THE COOK (IN STEAM).
In many respects the cook is the most interesting figure on board ship.
From him of the vast floating hotel, where the cook is a man of many
attainments, an artist in foods, who should, but does not, command
as great a salary as the chef of a first-class London hotel, down to
the miserable urchin who crouches low over his scarcely-shielded pot
on the open deck of a foreign-going barge, they not only deserve our
attention, they demand it, dumbly yet imperiously. How are the cooks
of first-class passenger steamers trained? Whence are obtained those
able manipulators of provisions who are always to be found on board
of excursion steamers that are laid up half the year, as soon as they
commence running? What do they do in the dead seasons, these magicians
who, in a space no larger than a reasonably-sized cupboard, succeed
in turning out a dinner of several courses for five hundred people,
no matter what the weather may be? Magician is surely the word, if
only for the marvellous way in which every corner of cramped space is
utilized, every trick of the culinary art--whereby the same thing is
presented under two or three totally different aspects and flavours,
and roasting, boiling, frying, and stewing go on apparently in the
same glowing chamber at the same moment--is practised. These things
amaze me; but, after all, much of the work may be done ashore, or in
the quiet of the moorings before starting-time in the morning, and
pastry may be bought all ready for table, also cold side-dishes.
But none of these adjuncts are available to the sea-going ship. His
dinners must be prepared, down to the smallest item, by the cook
himself and his subordinates. It is true that he has a large staff in
a liner, and that those assistants are carefully selected for their
several duties; but he has not, as his far better paid brother ashore
has, the power of dismissing any assistant summarily if that assistant
be incompetent or worse. That is, he has not such a power at the
time when it would be of use. In the day of battle, when the great
organization of an Atlantic liner's catering is going on, he must use
such men as he has; they cannot be exchanged for others. But how very
striking is the moral to be drawn from such a state of affairs. It is
that, considering the excellence of the work performed by these men,
there must be a most exalted standard of quality among them. And they
would seem to be a contented folk. We know, most of us, that the great
steamship companies have a reputation for treating their servants
generously, but generously-entreated workpeople are not always the most
contented. The cook and steward class in these vessels must be, or we
should hear them, for they are by no means a feeble folk. You will find
them occupying comfortable positions ashore while still in the prime of
life, having earned sufficient within a few years to enable them to
abandon the strenuous toil demanded of them at sea. They have earned
every penny, and have not been compelled to "carry the banner" in order
to get more. And in strangest out-of-the-way places of this wonderful
England of ours, you will come across quiet, gentlemanly men who,
upon opportunity arising, will inform you that they were cook of the
steamship _So-and-so_, or steward of such another one. They enjoyed the
life, but presently, like sensible men, they felt the need of a wife
and home and children, and they therefore looked about for something
suitable ashore, found it, and made room for a younger man.
No one, unless he belongs to the cooking-staff, has much opportunity
afforded him for prying into the galley on board a big passenger ship
during working hours. Those splendidly-fitted hives of industry may be
viewed at other times, but then they reveal nothing to the outsider.
This exclusiveness is not malicious, or for fear of being found fault
with. It is solely because there is no room for any but the workers,
who work indeed. Every inch of space is needed. Look down through the
hatch above, or peer in through the ports, and you will be astounded
at the way in which the cooks are handling the food, how in a space
where, by all ordinary rules of cookery, they should not have room to
move, they are turning out with conjurer-like dexterity a state dinner
of ever so many courses for a couple of hundred saloon passengers. And
then contrast their surroundings, if your previous experience enables
you so to do, with the palatial spaces of a grand hotel kitchen. Only,
you must remember at the same time the gale raging over the wide sea,
and the complicated movements indulged in by the ship as she strides
over the tremendous waves. So shall you acquire a respect for the
sea-cook that will endure all your days.
