didn't really do cooking outside.
Our family were quite ahead of the game as shortly after the camp, my dad had gone to America for the first time and had flown home from California where he'd been invited to someone's house for a weekend and they'd had a party which was focused around a charcoal barbeque.
Freshly enthused, it didn't be long after he flew back that he went and found one to buy, which was not an easy thing to do as they weren't widely offered and you could not look them up via the Internet. But he bought one, a charcoal barbeque in a particularly awful shade of orange that was popular in the 70's, and with great ceremony we set it up in the garden. As the freshly experienced fire lighter, I was given the duty of getting the fire lit and so began our first family barbeque.
It was in the family for many years as the charcoal barbeque was the only option, the diversity came in terms of size and shape. They were all the same in terms of being essentially a rectangular pot on legs with slots for placing the grill across the top. Most didn't even have a lid but they did work as long as you could get the fire started in the first place. And that wasn't simple because fuel stations didn't have bags of coals, and the coals you could get weren't treated to make them easy to light or come in a bag that you put a match to. It all had to be done properly using either heating coal or wood. You could get firelighters but the challenge with those was that they tended to linger and very often if one used too many, it could get into the smoke and change the taste of the food.
In later years, the old faithful charcoal barbeque was thrown away, superseded with a gas version but it opened our eyes to the matter of cooking outdoors and we retained a small portable barbeque for trips out.
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