A portable stove is a cooking stove specially designed to be portable and lightweight, used in camping, picnicking, backpacking, or other use in remote locations where an easily transportable means of cooking or heating is needed. Portable stoves can be used in diverse situations, such as for outdoor food service and catering and in field hospitals.

Since the invention of the portable stove in the 19th century, a wide variety of designs and models have seen use in a number of different applications. Portable stoves can be broken down into several broad categories based on the type of fuel used and stove design: unpressurized stoves that use solid or liquid fuel placed in the burner before ignition; stoves that use a volatile liquid fuel in a pressurized burner; bottled gas stoves; and gravity-fed "spirit" stoves.

The shichirin, a lightweight charcoal stove, has been used in Japan in much the same form since at least the Edo period (1603-1868). Old shichirin are mainly ceramic and many can be found in old houses. Most modern Shichirin are made by heating diatomaceous earth, but the raw materials are not uniform. There are also shichirin such as those made with a double inside and outside ceramic structure. The shape is mainly cylindrical, square, or rectangular, and the size also varies. Many varieties of shichirin are made for different uses. In North America, they are also known as "hibachi" or "hibachi-style".

Early European portable stoves burned animal fat and polar explorers continued to use blubber as a supplement for cooking fuel into the early 20th Century.

Modern portable stoves emerged from the mid-19th century. French-born chef, Alexis Soyer, became chef de cuisine at the Reform Club in London from 1837. He instituted many innovations, including cooking with gas, refrigerators cooled by cold water, and ovens with adjustable temperatures. In 1849 Soyer began to market his portable "magic stove" which allowed people to cook food wherever they were. The design of Soyer's "Magic Stove" was based on the same principle as a kerosene lamp, in which a wick is used to draw fuel from a tank or reservoir to a burner.

During the Crimean War, Soyer joined the troops at his own expense to advise the army on cooking. Later he was paid his expenses and wages equivalent to those of a Brigadier-General. He designed his own field stove, the Soyer Stove, and trained and installed in every regiment the "Regimental cook" so that soldiers would get an adequate meal and not suffer from malnutrition or die of food poisoning. Catering standards within the British Army would remain inconsistent, however, and there would not be a single Army Catering Corps until 1945. This is now part of the Royal Logistic Corps, whose catering HQ is called Soyer's House. His stove, or adaptions of it, remained in British military service into the late 20th century.

In the 1850s, the famous Alpine mountaineer Francis Fox Tuckett developed an alcohol stove for campers and mountaineers known as the "Russian furnace". It was also known as the "Rob Roy", after John MacGregor, the renowned canoeist who was nicknamed "Rob Roy". MacGregor's 1866 book, "A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe" was an international success and described his camping methods. Tuckett's stove and integral cook kit was designed to hang from a cord in the interior of a tent.

Fridtjof Nansen also developed an alcohol stove in the 1880s based on the work of Adolphus Greely. This improved on early designs and later became the basis for the Trangia cooker.