To compare great things with small, this mental picture brings before
me by association the cooks in the Australian coasting steamers. We
have nothing like the same lavish arrangements for cooks and stewards
on our own coasts, because our system is different. Here the fare is
exclusive of food. You may dine or not as it suits your purse or your
appetite. When you dine, you pay. But in the colonies the fare between
ports includes sumptuous feeding arrangements for the first-class
passenger, for the second--there are no third or deck passengers, as
with us--rough accommodation, but an unlimited supply of excellent
plain food. Australasia is truly the land of plentiful eating. And
the cooks--well, they are good, some of them super-excellent, and all
of them trained by hard experience to do much work in a very small
compass and with a tiny staff. The cook of the _Wonga Wonga_ stands
out boldly in my memory as one of the characteristic figures of my sea
experience. A huge negro with a voice of thunder, and an effervescing
humour that made him a prime favourite, he succeeded in his vocation
where many a better man might have failed. He was a fairly good
cook, but in his details of work reminded me strongly of the elderly
negress in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," who dished up a dinner out of chaos
and old night somewhere down below. Such an extraordinary jumble of
pastry-making, poultry-trimming, and all the varied operations required
in the preparation of a dinner was surely never seen. And out from
the weird confusion of things Sam would burst, smeared with blood and
grease and dusty with flour, brandishing a big knife and declaiming
Shakespeare on the slightest provocation. But in spite of the fact that
the whole preparation of a dinner for sometimes as many as five hundred
people, except peeling potatoes and the actual cooking, devolved upon
Sam alone, he was always up to time. It was dangerous to come near him,
though, as that time drew near. For then he drew perilously near being
a howling maniac. Yet no sooner had the last dish disappeared aft, than
Sam would sally forth from the galley, his ebony countenance aglow with
satisfaction, and a big pipe in his mouth. Down anywhere he would fling
himself, ready to discuss any question in the world, from the ruling of
an empire to the winning moves in a game of draughts. His successor,
when he got promoted to the _City of Melbourne_, was a far better cook,
and a paragon of order and cleanliness, but there wasn't a man in the
ship to say a good word for him. He was a shy Englishman.
Then, dropping still lower, I have every reason to remember the cook
of the _Helen M'Gregor_, sweetest of small passenger steamers had she
been on the London-Margate route, but a grisly terror when scaling the
steeps of the Southern Pacific waves in a "southerly buster" between
Grafton and Sydney. She was far too small for such an arduous service.
Yet we carried over a hundred passengers when full. All her cooking
was done in a caboose--just such a square box as may be seen on the
deck of any old sailing barque--a cube of about eight feet clamped to
the deck by iron rods. There was no table within it, only a locker seat
which contained coals running across it in front of the stove. Two men
could not pass between this locker and the stove without careful edging
or one of them getting burnt. Most of the implements had permanent
abiding places on the stove, but a few lived on racks above when not in
use; and when the skittish little ship was dancing they would clatter
down at intervals. Outside, in an angle between the back of the galley
and the steam-chest, was a movable board for pastry (and other things).
Its dimensions, with liberal measurement, may have been two feet
square--not another inch, if I were bribed to say so.
The presiding genius of this most primitive of arrangements was a
hunchback, a shrewd little Yankee with a French face, who received £11
per month and earned £50. He had one assistant, a nondescript man of
indefinite age, who never wore an apron, and whose duties were confined
to peeling potatoes, stoking the fire, plucking fowls, and washing up
pots. But these things he would do as long as there were any of them
_to_ do, mechanically, even though, as was frequently the case, the
conditions all about us looked as if another ten minutes would see us
all at the bottom of the sea. He earned £5 a month. But what he lacked
in ability or initiative was more than made up by his chief. That
man was a miracle. On that two-feet slab he would make pastry of all
kinds, prepare most elaborate dishes, yes, although the salt spray
whistled around him, and on occasion an eddy of the gale would flip
a dish with its contents off his board far away to leeward. He would
shout an order to his acolyte for half a dozen fowls and a bucket of
boiling water. A few rapid motions of the hands, and they were all
gyrating in the scuppers, while one after another he plunged them into
the steaming bucket and slithered the feathers off, flinging each as he
did so to his waiting henchman for the minor picking. Thus I have seen
him serve six fowls at noon--at 12.35 they were being eaten. Ask me not
how, for the details are unpalatable.
