AS A SEA COOK.
I drifted around San Francisco for several months and finally shipped as
cook and steward of the schooner _Henry_, bound from San Francisco for a
whaling, sealing, abalone curing, and general “pick up” voyage along the
Lower Californian coast. My acceptance as cook was based on the
production of an Irish stew which I cooked for the captain and mate
while the _Henry_ was “hove down” on the beach at North point and
undergoing the process of cleaning her bottom of barnacles. I can’t
recollect at this lapse of time where I learned to cook an Irish stew. I
will add that it was all I could cook--positively all, and with this
astounding capital of culinary ignorance I ventured down upon the great
deep to do the maritime housework for twenty men.
When we were fairly afloat and the Farallones were out of sight my
fearful incapacity for the duties of the position became apparent.
Besides, I was dreadfully seasick, and so remained for two weeks. Yet I
cooked. It was purgatory, not only for myself but all hands. There was a
general howl of execration forward and aft at my bread, my lobscouse, my
tea, my coffee, my beef, my beans, my cake, my pies. Why the captain
continued me in the position, why they didn’t throw me overboard, why I
was not beaten to a jelly for my continued culinary failures, is for me
to this day one of the great mysteries of my existence. We were away
nearly ten months. I was three months learning my trade. The sufferings
of the crew during those three months were fearful. They had to eat my
failures or starve. Several times it was intimated to me by the under
officers that I had better resign and go “for’ard” as one of the crew. I
would not. I persevered at the expense of many a pound of good flour. I
conquered and returned a second-class sea cook.
The _Henry_ was a small vessel--the deck was a clutter of whaling gear.
Where my galley or sea-kitchen should have been, stood the try-works for
boiling blubber. They shoved me around anywhere. Sometimes I was moved
to the starboard side, sometimes to the larboard, sometimes when cutting
in a whale way astern. I expected eventually to be hoisted into one of
the tops and cook aloft. Any well regulated galley is placed amidships,
where there is the least motion. This is an important consideration for
a sea cook. At best he is often obliged to make his soup like an
acrobat, half on his head and half on his heels and with the roof of his
unsteady kitchen trying to become the floor. My stove was not a marine
stove. It had no rail around the edges to guard the pots and kettles
from falling off during extra lurches. The _Henry_ was a most uneasy
craft, and always getting up extra lurches or else trying to stand on
her head or stern. Therefore, as she flew up high astern when I was
located in that quarter, she has in more than one instance flung me
bodily, in an unguarded moment, out of that galley door and over that
quarter-deck while a host of kettles, covers, and other culinary
utensils, rushed with clang and clatter out after me and with me as
their commander at their head. We all eventually terminated in the
scuppers. I will not, as usual, say “lee scuppers.” Any scupper was a
lee scupper on that infernal vessel. I endeavored to remedy the lack of
a rail about this stove by a system of wires attaching both pots and
lids to the galley ceiling. I “guyed” my chief culinary utensils. Still
during furious oscillations of the boat the pots would roll off their
holes, and though prevented from falling, some of them as suspended by
these wires would swing like so many pendulums, around and to and fro
over the area of that stove.
That was the busiest year of my life. I was the first one up in the
morning, and the last save the watch to turn in at night. In this
dry-goods box of a kitchen I had daily to prepare a breakfast for seven
men in the cabin, and another for eleven in the forecastle; a dinner for
the cabin and another for the forecastle; likewise supper for the same.
It was my business to set the aristocratic cabin table, clear it off and
wash the dishes three times daily. I had to serve out the tea and coffee
to the eleven men forward. The cabin expected hot biscuit for breakfast,
and frequently pie and pudding for dinner. Above all men must the sea
cook not only have a place for everything and everything in its place,
but he must have everything chocked and wedged in its place. You must
wash up your tea things, sometimes holding on to the deck with your
toes, and the washtub with one hand, and wedging each plate, so soon as
wiped, into a corner, so that it slide not away and smash. And even then
the entire dish-washing apparatus, yourself included, slides gently
across the deck to leeward. You can’t leave a fork, or a stove-cover, or
lid-lifter lying about indifferently but what it slides and sneaks away
with the roll of the vessel to some secret crevice, and is long lost.
When your best dinner is cooked in rough weather, it is a time of trial,
terror, and tribulation to bestow it safely on the cabin table. You must
harbor your kindling and matches as sacredly as the ancients kept their
household gods, for if not, on stormy mornings, with the drift flying
over the deck and everything wet and clammy with the water-surcharged
air of the sea, your breakfast will be hours late through inability to
kindle a fire, whereat the cook catches it from that potentate of the
sea, “the old man,” and all the mates raise their voices and cry with
empty stomachs, “Let him be accursed.”
