How to cook while camping, without a sausage or a marshmallow in sight

You don’t need any complicated kit to eat well while sleeping under the stars. Just take a stove, a spork – and these recipes

Much as I love camping, I understand why so many recoil at the idea of spending their holidays sleeping in a field and sharing bathroom facilities with several hundred other people, plus the local spider population. But, having just enjoyed a week in Devon in a one-person tent, with an elderly terrier, I have to come out in praise of campsite cookery. Though we ate in some superb pubs, the meals that brought the most joy were the ones we threw together from the small village shops we passed. (Shout out to the Holne Community Shop and Tearoom for being so well stocked – and to the kind fellow shopper who gave me and the dog a lift back to the campsite with our loot.) It gave me pause for thought about the kind of meals you actually cook when camping … and by camping, I don’t mean sleeping in a van kitted out with a fridge and a cooker, nice as that looked while struggling with guy ropes. I mean when your only equipment is what you can carry on your back: ie a small gas stove or a disposable barbecue, a knife and a spork.

Joe Woodhouse has some lovely ideas here, and there’s plenty of advice in this collection of recipes from the likes of Ben Tish and Melissa Hemsley. But, for me, the trick is always to focus on one key ingredient that doesn’t need to be kept too cool (this will, of course, vary depending on where you’re camping), and base all your meals around it until it runs out, at which point you’ll need to track down a new one. Ours, on this trip, were chorizo – the cured, rather than the cooking kind – and feta. With those two flavour bombs, and the olive oil, chilli sauce and salt that should be on everyone’s packing list anyway, you can make a feast from almost anything you find en route. Claudia Roden’s spicy potatoes from Rioja would have been ideal, as would Thomasina Miers’ piperade with baked eggs and crispy chorizo, though we might have had to lose a couple of the spices in favour of Tabasco.

I love the look of Georgina Hayden’s blackberry, feta and seed salad, which has the advantage that one of the main ingredients will be coming into season sooner than you think, Yotam Ottolenghi’s watermelon and basil version, or Nigel Slater’s feta and puy lentil one, which could also be made with tinned lentils if you don’t want to fire the stove up. In one site, which boasted fire pits and rather damp kindling, we blackened aubergines over hard-won flames (not by me, I was never a Scout) and made baba ganoush of a sort (without tahini, so perhaps I shouldn’t claim the name), which was excellent in a supermarket pitta (though Ashleigh Butler’s yoghurt flatbreads would have been even better) with some feta and cherry tomatoes on top.

Our other standby was eggs. Farm campsites often sell their own, and with a box of eggs and some sort of bread you’re never a few minutes away from a good meal: scrambled eggs and chorizo, Valentine Warner’s nettle tortilla, fried egg rolls with squashed tomatoes, a little salt and a view of a gently babbling brook – no fancy hotel restaurant could hope to compete.

My week in food

I made a cake | Shameless blowing of my own trumpet here, but I was rather pleased with the triple-chocolate malt cake I made for the Substack summer fete last month, where it sat along offerings from fellow Feast contributors like Yotam Ottolenghi and Ravneet Gill. I’ve shared the recipe here, but credit for the frankly inspired dog design has to go to Chelsey of the Chelsweets baking site. Hers is a westie, mine is, of course, a cairn terrier, which is why mine looks a bit wilder.

Tour de Food | Forget the football or even the tennis; July is, for me, dominated by the greatest sporting event of them all, the Tour de France, home of hardcore athletes flogging themselves around some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe. If you’ve ever wondered what one eats when burning about 6,000 calories a day, this fascinating article lifts the lid on the world of team chefs and travelling kitchens, while the Tour’s official website explains what they could be eating in each region, if only they weren’t too busy cramming in carbs. TNT commentator Jonathan Harris-Bass is also posting a recipe a day on Instagram throughout the tour.

Cherries: ripe | I celebrated my birthday last week with a visit to the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent for their cherry weekend. I was so excited by the abundance and variety on offer that I came home with two huge punnets, which I then had to process, because, though they keep well in the fridge, even I can’t eat several kilos of fruit in a matter of days. Most went into the freezer for future use when cherries are but a sweet memory (freeze them in a single layer on a tray, then tip them into bags for easier storage); but, I also made an Uzbek cherry punch from Anna Ansari’s brilliant book Silk Roads (nice with rum, she suggests, but also with fizzy water), and a jar of Mary Cadogan’s pickled cherries, which she recommends with cured meat, or duck or chicken salads.

Cold brewhaha | Writing this at the beginning of the second heatwave of the season, I risk repeating myself in recommending the caffeine-dependent invest in a cold brew jug so you have chilled coffee, or tea on hand, especially if you work from home. I bulk buy bags of Rave’s coarsely ground beans designed for cold brew, and always have a batch on the go – indeed, it’s fuelling this email, so judge for yourself how effective it is.

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