“I wonder what the foreman of the jury, whoever he’ll be, has got for breakfast,” said Mr. Snodgrass . . .
“Ah!” said Perker, “I hope he’s got a good one.”
“Why so?” inquired Mr. Pickwick.
“Highly important; very important, my dear sir,” replied Perker. “A good, contented, well- breakfasted juryman, is a capital thing to get hold of. . . .”—Dickens, Pickwick Papers.
Thus it was that a great student of human nature and a keen delineator of its many weaknesses and foibles, in his account of that historic breach-of- promise trial, the case of Bardell vs. Pickwick, gave utterance to a profound truth, and hinted at the tremendous part that proper feeding plays in the relations and behavior of human beings.
In our Navy we have realized for many years the importance of proper feeding, and we have realized that huge contribution it makes toward the efficiency and contentment of our personnel. Accordingly, the food we give our men is purchased and prepared under the supervision of trained commissary officers; the menus are compiled so to provide the most healthful items and combinations, with the greatest possible diversification to avoid monotony; the weekly menus are checked and approved by the captain; the prepared food is sampled by the captain from time to time, a sample of every meal is sent to the officer of the deck for his inspection and testing, and altogether every effort is made to insure that our men will receive the best possible in the way of proper and appetizing food.
But—and with a very large “but”—you will note that all of this care is exercised in regard to the feeding of our enlisted personnel, and we seem to have lost sight of the fact that the manner of feeding our officers might have a very important bearing upon the efficiency of the ship as a whole. Surely, there can be no greater factor in the morale of the entire ship than a well-run wardroom mess, with proper food, prepared and served in an appetizing manner, and with an intelligent arrangement of menus to provide a wide variety and avoid frequent repetition. But how often do we encounter a mess with those attributes? I am afraid it is but seldom, and when we do find one it is invariably due to the efforts of that rara avis, an energetic and interested mess treasurer who knows something about food and appreciates its importance in the affairs of men.
To paraphrase part of the quotation above, I might say that, “A good, contented, well-breakfasted officer is a capital thing to get hold of,” both for his superiors and his subordinates; and it is certain that a well-lunched officer and a well-dined officer also would be capital things. However, it is feared that such officers are not as common as they should be, and their dearth can be attributed probably to the system under which we operate our officers’ messes, and the manner in which the average mess is handled.
The most obvious shortcomings of our wardroom messes perhaps are the stereotyped menus and the stereotyped methods of preparing food which are so general throughout the Navy, and which—both the menus and the methods—seem to be based upon the restricted facilities and the dietary practices of many years ago. Needless to say they leave very much to be desired, and it appears that a thorough modernization and overhauling of our system would be a helpful thing, and that a thorough shaking-up and re-education of our officers’ cooks and stewards would be also very helpful. Then our officers could be fed more nearly in accordance with our modern dietary ideas, and in the manner which other professional men of equivalent physical and mental effort have found necessary nowadays to their efficiency and their health.
The re-education of our cooks and stewards, I must admit, probably would be a task beside which the much-quoted Augean and Sisyphean contracts would seem but rather minor jobs. For many years it has been the practice of a certain species of glib writer or shallow speaker to hold seafarers, and especially naval officers, up to the public gaze as horrible examples of the most hidebound conservatism, and as a class to whom the very word change is anathema. I wonder if any one of those critics has ever tried to get one of our stewards or our cooks to change ever so slightly his ideas on the preparation of food? If this critic hasn’t attempted it, then he knows not of what he speaks. The preparation of our officers’ food seems to be governed by a set of rules and customs so rigid and immutable that, compared with them, the famed and proverbially inflexible laws of the Medes and Persians would be as soft and yielding putty. The genesis of most of these rules and customs seems to be shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and it appears that no amount of diligent inquiry can unearth the reasons for their existence. As one outstanding example of these apocryphal practices, I commend to the earnest student for research the peculiar but inviolable law which requires that a meat loaf always have a hard-boiled egg lurking within as a core. In vain have I endeavored to uncover the motive behind this custom; the only answer seems to be—“We’ve always done it that way.”