One great trial with me lay in the difficulty of distinguishing fresh
water from salt--I mean by the eye. We sea cooks use salt water to boil
beef and potatoes in: or rather to boil beef and pork and steam the
potatoes. So I usually had a pail of salt water and one of fresh
standing by the galley door. Sometimes these got mixed up. I always
found this out after making salt-water coffee, but then it was too late.
They were particular, especially in the cabin, and did not like
salt-water coffee. On any strictly disciplined vessel the cook for such
an offence would have been compelled to drink a quart or so of his own
coffee, but some merciful cherub aloft always interfered and got me out
of bad scrapes. Another annoyance was the loss of spoons and forks
thrown accidentally overboard as I flung away my soup and grease-clouded
dishwater. It was indeed bitter when, as occupied in these daily
washings I allowed my mind to drift to other and brighter scenes, to see
the glitter of a spoon or fork in the air or sinking in the deep blue
sea, and then to reflect that already there were not enough spoons to go
around, or forks either. Our storeroom was the cabin. Among other
articles there was a keg of molasses. One evening after draining a
quantity I neglected to close the faucet tightly. Molasses therefore
oozed over the cabin floor all night. The cabin was a freshet of
molasses. Very early in the morning the captain, getting out of his
bunk, jumped both stockinged feet into the saccharine deluge. Some men
will swear as vigorously in a foot-bath of molasses as they would in one
of coal-tar. He did. It was a very black day for me, and life generally
seemed joyless and uninviting; but I cooked on.
The _Henry_ was full of mice. These little creatures would obtrude
themselves in my dough wet up for fresh bread over night, become bemired
and die therein. Once a mouse thus dead was unconsciously rolled up in a
biscuit, baked with it, and served smoking hot for the morning’s meal
aft. It was as it were an involuntary meat-pie. Of course the cabin
grumbled; but they would grumble at anything. They were as particular
about their food as an habitué of Delmonico’s. I wish now at times I had
saved that biscuit to add to my collection of odds-and-endibles. Still
even the biscuit proved but an episode in my career. I cooked on, and
those I served stood aghast, not knowing what would come next.
After live months of self-training I graduated on pies. I studied and
wrought out the making of pies unassisted and untaught. Mine were sea
mince pies; material, salt-beef soaked to freshness and boiled tender,
dried apples and molasses. The cabin pronounced them good. This was one
of the few feathers in my culinary cap. Of course, their goodness was
relative. On shore such a pie would be scorned. But on a long sea-voyage
almost any combination of flour, dried fruit and sugar will pass.
Indeed, the appetite, rendered more vigorous and perhaps appreciative by
long deprivation from luxuries, will take not kindly to dried apples
alone. The changes in the weekly bill of fare at sea run something thus:
Sundays and Thursdays are “duff days”; Tuesday, bean day; Friday,
codfish and potato day; some vessels have one or two special days for
pork; salt beef, hardtack, tea and coffee are fluids and solids to fall
back on every day. I dreaded the making of duffs, or flour puddings, to
the end of the voyage. Rarely did I attain success with them. A duff is
a quantity of flour and yeast, or yeast-powder, mixed, tied up in a bag
and boiled until it is light. Plum-duff argues the insertion of a
quantity of raisins. Plain duff is duff without raisins. But the proper
cooking of a duff is rather a delicate matter. If it boils too long the
flour settles into a hard, putty-like mass whereunto there is neither
sponginess, lightness, nor that porousness which delights the heart of a
cook when he takes his duff from the seething caldron. If the duff does
not boil long enough, the interior is still a paste. If a duff stops
boiling for ever so few minutes, great damage results. And sometimes
duff won’t do properly, anyway. Mine were generally of the hardened
species, and the plums evinced a tendency to hold mass meetings at the
bottom. Twice the hands forward rebelled at my duffs, and their
Committee on Culinary Grievances bore them aft to the door of the cabin
and deposited them there unbroken and uneaten for the “Old Man’s”
inspection. Which public demonstration I witnessed from my galley door,
and when the duff deputation had retired, I emerged and swiftly and
silently bore that duff away before the Old Man had finished his dinner
below. It is a hard ordeal thus to feel one’s self the subject of such
an outbreak of popular indignation. But my sympathies now are all with
the sailors. A spoiled duff is a great misfortune in the forecastle of a
whaler, where neither pie nor cake nor any other delicacy, save boiled
flour and molasses sauce, come from month’s end to month’s end.
