Survival Food Cooking

Having an emergency food supply is a giant step forward in your preparedness program. The next step is to know what to do with those basic survival foods.

If you are making a list of skills to learn, basic cooking is a great one to explore.  Not everyone will be a master chef.  Not everyone needs to be.  But basic cooking knowledge is important to everyone.  Not only will it be potentially life-saving in a survival situation, but even in day-to-day life, the ability to cook for yourself can make a healthy difference between living off of wholesome foods or noxious convenience foods.

There are some great cooking resources out there, but keep in mind that in an emergency situation you may not have access to the internet.  The power may be out, or cell towers may be down.  Or, after an extended economic downturn, you may not even be able to afford power or cell service.  Learning what you can before an emergency and having hard copies on hand is important.

For cooking a wide variety of foods using basic ingredients, check out the free public domain book Two Hundred and Seventy-Five War-Time Recipes by Carolyn Webber.  This is a book from 1918 which has been digitized by Google.

I suggest copying or printing the recipes you like, so that you will have access to them during emergency situations.  One good place to keep the recipes is right with your food supply.

There used to be a reprint of this book that you could buy, but it’s out of stock right now and I don’t know when or if it will be available again.

You can find other resources, too.  There are a number of good survival cooking books you can buy.  I will be eventually reviewing some of them here.  In the meantime, you can see a few at this Amazon link for survival cookbooks.  This is not an affiliate referral link nor an endorsement. It’s just something for your consideration, to help get you started in your search for more information.

There are also some good recipes using basic ingredients at Survivopedia.

When cooking in emergency situations with limited supplies, you will almost certainly need to substitute ingredients in recipes.  For instance, your recipe may call for butter, but maybe you don’t have any butter.  Consider printing out this excellent web page of Emergency Food Substitutions from agriculture.com and keep it with your emergency food supply.