...I have pretty much struck out. I refuse to carry cast iron...there's no reason to torture myself to that end just to add the ability to fry food on occasion. No one makes one small enough for my personal wants/needs, nor makes one out of an acceptable material for, again, my wants and needs."...Sam was a good cook, even by Hobbit reckoning, and he had done a good deal of the camp-cooking on their travels, when there was a chance. He still hopefully carried some of his gear in his pack: a small tinder box, two small shallow pans, the smaller fitting into the larger; inside them a wooden spoon, a short two-pronged fork, and some skewers were stowed; and hidden at the bottom of the pack in a flat wooden box a dwindling treasure, some salt."
-The Gear of Samwise Gamgee described during their time in Northern Ithilien, The Lord of the Rings, Part 2: The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 4: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
So a few weeks back, I came across this gem in a local antique store, along with a pair of spatulas which matched it in style of manufacture: a large, flat ladle made of mild steel.
It is pretty clearly hand-hammered, and a bowl of this sort could easily be cold-worked by anyone on this board with a dishing stump and a bit of time. If you have a bench grinder and an old Shield boss you don't need, grinding off an inch of depth could achieve the same effect. The handle in this particular piece has either been forge-welded on, or is a part of the whole, but regardless, it is conically rolled, and welded/soldered together in some fashion along the seam.
Somewhere (though not in the above quote) I could've sworn that Sam's pan was described as having a folding handle. I've considered cutting this handle off and making a new handle on a hinge to make this super-compact, but I hit a wall when I considered in advance (for once) the adventure that would be trying to pour off grease out of a pan that has a folding handle. Adding a latch mechanism to keep it in place when wanted was starting to get too complicated, and a handle that folds is going to wind up a bit short, thus a bit close to the fire for my finger's personal preferences.
Quick Test Run this evening, for Baked Potato Night (no, I don't feed my family potatoes baked in mud):
So I decided, against every fiber of my being, to leave this sucker as is, with a 4" pan and a 7" handle. I carry a meager amount of cooking oil in a little corked flask of sorts to help avoid burning/sticking, and the fact that it's steel, rather than tin-lined like my boiler and cup, means I can scrub the crap out of it with creek gravel after cooking to get any leftovers out of it, rather than having to worry about scratching off a lining, etc.
Anywho, cooked bacon up in a reasonable amount of time, and slides comfortably between wraps along the top of my Yukon pack, so it's accessible enough for a quick fried mushroom on the trail if I'd like, but complately out of the way and out of sight at all other times. The BIG perk, is that it is small enough to help me ration my meat supply, so I don't fry up an entire side of salt pork in one night, etc. I'm planning to save the bacon drippings from one night's salt pork ration by keeping them in the pan for one night, so the next morning I can heat it up and immediately have some flavoring that I can add to some crumbled up hardtack or the like. If I soak one meal's worth of hardtack in water overnight--as was common in its use--I can fry up the crumbles and have bacon flavored fried "pancakes" of a sort for breakfast. Quick, easy, and nothing has to boil, etc.
Did I mention I got this and two spatulas for ten bucks? Not sure what I'll use the spatulas for as far as Rangering goes, but they'll serve nicely at some larger function, I'm sure.
Rather proud of this one. I think it'd be plenty reasonable to say that this could've been made BY Rangers, FOR Rangers, but I'd like to think that a Dwarf of the Blue mountains, traveling as a tinker to repair cooking pots and such for money was commissioned to hammer this out real quick when visiting Bree.
Would've been a fun conversation to hear. "You see, Dwarf, I've got this problem..."