In St. Bartholomew’s or Turtle bay, as the whalers call it, where for
five months we lay, taking and curing abalones, our food was chiefly
turtle. This little harbor swarmed with them. After a few hours’ hunt
one of our whaleboats would return with five or six of these unwieldy
creatures in the bottom, some so large and heavy as to require hoisting
over the side. Often the green fat under the callipee, or under shell,
lay three inches in thickness. I served up turtle fried, turtle stewed,
quarters of turtle roasted and stuffed like loins of veal, turtle plain
boiled and turtles’ flippers, boiled to a jelly and pickled. A turtle is
a variously flavored being. Almost every portion has a distinct and
individual taste. After all, old Jake, our black boat-steerer, showed us
the most delicate part of the turtle, and one previously thrown away.
This was the tripe, cleansed of a thin inner skin. When the cabin table
had once feasted on stewed turtle tripe they called for it continuously.
After many trials and much advice and suggestion, I learned to cook
acceptably the abalone. The eatable part of this shellfish when fresh
is as large as a small tea saucer. There are two varieties, the white
and black. The white is the best. Cut up in pieces and stewed, as I
attempted at first, the abalone turned out stewed bits of gutta percha;
fried, it was fried gutta percha. Then a man from another vessel came on
board, who taught me to inclose a single abalone in a small canvas bag
and then pound it to a jelly with a wooden mallet. This process got the
honey out of the abalone. The remains of four or five abalones thus
pounded to a pulp, and then allowed to simmer for a couple of hours,
would make a big tureen of the most delicious soup man ever tasted,
every drop of which, on cooling, hardened to the consistency of
calves’-foot jelly. When my cabin boarders had once become infected with
abalone soup they wanted me to keep bringing it along. The Americans do
not know or use all the food in the sea which is good.
I was an experimental cook, and once or twice, while cutting-in whale,
tried them with whale meat. The flesh lying under the blubber somewhat
resembles beef in color, and is so tender as easily to be torn apart by
the hands. But whale meat is not docile under culinary treatment.
Gastronomically, it has an individuality of its own, which will keep on
asserting itself, no matter how much spice and pepper is put upon it. It
is a wild, untamed steed. I propounded it to my guests in the guise of
sausages, but when the meal was over the sausages were there still. It
can’t be done. Shark can. Shark’s is a sweet meat, much resembling that
of the swordfish, but no man will ever eat a whale, at least an old one.
The calves might conduct themselves better in the frying-pan. We had
many about us whose mothers we had killed, but we never thought of
frying them. When a whaler is trying out oil, she is blackened with the
greasy soot arising from the burning blubber scraps from stem to stern.
It falls like a storm of black snow-flakes. They sift into the tiniest
crevice. Of all this my cookery got its full share. It tinged my bread
and even my pies with a funereal tinge of blackness. The deck at such
times was covered with “horse pieces” up to the top of the bulwarks.
“Horse pieces” are chunks of blubber a foot or so in length, that being
one stage of their reduction to the size necessary for the try-pots. I
have introduced them here for the purpose of remarking that on my
passage to and fro, from galley to cabin, while engaged in laying the
cloth and arranging our services of gold plate and Sèvres ware, I had to
clamber, wade, climb, and sometimes, in my white necktie and
swallow-tail coat, actually crawl over the greasy mass with the silver
tureen full of “consommé” or “soup Julien,” while I held the gilt-edged
and enamelled menu between my teeth. Those were trying-out times for a
maritime head butler.
The cook socially does not rank high at sea. He stands very near the
bottom round of the ladder. He is the subject of many jests and low
comparisons. This should not be. The cook should rank next or near to
the captain. It is the cook who prepares the material which shall put
mental and physical strength into human bodies. He is, in fact, a
chemist, who carries on the last external processes with meat, flour,
and vegetables necessary to prepare them for their invisible and still
more wonderful treatment in the laboratory which every man and woman
possesses--the stomach--whereby these raw materials are converted not
only into blood, bone, nerve, sinew, and muscle, but into thoughts. A
good cook may help materially to make good poetry. An indigestible
beefsteak, fried in grease to leather, may, in the stomach of a General,
lose a battle on which shall depend the fate of nations. A good cook
might have won the battle. Of course, he would receive no credit
therefor, save the conviction in his own culinary soul, that his
beefsteak properly and quickly broiled was thus enabled to digest itself
properly in the stomach of the General, and thereby transmit to and
through the General’s organism that amount of nerve force and vigor,
which, acting upon the brain, caused all his intelligence and talent to
attain its maximum, and thereby conquer his adversary. That’s what a
cook may do. This would be a far better and happier world were there
more really good cooks on land and sea. And when all cooks are Blots or
Soyers, then will we have a society to be proud of.