Therefore, to see what manner of man it is whom sailors have had to deal with their food in the majority of vessels up till the advent of the great passenger-steamers, and who is carried as a cook of to-day in thousands of sailing vessels, it is necessary to take a trip in a vessel dependent upon sail-power for propulsion—a vessel wherein you may be a matter of five or even six months at sea without making a call anywhere, for ever so short a time. It is perfectly safe to say that, even at the present day, seven out of ten sailing-ship cooks are only so styled by courtesy, or for want of a better name to give them. And this is in despite of the well-meant, and, in most cases, philanthropic efforts that have recently been made to train cooks for ship work. The good people who, with the welfare of the seaman at heart, take so much pains in order that he shall have his food properly prepared are undoubtedly doing a good work for their pupils; but the unhappy sailing-ship man seldom gets the benefit from those educated cooks that their teachers hope for. And this for the simple reason that, when once a ship's cook has really learned cookery, he will use his utmost endeavours to get a ship where there is something that requires skill in cooking. So he gets into steam, and, once there, only some dire misfortune will bring him back to a wind-jammer again.
Yet, strangely enough, even the elementary skill required for cooking the staple food served out in the great majority of sailing ships to-day is generally wanting. Surely it is only reasonable to expect a man who engages to serve as cook of a ship to be able to boil salt beef and pork, make pea-soup, and bread, and boil rice. Nothing more is required of him at sea than this, for the better food carried for the cabin is prepared by the steward, who will generally give an eye to it also during preparation. But it is seldom that you will find a sailing-ship cook who will, or who can, do these things properly. And as to taking a little trouble to make this coarse food palatable by varying its treatment, such cooks would be astounded, indignant, at the revolutionary idea. Then, when in port the fare is changed to that of fresh meat and vegetables, the only thing that the cook seems capable of doing is to make one kind of soup. That is usually good, but soon becomes monotonous. As to roasting meat or cooking potatoes nicely, such a thought is not to be entertained; or, if the cook does try to do such a thing, the meat is usually so hard as to be uneatable by any one but a sailor or a savage.
Now, I am aware that these statements of mine will be met with indignant denials in some quarters. I shall be told that things have altered so much for the better since my day (sixteen years ago) that I should hardly recognize them. Unfortunately for the makers of such remarks, I have taken pains to find out whether this is really the case, ready and eager to rejoice in the fact, if it were a fact. And I have found to my sorrow that among sailing ships the improvement is practically nil. When I was going to sea there were good-living ships, where plenty of preserved meats were carried, and the crews treated periodically to fresh messes; ships where abundance of potatoes and turnips and onions were put on board, and served out liberally to the crew forward as well as the officers; where a regular allowance of butter and pickles was made, and in cold weather oatmeal porridge was served out for breakfast. And there were lines of sailing ships where a scale of provisions such as these was drawn up on generous lines, and incorporated in the ship's articles instead of the shameful Board of Trade scale. There are such ships to-day, but their proportion is no greater than it was then. And if any will speak of official inspection of provisions, in order to ensure a high standard of quality, I would respectfully call their attention to the innumerable statements made and uncontradicted this present winter of the abominable condition of the food supplied on board many of the transports to our troops on their way to South Africa. Not that I believe such food would find its way into the kids of the crews of those transports in the ordinary course of things. No; but such food as that is in the ordinary course of things carried by sailing ships, the majority of them for the supply of their foremast hands.
Now, in these days such behaviour on the part of those whose business it is to supply ships with food is unpardonable, not only because it is cruel, but because it is unbusinesslike. It would be cheaper to supply preserved fresh meat than salt, cheaper to vary the food instead of giving hapless men the infernal monotony of beef and duff, pork and pea-soup, every other day for a matter of a hundred to a hundred and fifty days on end. There is really no reason why every ship afloat should not have a pound of butter per week served out to each sailor, or why a sufficient quantity of such easily kept vegetables as potatoes, turnips, and onions should not form a regular portion of a sailor's dietary. It is also very well to talk of the healthiness of sailors; but you will very seldom find a hale, deep-water sailor over fifty years of age. Nor is this due to volcanic outbursts of intemperance and other forms of vice while on shore. It is due to privation of vegetables, and bad, highly-salted meat as the only flesh food for long periods. Dried peas can never make up for the want of fresh vegetables, although apparently they are expected to do so, even when flavoured by the boiling with them of pork so salt that if allowed to remain in the soup for more than half an hour the latter is rendered uneatable. And then so many cooks are fond of an over-dose of carbonate of soda in the soup in order to ensure the peas bursting. No one ashore can have any idea of the craving which seamen on long voyages feel for fresh vegetables, the thought of them at times being almost maddening.
It may be said—although, from the real importance of the subject just touched upon in the few preceding paragraphs, I sincerely hope it will not be—that I have been making a purely gratuitous digression from my text. At any rate, I will now drop the subject-matter of cookery, and proceed to deal with the cook himself as fairly as I may. Unfortunately, my experience has been so unhappy that it is rather difficult for me to remember that there must be many good cooks in sailing ships, even if I have not had the good fortune to be shipmates with them during my sailing-ship voyages. However, I will do my best to be impartial.