Considering first the subject of the wardroom menus, I think it is obvious that generally they are unsuitable for men performing the type of mental and physical labor that our officers do. Perhaps our luncheon menus are the most open to criticism and subject to improvement in this. regard. We all know the average luncheon; a meal which in the nature and the quantity of its viands would be highly appropriate for hard-working longshoremen, but which usually leaves officers in a torpid or a tortured state, according to their individual digestive potencies, and absolutely precludes any efficient effort for several hours afterward. The dinner menus, while possibly they cannot be as varied or as flexible as those for luncheon, nevertheless offer a fertile field for more intelligent planning and supervision than they apparently now receive. In particular, the fitness of the menus, considering the locality in which the ship happens to be, the climate, and the availability of special foodstuffs peculiar to that locality, is seldom given proper consideration. As a common illustration of this point of unfitness, undoubtedly most of us can remember time and time again sitting down in a stifling wardroom in a nice warm corner of the tropics, and there to be confronted with a layout of roast pork or duck, with rich heavy gravy, and all the other standard accompaniments; topped off with canned plum pudding covered with hard sauce. A meal that perhaps would be highly appropriate and welcome on the bleak and icy shores of Little America, but in the tropics is hardly other than a gastronomic horror, and as out of place as would be tallow candles and seal blubber. Many other such common examples can be cited or probably will occur to mind, but in the main I think it cannot be gainsaid that our menus show a lack of thought and imagination and, furthermore, that they show a general lack of realization of the huge variety of foodstuffs, especially fresh produce, that modern transportation and marketing methods have made available to us all the year round.
After the subject of menus comes the subject of the actual cooking. Here again is a crying need for correction and for betterment. Apparently the policy of training our officers’ cooks has been to have them work directly under older cooks, without the benefit of any instruction from non-navy or specially trained and qualified teachers. As a result there has been a sort of inbreeding process, and a perpetuation of many objectionable and outdated methods that are entirely out of accord with modern dietary ideas, and fail sadly to utilize the wide opportunities made possible by our present-day cooking and refrigerating equipment.
While we are on the subject of cooking, I should like to offer a few comments on a matter that is near and dear to the heart of almost every officer; and one upon which the most tongue-tied and reticent of officers can usually discourse with bitter and amazing fluency. This matter is none other than that time-honored and perennial bone of contention—our wardroom coffee, probably the most mysterious of all the unaccountable aspects of our wardroom cooking. Theoretically the brewing of good coffee should be no more difficult than the process of boiling an egg, and yet good coffee in the wardroom mess is something we seldom find, and in many cases outside of the fact that the liquid is dark-colored and strong, and is served in a coffee cup, it seems to have little connection with, or resemblance to, what is accepted as coffee in most circles ashore.
The reasons for this condition probably are many and varied, and possibly bound up with our training methods, but I think the most evident reason is the want of skilled and relentless supervision over the pantry personnel. To illustrate: Once in a spirit of desperation and revolt I attempted to obtain potable coffee for the mess. Like Cousin Egbert, I could be pushed just so far, and I balked at the awful decoction coming to the table as coffee. Standing over the pantry boys I insisted upon a religious scouring out of every corner of the percolators, and then a prolonged boiling out with soda. The final touch was to prohibit the making of the coffee until just before it was to be served. As a result of this process a beverage that could be classed as fairly good coffee arrived at the table. The sad part was, however, that this pressure could not be maintained constantly, and its relaxation was immediately and thereafter signaled by the serving of the same nondescript liquid as before. I single the item of coffee out of our wardroom foodstuffs because of the fact that it bulks so large in the gastronomic side of our Navy life, and to most of us a good cup of coffee, like Mr. Pickwick’s well-breakfasted juryman, is a capital thing to get hold of.
Now comes the question of the administration of the wardroom mess; in particular our system of an elected mess treasurer. Here is a subject that can invoke the fiercest wardroom arguments, and undoubtedly the matter has been threshed out and discussed to the point of exhaustion. Nevertheless, I think that in the amendment of this system probably lies the solution of many of the grievances and the ills that beset every wardroom mess.
Some officers when elected make a determined and honest effort to run the mess properly and to the utmost possible benefit of their messmates. However, these officers are usually the hard-working type who already have a heavy load of ship’s duties, and handicapped by their lack of special knowledge and of time, they cannot get the results desired. Others perhaps will not put any special effort into the job, and merely sticking it out for the required two months, they abdicate gracefully with great relief on their part, but with far greater, albeit silent, relief on the part of their messmates. Practically all officers, however, look upon the job of mess treasurer as a sort of punishment duty, and most of us, if we are elected, shuffle off the coils as soon as it is legally possible. The job is a rather disagreeable and thankless one at best, and it is made more difficult by the fact that most of us know very little of foods, and their proper combinations and proper cooking, and accordingly we must depend almost entirely upon the knowledge and advice of the steward, which is not always to the best advantage from many standpoints.
