Does anyone really like s'mores?

It’s winter in Australia at the moment – and I know the other hemisphere looks upon Australia’s ‘freezing winters’ with as much sympathy as we look at your ‘blazing summers’, but it’s currently 7C outside and that’s bonfire weather wherever you are.

And thus I need to talk about the way we’re approaching around-the-fire food. Most of the culinary influence here seems to come from the Boy Scouts, which is flawed for several reasons. The Boy Scouts lifestyle is not really anyone’s idea of comfort. The Boy Scouts are also a group of 14 year olds, and you only have to see a group of 14 year olds with their fries and milkshakes after school to know they do perverted stuff with food.

Enter the s’more. It’s literally a Boy Scout recipe that was first published in a cookbook as the ‘Graham Cracker Sandwich’ in the early ‘20s, and then later that decade, was called the ‘Some More’ in a Girl Scouts cookbook. A few years in that terrifying mill known as the ‘Murrican vocabulary and it naturally became S’More.

Gah (Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash)

Gah (Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash)

It’s essentially marshmallow roasted over the fire – which in itself is a great idea –then sandwiched, with melting chocolate, between two crackers. It sounds amazing, doesn’t it? However, the result is a sticky wad of molten marshmallow, chocolate, ash, and dirt – in short, a 14 year old’s campfire mess, not a dessert anyone would wish for. Annoyingly, I’ve still got someone’s s’more burned onto a shoe I wore at a campfire 2 years ago.

Hence my recommendation for the contemporary campfire roaster is to stick with the standard marshmallow– and something you don’t hear of that often – the baked potato. As the evening burns on and the furnace is reduced to a glow, wrap potatoes in foil and toss them into the glowing ashes. After 10 minutes, salt and serve.

Oh, and cheese and wine. We’re not 14 anymore.