The patent Brodie stove as fitted in the Victory.
(Drawing by John McKay)
WE KNOW A GREAT DEAL about what the seamen in the Georgian navy ate and how it got to them. What we know less about is how they ate; it is one of those aspects of naval life which no-one seems to have thought important enough, or perhaps different enough from land-borne life, to describe in consistent detail. Compared with the number of letters and journals written by various levels of officers there are very few written by lower-deck men and of those few, hardly any mention of food or mealtimes. So, we must piece the story together with what has been documented from naval and other writings on food history and what we can reasonably surmise.
Unlike the modern military mess, which term tends to mean the place where you eat, to the Georgian navy a mess was a group of men who ate together. We will come back to this concept in more detail later; for now we just need to know that one man from each group was designated ‘mess cook’ and he went along every day to collect the food from the purser or steward. The steward’s room was usually aft, on the orlop deck next to the bread room. It would be equipped with bins or casks containing the biscuit, flour, pease, suet, raisins and so on, racks for cheese and the small firkins of butter, a counter and several scales. The atmosphere at issuing time would have been somewhat dusty, especially when flour was being served. For this reason the steward was known as ‘Jack-in-the-dust’; it was clearly not a job for asthmatics.
The Admiralty, through the Regulations, laid down the official ration for each man, and some rules to ensure fairness in issuing and what was to happen with poor-quality provisions. It was up to the captain of each individual ship to decide when the food was to be issued; typically, captains’ orders give a twice-daily, two- or three-hour, period for issues (7 to 9 or 10am, 4 to 7pm).1 It is when you contemplate the number of messes in a ship and think about the length of time it would take to physically weigh out and hand over the day’s food to each mess, and make a note of what they had received, you realise why it needed a generous time slot.
Remembering that the purser had to account for the food on a per man basis, and that the men were entitled to cash payments for what they did not receive, it is obvious that there must have been some foolproof way of doing this. Messes were normally identified by number (hence the expression ‘he’s lost the number of his mess’, meaning ‘he’s died’) so each mess cook would arrive at the head of the queue and sing out ‘Number whatever, all present today (or ‘Fred Bloggs absent’), and the steward would make a note, perhaps by moving a peg in a tally board or ticking each number on his list. Unfortunately no full sets of pursers’ books seem to have survived, so we cannot see the detail of these issues – whether half the messes went in the morning and the others in the afternoon, or whether different items were issued at different times. What we can reasonably infer, from the fact that we know there was little secure storage space on the mess decks where the men lived, was that they would probably only have received one day’s food at a time. So, each mess cook would take one or two mess ‘kids’ (small tubs with rope handles) along to the steward’s room and collect the day’s biscuit, pease, butter and cheese, or whatever substitutes might be required. If it was a pudding day, that would include flour, raisins and suet. Other items were dealt with elsewhere.
As well as its mess kids, each mess would have a pudding bag and one or more nets, each of these with some sort of tag or button bearing the mess number (small tally sticks with carved Roman numerals which have been recovered from shipwrecks may have been used for this purpose). As well as being for suet puddings, the pudding bag would be used for cooking the pease; the nets were for cooking meat and vegetables. The advantage of using a system of nets and bags is that you can put different items in to cook at different times. The cloth for the bags was a regulation issue: ‘And there shall be supplied, once a year, from the Victualling Office, a proportion of canvas for pudding bags, after the rate of one ell to every sixteen men.’2 We do not know the shape of the bags made with it; these may have been cylindrical but were more likely to have been round, perhaps with a draw-string to close them. Certainly the round bag would have been easier to get the pudding out of as well as to clean. There is no mention of nets in the Regulations, but a net is an easy enough thing to make with some twine and nimble fingers.
The method of allocating meat was known as ‘pricking’ and it was done by the ship’s cook. He had a large fork called (officially, not just colloquially) a tormentor, with which he would prick a piece of meat, doing this in such a way that no favouritism could be shown. Either the cook could see the waiting mess cooks but not the meat as he pricked for it, or he could see the meat but did not know who was going to get it, sometimes standing behind a screen, sometimes calling out ‘Who shall have this?’ and his mate picking a mess number at random. There is one report of this pricking being done after the meat was cooked but this begs the question of how, with no more than a big fork, the cook was able to prevent the meat falling apart in the process. The pricking process included the officers as well as the men; there was a rigid rule that ‘all are to be equal in the point of victualling’.3
The problem attached to this process is how they coped with messes of different numbers of men when meat came in standard-sized pieces (four or eight pounds for beef, two or four pounds for pork). Some of the meat must have been cut while raw to ensure that each mess got the right amount; perhaps it was all cut into one- or two-pound pieces, which would have had the added advantage of shortening the steeping time. No-one has mentioned that this was done, but nor has anyone said anything to indicate that it was not. Another thought: how did the ship’s cook know how much meat each mess should have? He could not take the mess cook’s word for it and he could not be expected to know how many men there were in each mess even when they were all there and all having the day’s meat ration in full, let alone know that one or two men were away from the ship or in the sickbay, or that the mess was having half meat and half duff. Perhaps the purser’s steward gave the ship’s cook a list (assuming that he could read) or, more likely, the steward gave the mess cook an appropriate number of counters or tally sticks which he then gave to the cook in exchange for the meat.