In the first place, the routine of a cook's duties in a sailing ship is fairly fixed; there is not much room for variation. We will suppose that it is Monday morning in the middle of a long passage. At 4 a.m., when the middle watch is relieved, the cook is called. Going at once to his galley, he lights his fire with a handful of tarry yarns and a little wood, and pops the kettle on. Then a grating noise and a pleasant smell are manifest; he is grinding coffee. While the water is boiling he will attend to the mixing of the sponge set overnight for bread or duff, whichever it is his custom to make out of the half-pound of flour which every man is entitled to on that day of the week. At two bells (five o'clock) he puts his head out of the galley door and cries "Coffee." On the word every man of the watch on deck, except the steersman, brings his pannikin to the galley door and receives a little more than half a pint of—well, we'll call it coffee; but really, when you come to think of it, the name is somewhat misapplied. For the daily allowance is half an ounce of green beans, which, by the time they are roasted and ground, are hardly capable of yielding sufficient caffeine to make a pint and a half of drinkable infusion, or rather decoction, since the cook must boil it to get any flavour at all. But that is a detail. At any rate, the liquid is hot, and it may be sweet, if the drinker is economical with his twelve ounces of sugar, careful enough to make it last him the week.
This morning coffee is a great institution. However unsavoury it may be as a beverage, it is looked forward to as no other meal of the day is, for it breaks up the long and sleepy morning watch, it ushers in the day, and its medicinal effects are undoubted. After it has been drunk, the man at the wheel relieved for his share, and a smoke indulged in, the cry of "Wash decks" is heard, and the day's work begins. The cook's duties are light. He has nothing to prepare for the men's breakfast—that is, in eight ships out of ten—except another jorum of questionable coffee, about a pint for each man. In most ships breakfast for the men is the grimmest farce imaginable. A few fragments of dry ship-biscuit, and a pint of coffee, cannot by any stretch of courtesy be called a meal. A little butter would go far to make it one. A few potatoes wherewith to make dry hash or lobscouse with a few remaining fragments of meat left from the two preceding meals, and an onion to flavour it with, would cause the ship to be gratefully regarded as a "good-living" packet. In American ships this is the rule; few indeed of them are to be found where a good breakfast is not provided for the men, and, what is quite as important, the quality of the bread (biscuit) supplied is usually superior to that found in the cabins of British sailing ships. Not so in Canadian vessels. It is a profound mystery to me, the way in which Canadian sailors, or, for the matter of that, longshoremen in Canadian coast villages feed. The fattest of fat pork, potatoes, and salt cod seem to be the staple food in the coasters, and as often as not "coffee" is made with burnt bread, and sweetened with exceedingly dubious molasses.
Lying in a Nova Scotian harbour once, loading lumber from a large schooner, I went on board at breakfast time. I found the skipper preparing breakfast for all hands—four of them. They did not muster a cook. He unearthed a mass of cold cooked potatoes and a block of pale pink fat, got out a big square tin, which he put on top of the hot stove, and, carving up the lump of fat into dice, sprinkled them over the bottom of the pan. He then peeled his potatoes, and dropped them into the pan on top of the hissing fat, stirring them round with his knife. As soon as the mass was warm through, breakfast was ready. The "coffee" was warmed up from yesterday, and its aroma was enough to kill a mosquito. I should think it would have made a fine disinfectant. Yet in that splendid country there is no want of the best food. There is a serious lack of cooking ability. I stayed in a "hotel" in one coast village for nearly two months one winter, where at least thirty always sat down to meals. Those meals never varied. Fried blocks of meat, potatoes boiled in their skins, soggy bread, and "pies," a sort of stew of cranberries or dried apples, spread over a dough-covered plate, and indurated in an oven, always formed the menu: never a bit of green vegetable, or any suggestion that even the same kind of meat might be made just as palatable, if not more so, by being treated in a different kind of way. I suppose these strong men look down with a certain contempt upon any careful treatment of food as being effeminate.
But to return to the British sailing-ship cook getting ready for breakfast. As I have said, the men's repast does not burden him. He may have in the oven a panful of "cracker-hash," a mess of pounded biscuit, chopped beef or pork mixed with water, and plentifully anointed with grease skimmed from the cook's coppers. This will have been got ready overnight by the younger members of the forecastle crowd. In many ships, however, this form of filling is strictly forbidden; that is to say, the cook is not allowed to have it in his oven, because it is well known to be most unwholesome, producing various intestinal disorders, and covering the men with boils. But the temptation to invent some means of distending the craving stomach is great, so most men break up the biscuit into their coffee, and shovel it down soaked, to the ruin of their digestions. Meanwhile the watch on deck are getting a razor-keen edge on their appetites. The strong, pure air, and the vigorous exercise of thoroughly cleansing the decks with a flood of water and much scrubbing, from stem to stern, is enough to do this, even if it were not aided by an occasional appetizing whiff from the galley of frying bacon or cunning stew, which is being got ready for the officers' morning meal. Those who have been sleeping in the crowded forecastle are naturally not so sharp set; they can do with a drink of coffee and a smoke. But when at eight bells (8 a.m.) the watch is relieved, and those who have been at work all the morning come below to the mockery that awaits them, there is much bitterness and bad language.
No sooner has the cook cleared off the cabin breakfast than he turns his attention to the duff or bread. The former curious compound is peculiar to British Merchant sailing ships. It is really boiled bread. It is made, like bread, with hop yeast, but a certain quantity of grease is mixed with it, and it is not put into the bags dry, like dough, but slack enough to run. The bags are made of canvas, conical in shape, to allow of the duff being turned out easily. Before the mixture is poured into them they are dipped in hot water—salt, of course; you cannot afford to use fresh at sea for such cooking purposes, except in steamers, where a condenser is always at work. When the due amount is poured into each bag it is loosely tied to admit of its rising, and plunged into a boiling copper, whence, if all be well, it will emerge at seven bells light and spongy. Usually a modicum of molasses is provided, to give it some flavour; but I have been in ships where even that poor adjunct was wanting.