MagForce French 6-piece Mess Kit, Bloody huge, Aluminum

A humongous six-piece French mess kit, portable field kitchen, or post-apocalyptic restaurant, whichever you wanna call it. You can make soup for a whole bunch of people with this and serve the cheese and other fancy nibbly bits on different trays. A splendid choice as a backup kitchen when the crap hits the fan.

Features

We don’t have that much information about these things apart from the fact that similar ones have been used at least in France, in the 60s/70s, possibly of course also in other military forces. The idea is not to give each soldier one of these but to cook several person’s meals with one kit.

This six-piece kit has two D-shaped serving trays, a shallower and a deeper cooking dish, a large pot, and a lid. Just like normally sized mess tins, these are stacked into one "handy" package that you carry using the pot handle. You can also secure these together with a strap, as you do with Trangia, but the strap isn’t included.

The logo on the lid reveals that the kits we got were made by MagForce, which was a French military gear company founded somewhere in the 1950s. We don’t know whether these kits were made for the French armed forces or some other army or whether they are some NOS stuff. Our guess is that these never made it to any army warehouse and thus we didn’t label these as military surplus.

Use

This is a fantastic field kitchen for even a larger family. When your house is out of power, or the electricity prices skyrocket, you can cook lots of stew and stuff in your backyard with these. And when the world collapses around you, and the mushroom zombies rule the streets, you still have cooking gear for that lifesaving roadkill raccoon gumbo. And with a full belly, life doesn't seem that bad.

These aren’t definitely ideal for ultralight hikers. However, if you hike, hunt, or do other outdoor stuff with a larger group, this will handle that very nicely. These are also suited for folks who are into car trekking

Size info

As mentioned, this is one jolly hunk o' metal. The measurements when packed for transportation are c. 35 x 26.5 x 32.5 cm (13.8" x 10.4" x 12.8") and the weight 3.3 kg (7.3 lbs). Below you’ll find the measurements of the individual pieces:

• D-shaped serving tray: 25.3 x 16.3 x 3.8 cm (10.0" x 6.4" x 1.5")
• Oval shallow dish: 34.2 x 26.5 x 7.0 cm (13.5" x 10.4" x 2.8")
• Oval deeper dish: 31.5 x 25.2 x 8.9 cm (12.4" x 9.9" x 3.5")
• Oval pot: 30.5 x 23.5 x 21.5 cm (12.0" x 9.3" x 8.5")
• Lid: 32.9 x 26.1 x 2.0 cm (13.0" x 10.3" x 0.8")

Condition

These are unused, but due to the softness of aluminum, they probably have some minor scratches caused while moving them from warehouse to warehouse. These beauty marks have no effect on usability. Even though they are unused, they are most likely quite old. The manufacturer no longer exists, at least under this name.