This fun illustration and text is from the 1955, “Nothing’s More Fun Than… Eating Outdoors“. Since the text may be a little hard to read in the image, here is what it says… enjoy!

Camp Tricks

Hot, mealy, baked potatoes and butter. Are they good! Here’s the trick: Choose potatoes about the same size so al will be done at the same time. Scrub them well. Place them in hot coals and cover with embers while the rest of the fire is built up for food which is still to be cooked. If this isn’t done, all to frequently baked potatoes are brought our half raw and half done. Medium potatoes take about 1 hour. If you want to hurry them, parboil potatoes at home and cover them with the hot ashes around the edge of the campfire.

Mealy potatoes?  Eeeww!  No, mealy potatoes are not good, in fact they are nasty.  Oh, perhaps they mean “meal like” when they say “mealy”… and not, uh, mealy as in grainy icky potatoes.  I mean, if mealy didn’t already have a definition in the dictionary that lends to icky, then the word “mealy” meaning meal-like would a really cool word and description… but that isn’t the case!

I also find it interested they just toss the whole potato in without first wrapping it aluminum foil. I mean my cooking outdoors with aluminum foil cookbook says to do that!  Plus, when I was a kid, my parents went to a cookout where they baked potatoes this way, wrapped in foil and tossed in the fire pit, and they grilled steaks on rocks.  (Must’ve been a Flintstone’s dinner party.) So there you go!