Another thing that always seemed radically wrong to me was the making of tea and coffee in the same pot used for soup, and making these infusions as if they were soups; serving them out, too, like soup, by ladlefuls, stirring up the leaves or grounds, as if afraid of defrauding some critical sailor of his due allowance. Surely it should not be so difficult to utilize a kettle for making tea and coffee. But these observances grow into the most conservative of customs, and it is like suggesting mutiny if some enterprising individual dares to hint at a change. One cook that I was shipmates with, a Maltese, perpetrated a piece of cookery that I am never able to forget. Some one had caught a dolphin, and, instead of frying it (in the oven) as usual, the cook boiled it, and indeed it was very palatable. But the next morning at coffee-time the coffee was too funny for anything. We were not at all dainty, but that mixture would not go down. So one of our number, a sarcastic old Yankee, went to the galley and said, "Hyar, cook, what in thunder hey ye ben improvin' th' coffee fur? It may be all right, but I'll be doggoned ef I kaint do better with it ez before. I've gut used t' it." So saying, he held out his pannikin invitingly. The cook took it, smelt it, tasted it, looked puzzled for a second or two, and then said triumphantly, "Oah, yez, I know. I boil him in de same pot I boil de fish las' night, 'n' I don' wash her out, see!" He was quite struck with his ingenuity in finding it out. And he wasn't punched either.
I mentioned the cook of the mess just now—but that is a term applied solely to a man who takes his turn with the others, where there are no boys or ordinary seamen in the fo'c'sle, to carry in the food, wash up the plates, or clean the fo'c'sle out, and trim the lamp. Now, in an American ship the crew's plates are washed by the cook, who also keeps the tin dishes in which their food is served to them as bright as silver. That, again, is a point where an American ship's cook differs widely from his British confrère. Indeed, it is not too much to say that a cook who would be called a very clean man in a British ship would be looked upon as dirty on board of a Yank, so high is the standard maintained there in matters of cleanliness.
Really I am half afraid to say what I have seen done by cooks on board British ships, it seems so incredible to landsmen. But the subject is so important in its bearing upon the well-being of the men, that one hardly likes to leave it without telling all the truth. I have seen a cook who did not know how to open a tin of meat, who tried to chop it in half with an axe; who was too lazy and filthy to wash the saucepans out, but wiped them out instead; another, who made duff without yeast, and boiled it in salt water without a bag—a lump of dough that was like a piece of grey india-rubber when it was served up; another, who did not use a frying-pan for steaks in harbour, but flung the chunks of meat upon the top of the red-hot stove, and unblushingly sent the charred flesh into the fo'c'sle for the men to eat.
But the strangest thing of all, a thing that puzzles me to this day, was the action of a crew in one vessel where we were cursed with the queerest specimen of an incapable for cook. We shipped a man in Rangoon as A.B. who was really a good cook as ship-cooks go; and as soon as he found out how things were, he volunteered to teach that wretched food-spoiler his duties in his (the seaman's) own time. Then, wonderful to relate, the very men who were suffering from the vile messes the pseudo-cook was making, turned round upon that volunteer, saying that if they were the cook they wouldn't allow no —— interloper to meddle with their work, so they wouldn't. Of course this discouraged the reformer, and he desisted from his laudable efforts, with the result that we were in a state of semi-starvation all the way home. Truly a sailor is a strange being.
There is a lower depth still, impossible as it may seem—in small vessels where the galley dwindles to a "caboose," a sort of sooty cupboard on deck, too small for the miserable youth who is both cook and steward to get into. So he stands on deck, often swathed in oilskins, his head in the grimy hole, with the smoke from the stove nearly stifling him, doing his "cooking." Does this state of things need any comment? Fancy cooking under such conditions, if you can. In bad weather, of course, the fire cannot be kept alight, so that the crew must go without any other comfort for their craving stomachs than biscuit and cold water. A short meditation upon such conditions of living should bring to many of us a sense of shame for our complainings at food which, were it ten times as bad, would be an unheard-of luxury to the sailors on board some of our ships.
Let me conclude with one more reminiscence. In a brig of which I was mate, on the East African coast, we shipped two Zanzibar Arabs as cook and steward. The skipper had his wife on board, and she, poor woman, on the passage home, was in danger of being starved to death. So the bo'sun and myself took it in turns to oversee those savages, cannily, too, for they valued not their life one jot, and would as soon have murdered us as look. Oh, how we suffered! At last we reached St. Helena, and got some fresh beef and vegetables. I cooked a dinner of these luxuries, and when it was brought into the cabin, the lady actually wept with delight at the prospect of one decent meal.
THE APPRENTICE (SUGGESTIONS).