For pennies

WHY LIGHT YOUR CHARCOAL THIS WAY?

All you need is some newspaper and an old piece of stovepipe. It's what we do here, after being enlightened and equipped, courtesy of retired tool and die-maker Dick Dietrich of East Troy, WI. Dick came up to the sewer raccoon headquarters* with a gift of the fixings for doing away with charcoal lighter fluid. He also brought a couple big bags of the charcoal he makes himself from scrap wood palettes, etc, in 50 gallon oil drum-fashioned retorts on his rural property.

It works best of you happen to have a Weber or kettle-type cooker, especially if you want to get away with very little fuel for a lot of cooking, like a whole chicken as Dick demonstrated, or just a few hot dogs or burgers. The domed enclosing lid retains the heat.

Either way, you're going to use a small-diameter charcoal holder in the center of the cooker. It's all the heat you need, though most people, like Crankshaft above, load their grills with way too much charcoal and huge dousings of lighter fluid. (We assume gasoline is a joke by the cartoonist.)

To begin, take a steel heavy gauge cooking pot and put a small length of stove pipe in in, after snipping jagged, air-admitting V's into the bottom. Stuff in some crumpled newspaper and then load a few small handfuls of charcoal on top of the paper in the pipe.

When you light the newspaper - at the bottom of the stovepipe - a chimney affect is created, and soon your charcoal has the stovepipe glowing red with heat. With a pliers, safely remove the hot stovepipe and lay it aside. Then with a padded mitt from the kitchen, pick up the kettle with the glowing coal and pour the coals in the small, also stovepipe-fashioned, ring at the bottom of your cavernous (or not) cooker. It sits on a simply-bent corners wire screen base for coal ash retention AND air admission for the charcoal. Dick, a stranger but not anymore, made all this stuff for us for free.

Note the jagged cuts at the left in the pipe.

This is all the charcoal it takes to run a big Weber.

The finished product doesn't look too bad.

*Dick became a friend after he called the news headquarters answering a net-posted request for a working Svea 123 gas camping stove. We have one but wanted another for parts. He could have been calling from anywhere in the world, but it turned out that he was just a few miles from here near East Troy! He didn't have a 123 but wondered if I had any gas blow torches. (No, I didn't.)

We talked for about an hour on many subjects and then got on the subject of charcoal-cooking. Dick came here, and is a colorful and genial chap, it turned out. He and his wife go to Civil War reenactments and rendevous, and do alot of camping.

We hope you've bought your last can of charcoal lighter fluid, employ "heat rises" technology, and enjoy the pleasure and sumptuous taste of wood-cooked food, without any chemicals or lingering fumes; and on the cheap!

[Dick showed us how us how to ignite charcoal using cut-up bits of wax-covered supermarket produce cartons he gets for free. They burn a long time, and hot.]