All green vegetables should be crisp and firm when they are cooked. If they have been around camp for several days and have lost their freshness, first soak them in cold water. A piece of pork cooked with beans and peas will give them a richer flavour. The water that is on canned vegetables should be poured off before cooking. Canned tomatoes are an exception to this rule, however. Save all the leftovers. If you do not know what else to do with them, make a stew or soup. You can make soup of almost anything. The Chinese use birds’ nests and the Eskimos can make soup of old shoes. A very palatable soup can be made from various kinds of vegetables with a few bones or extract of beef added for body. The length of time to cook things is the most troublesome thing to the beginner. Nearly everything will take longer than you think. Oatmeal is one of the things that every beginner is apt to burn, hence the value of the double boiler. Rice is one of the best camp foods if well cooked. It can be used in a great variety of ways like cornmeal. But beware! There is nothing in the whole list of human food that has quite the swelling power of rice. Half a teacupful will soon swell up to fill the pot. A tablespoonful to a person will be an ample allowance and then, unless you have a good size pot to boil it in, have some one standing by ready with an extra pan to catch the surplus when it begins to swell. There are certain general rules for cooking which may help the beginner although they are not absolute. Mutton, beef, lamb, venison, chicken, and large birds or fish will require from ten to twenty minutes’ cooking for each pound of weight. The principal value of this is to at least be sure that you need not test a five-pound chicken after it has been cooking fifteen minutes to see if it is done. Peas, beans, potatoes, corn, onions, rice, turnips, beets, cabbage, and macaroni should, when boiled, be done in from twenty to thirty minutes. The surest test is to taste them. They will be burned in that many seconds, if you allow the water to boil off or put them in the middle of a smoky fire where they cannot be watched. Fried things are the easiest to cook because you can tell when they are done more easily. Fried food however is always objectionable and as little of it should be eaten as possible. You are not much of a camp cook if a frying pan is your only tool. A bottle of catsup or some pickles will often give just the right taste to things that otherwise seem to be lacking in flavour. In frying fish, always have the pan piping hot. Test the grease by dropping in a bread crumb. It should quickly turn brown. “Piping hot” does not mean smoking or grease on fire. Dry the fish thoroughly with a towel before putting them into the pan. Then they will be crisp and flaky instead of grease-soaked. The same rule is true of potatoes. If you put the latter on brown butcher’s paper when they are done, they will be greatly improved.