[Sca-cooks] Dutch oven question

[Kirrily Robert]

Micaylah wrote:
>
>Phlip, email me if you would like some further Dutch oven sites to check
>out. I have become fairly proficient in the last couple of years using
>this method of cooking. I also bought a forged Viking tripod and various
>hooks and claws last year to try out. Haven't had the nerve to yet
>though. Jumping from charcoal/briquette cooking with a Dutch oven to
>fire cooking fairly sends me into a swoon. But then, until this past
>year bread did the same thing to me so perhaps I am overreacting! :)

Perhaps Micaylah or someone else can help me out.  I was recently in a
second hand store and saw dutch ovens for what I considered to be
exorbitant prices.  One in quite good condition was $72, and one in
worse condition was $54.

I politely asked the proprietor what a dutch oven would cost new, not
wanting to outright accuse him of trying to rip people off.  He told me
that you couldn't get them anymore.  Well, I might be a long way from
home, but in my experience dutch ovens aren't hard to find in good
camping stores, and I told him so.

Well, he started to tell me how that might be the case in Australia,
where people lived wild in the outback and they didn't have electricity
and so on and so on.  I thought this was pretty funny since I come from
a city three or four times the size of the one this shop was located in,
and settled some 30 years earlier, but I kept my cool.

I told him I was fairly certain I would be able to find a new dutch oven
for under $40 even here, and he backpedalled and said "oh, well that's
not what *I'd* call a dutch oven... flimsy... poor quality... made in
Taiwan..."

Well, I left his store and I won't be back.  When I got home I looked
online at the catalogue of a local camping store where I'd bought my
tent for SCA camping, and found that they had large dutch ovens for
about $25.

So here's my question: is there any significant variation in the quality
of dutch ovens?  In particular, would I regret buying a basic dutch oven
from a reputable camping goods store, and wish I'd paid extra to have it
hand-cast by the ancient and sekrit dutch masters of pot-making?  Is the
difference (if it exists) anything that I'd notice in my use of it, or
would it be a matter of it lasting only 100 years instead of 300 years?

Yours,

Kirrily

--
Lady Katherine Robillard  (mka Kirrily "Skud" Robert)
katherine at infotrope.net  http://infotrope.net/sca/
Caldrithig, Skraeling Althing, Ealdormere
"The rose is red, the leaves are grene, God save Elizabeth our Queene"