But his great achievement was butchering in bad weather--butchering
sheep. Stolid Joe would bring the sacrifice along, mercurial Bill
would seize it, stab it, and unaided commence to rip off its hide
immediately. There, on the deck, outside his galley door, the struggle
would go on as if it were a fight to the death, so great was the fury
that little man displayed. And it was one of the commonest sights to
see, in the midst of the operation, a green comber of a wave come
hissing along, embracing carcase and cook, and sweeping them clean off
in a dishevelled heap bang aft up against the second-class berths.
Knife in one hand, half-skinned sheep gripped by the other, he had no
buffers wherewith to ward off bruises; but he had a voice. And he used
it, not in canticles of praise. Yet punctually the meal for which that
sheep was being prepared would appear on the table. And it would not
be an unsavoury dinner, either. The one thing that always seemed to
dishearten him was the lifting clean out of its fiery bed of a copper
or kettle, that fitted into a hole on the stove-top, by a vicious
plunge of the vessel. And as such an event was usually followed by a
green sea thundering over all, and flooding him and his lieutenant
clean out of the galley amid a smother of steam, coal grit, and spoilt
food, his temporary subdual could not be wondered at.
But I must forbear. Mental pictures of that super-excellent cook's
doings arise before me in almost interminable succession, tempting me
to forget the fact that there were many others doing almost precisely
the same things unsung, and unrewarded save by the meagre pay they
drew. Who, for instance, could envy the cook of a "weekly" tramp?--a
steamer, that is, which, making quite long voyages, has engaged her
crew at so much a week and find themselves. Perhaps there are no cooks
at sea who are more worried than these. For Jack, left to his own
devices for supplying himself with food, does some of the queerest
things that ever were or could be recorded. And each individual expects
his own mess to be as carefully looked after as a whole saloon dinner.
Natural, perhaps, on his part, but for the hapless cook purgatorially
inconvenient. I was once a passenger from an Irish port to Liverpool in
a weekly boat, and in the grey of the dawn was waiting at the galley
door to buy a cup of coffee. Men came and went incessantly, banging
oven doors and flinging utensils from side to side of the red-hot
stove-top. The cook was absent, engaged aft in some business or other.
Presently he appeared with a teapot, and immediately snatched at a
huge copper kettle which stood on the stove in the middle, where the
top plate was almost transparent with heat. The kettle flew up in his
grasp, being empty. "Why, there's nothin' in it!" he screamed. "No,"
replied a fireman who was groping in the starboard oven; "I tried it
ten minutes ago, and it was empty then." "An' you putt it back on that
stove!" said the cook tragically. "Course I did," was the calm reply;
"think I was goin' ter fill it?" I really thought the cook would have
died of suppressed emotion before he found words wherein to express
himself. But his tongue was loosened presently, and then his remarks,
if sulphurous, were fairly comprehensive. The fireman only laughed.
What shall I say of the cook of the tramp pure and simple? Only this, I
am afraid that, while he has a bitter, hard berth of it, he gets little
better pay than his brother of the sailing ship. One consolation he
has, and that not a little one--he has more to cook, and consequently
he is, taken generally, a better workman. For there is nothing tends
to disgust a man more, no matter of what trade he be, than the being
compelled to make bricks without straw. And there can be no doubt that,
hard as are the tramps in many respects for their crews, the food is
much better than that provided in sailing ships, taking the average.
Having such a rough crowd to cater for, however, does not tend to
improve the quality of the cooks carried in tramp steamers. A decent
man hardly cares to face the possibility of being violently assaulted,
for no fault of his own, by members of a gang of ruffians of every
nation under heaven save his own countrymen. And this is the state
of affairs that any man in such a position as a cook holds must be
prepared to face in most tramps. If he be fortunate enough to get into
one of the north-east coast tramps, owned by canny firms, who like to
have their ships manned by their own people, and whose highest ambition
is to see efficiency combined with comfort on board of them, he will be
as well off as any sea-cook, not an artist, can reasonably ask to be.