In no other instance perhaps is the need for skilled supervision more apparent than when the purchasing of stores for a cruise takes place. In this process also our stewards are seemingly governed by apocryphal and sacrosanct laws which specify that certain articles always must be stocked no matter how long or where the cruise. Moreover, probably many of us can remember cases within our experience when the quantity and nature of some stores purchased for a cruise seemed to be absolutely inexplicable, and led to consequences that were rather uncomfortable to the mess. One such case I remember occurred when the wardroom steward, obeying some mysterious urge, plunged heavily in two such unrelated items as canned cherries and cold-storage ducks. The full import of this situation was not apparent, however, until the cruise had waxed in length, and we had devoured cherries in every possible form, nude and disguised, until we loathed the very sight of them, and we had eaten duck until it was gloomily hinted that some of us were actually beginning to waddle and quack. Toward the end of the cruise it seemed that despite our most valiant efforts, we had hardly made a dent in the stock of these articles, and every prospective transferee was warned that should he leave the mess he would have to accept his rebate in the form of six cans of cherries and a duck. I don’t remember what the final solution of the matter was, but I do know that it has left me with a violent and unreasoning antipathy toward those two particular comestibles.
As stated before, I think that by amending our present system we could do much toward improving our wardroom messes. We have now a number of young officers of the Supply Corps who have been specially trained in all the ramifications of foodstuff purchasing and availability as regards localities, seasons, etc., and the proper cooking combinations and menus of those foodstuffs. Would it be impracticable and would it not be all to the good if such an officer were attached to every large ship at least, and as part of his regular commissary duties supervised every feature of the wardroom mess except perhaps the finances? To preserve its independence the mess could still have a mess treasurer as its cash-keeper, which is really the least onerous phase of a present mess treasurer’s duties. Then with our re-educated cooks and stewards operating under the supervision of these specially trained officers, would there not ensue a large contribution toward the efficiency, contentment, and health of the residents of the wardroom?
Mealtimes then perhaps would present a millennial picture of a table surrounded by faces smiling as happily, and almost as toothily, as do the faces surrounding the dinner tables in the advertisements. Moreover, under the benign influence of good food and untroubled digestion, the greater part of the many little irritations of life at sea probably would pass unnoticed, and even the larger vexations would hardly impart a tremor to the general equanimity. Under such assumptions we can imagine the sadly-harassed executive officer of a large ship, after his day-long battle of adjusting and co-ordinating the many activities and contentions of a ship, the attempts to untangle the much-entangled marital and financial affairs of various men, and all the other soul- wearing tasks that cark his existence, coming into the wardroom and sitting down to a dinner, intelligently planned and carefully prepared and served. He will rise from the table at the meal’s end, and will repair to the movies with a good cigar and the soothing conviction that life is really quite pleasant, and that his captain and his subordinate officers are really very fine fellows. As the sense of well-being and kindly toleration then spreads through the wardroom, it is not inconceivable that even the shriveled leathery heart of the first lieutenant might experience a feeble glow and, expanding under the influence, cause the owner thereof to become almost amiable in disposition and almost liberal in his approval of requests for services or material.
I must admit that this picture verges upon the Utopian, but nevertheless it cannot be gainsaid that the matter of proper feeding plays so large a part in our health and consequently our efficiency, that any special attention and care we give to it is well worth while and would be to the best interest of the service. When we consider the constantly increasing demands made upon an officer’s time and effort while at sea, it is obvious that his everyday health must be of the best in order to meet these demands properly, and the starting point of this everyday health rests in what and how he eats. This does not mean fancy or elaborate dishes, but merely the proper food, and above all, properly prepared. The luxuries of yesterday are the necessities of today, and while our predecessors fought gallantly on salt beef and hardtack it is not amiss that we should require fresh beef and soft bread for our health, contentment, and efficiency.
HEAVEN sends us good meat but the Devil sends cooks.—DAVID GARRICK
We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends, we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.—OWEN MEREDITH
AS MUCH valour is to be found in feasting as in fighting, and some of our captains and knights will make this good and prove it.—ROBERT BURTON