Silver Spoon Cooking Award

Overview

The Silver Spoon is a travelling award given to the patrol that displays superb campsite cookery during selected meals at troop campouts. The actual award is a silver serving spoon that hangs from the winning patrol’s flag until another patrol wins the award and takes it for their own flag.

Rules

1. Standard Boy Scout guidelines and safety precautions must be followed at all times (see your Scout Handbook for details).
2. Food must be prepared at the campsite. Some minor preparation is allowable, such as dicing onions or meat, or premixing spices, etc. Check with the Scoutmaster before you leave for the campout if you are not sure about your pre-trip preparation plans.
3. Basic troop cooking equipment should be used (propane stoves, dutch ovens, etc. You may bring special equipment (reflector oven, solar cooker, etc.) with Scoutmaster’s prior approval. You are not required to use such equipment but you may be awarded extra points for creativity or judge’s discretion bonus points.
4. All winning recipes will be compiled into a special Silver Spoon cookbook. Any patrol may use previous winning recipes for competition meals or regular meals (you can have a good tasting meal anytime!).
5. The Patrol Leaders Council (PLC) will decide which campouts are suitable for the contest and which meal will be judged (breakfast, lunch, dinner or evening treat.) The PLC will make sure that the contest does not conflict with other planned campout activities.

Judging

A panel of Rocking Chair Patrol members will do judging. The panel will be randomly divided into judging teams. Each team is assigned a patrol to judge. The team will join the patrol at the beginning of the meal preparation. They will mark their scores for each of the contest categories listed below. If there are more than one judge scoring a patrol, each of their sheets will be added together and an average of their scores will be the patrol’s competition score.

The Troop Senior Patrol leader or his delegate will serve as competition master judge. The Master Judge will tally the scoring sheets and announce the winner. The decision of the Master Judge is final.

Judging Criteria

There are five categories; Meal Preparation, Cooking, Presentation and Bonus. Each category has rating points for evaluation. They are evaluated as being Terrible, Bad, Poor, Okay, Good or Great, with zero to five points assigned to respectively. The judges will circle the number for the evaluation point that matched the score given. For example, if your meal tasted "Great," the judge would circle the "5."

Scoring

The Master judge will total the points for each column at the bottom in the "Add columns" row. Then he will add these numbers to calculate the "Total" score. Total scores from each Judge will be added together and then divided by the number of judges to determine the patrol’s average score. The patrol with the highest average score wins!

Download Sheets

The rules, judging sheets & tally sheet are listed below for downloading.  I also have provided the full Microsoft Word document so you can modify it to meet your own needs or troop style.