Dutch Oven Delight
Cooking is a great way to bring people together, and nothing epitomizes this more than the National Dutch Oven Gathering (NDOG) — an annual meeting of people from across the United States and Canada who’ve discovered that a love of food can center around a love of Dutch ovens.
To many home cooks, a Dutch oven is a large, deep pot that churns out endless batches of stovetop soups and chilis for family dinners. Before I visited with the attendees of the 2018 NDOG in Hutchinson, Kansas, I was of the same opinion; a Dutch oven meant my mother’s enormous, enameled Le Creuset pot. That mental image was corrected the moment I stepped into the room for NDOG’s daily group breakfast. Inside was a long row of tables boasting dozens upon dozens of “camp” Dutch ovens, each full of food that’d been cooked on the fairgrounds that morning: French toast, country grits, biscuits and gravy, eggs, and so on.
To participants of the national and all other regional gatherings, a Dutch oven is a cast-iron or aluminum pot that sits on
