Damper Dogs are stove-top baked bread made from white bread dough made in Newfoundland.
Traditionally, they were made on top of a cast-iron wood or coal stove, on the flat dampers that served as burners for the stove.
You’d clean the top of the stove, then heat it. Meanwhile, you would cut off egg-size pieces of risen bread dough, and flatten to be about 1/2 inch (1 cm) thick.
You would then cook the pieces of bread dough on the stove top dampers, browning on both sides, then serve them hot.
It was a way of giving kids and husbands some bread in a hurry, so that when the loaves of bread came out of the oven, they’d leave them alone until dinner.
Damper Dogs can’t be made on electric or gas stove tops, as they require a flat surface. They are now fried up in frying pans, in oil.
Girl Guides also make something completely different that they call Damper Dogs: they make a dough from an instant biscuit mix, take an egg-sized amount of the dough, roll it out long between their hands, then spiral it around a stick, cover it in foil and hold it over a fire to cook it until golden brown.