When the meat was fresh, there were traditionally vegetables to go with it. This was normally when the ship was in port and they had more for the first two weeks than after: on the North American station in 1813 this was expressed as ‘for fourteen days at the rate of ⅘pound of cabbage and ⅕ pound of onions per man per day, thereafter until quitting the port, ½ pound of cabbage and 1/10 pound of onions, or fruit in lieu’.4 Sometimes the amount was specified as ‘such as will satisfy the men’ and this, as well as the fact that it was sometimes referred to as ‘vegetables for the soup’, makes one wonder if it was cooked in a separate copper and ladled out, rather than being issued raw and cooked in a net or bag. Alternatively, some of the men may even have preferred their vegetables raw, relishing the crunchy texture as well as the more intense flavour.
Having said that provisions were issued on a daily basis to each mess, this did not apply to the oatmeal. The only feasible way to make porridge on a large scale would be to put it all in a large pot where it could be stirred and watched, and then to serve it out with a ladle. Although Jack Nastyface says that each mess had its own hook-pot for burgoo, the Regulations say ‘when [the cook] serves out soup or burgou [sic] he is strictly charged to do it without any partiality, giving to every man, as nearly as possible, an equal quantity’.5 Nor is it likely that they had porridge for breakfast only on the three days shown on the official table of provisions. What must have happened here is that the purser issued one-seventh of the week’s total oatmeal ration to the cook each day.
The final item which was collected by the mess cook was the drink, and tradition gave him an extra share as a reward for his efforts. The rule here was that it should be served on an ‘open deck’, where all could see fair play in both the serving and, where spirits were involved, the mixing of grog. When lemon or lime juice was issued as a scurvy preventative, this, together with its accompanying sugar, would be served at the same time, either mixed into the grog or with water as ‘sherbet’. Captains’ orders typically required the drink to be served in two halves, one during or just before the midday dinner break, the other late in the afternoon. The captain could also restrict the amount of alcohol to be issued to particular individuals or classes of people. The most likely class would be the boys, who would then be paid for their unused portion. The individuals would be those being punished for some minor crime; in this case they would not receive the value as they could have used that to purchase drink from someone else. In such a situation the ‘no drink’ order would probably have involved their being moved to a separate mess for the duration to prevent their usual mess-mates sharing with them. Those who, for their own reasons, did not want alcohol, could refuse it and receive credit; it is likely that many of them took it and used it, as would many others, to pay debts or purchase favours from their shipmates. The same would have applied to tobacco: alcohol and tobacco have always been valuable commodities in closed communities.
Every ship carried a cook, that is to say, a man with the title of cook – the only qualification he required was that he must have a warrant and be a pensioner of the Chest at Greenwich, which meant that he would often be short of a limb. This qualification was, until 1806 when the fourteenth edition of the Regulations specify it as an absolute requirement, merely advisory, dating from an order in 1704 which says that pensioners of the Greenwich hospital were to be given precedence when appointing a cook. Depending on the size of the ship, the cook had at least one able-bodied assistant and the services of a boy, who would prepare vegetables and clean out the coppers and other utensils for the daily inspection by the officer of the watch.
As well as his pension and salary, the cook had the perquisite of the ‘slush’, the meat fat which rose to the top of the coppers during cooking, and which had to be periodically skimmed off. Dudley Pope refers to it as ‘unappetising fist-sized lumps of yellowish fat’, but this is not correct.6 Not only would no self-respecting mess allow the cook to have the benefit of large amounts of such useful stuff from their piece of meat, what we are discussing is fat which has come out of the meat in liquid form and risen to the top of the cooking liquid. When it has cooled and set, slush is little different to suet or dripping. The slush had first to be offered to the boatswain for lubricating the running rigging, gun trucks and so on, but the rest was the cook’s to sell, theoretically to the tallow merchants on shore but no doubt also to his shipmates. As well as being useful for waterproofing boots, it could be used for frying fish, onions or, according to Jack Nastyface, a mixture of ox liver and pork.7 Beef slush would be in demand for making puddings. Although allowing the men to eat slush was forbidden in the Regulations on the grounds that it was unwholesome and caused scurvy, this rule was probably ignored on a grand scale if the captain and surgeon were prepared to turn a blind eye. It is, however, another situation where the Regulations were actually correct, although as with so many of these things they could not have known the reason: eating rancid fat can lead to malabsorption of other foods by the gut.8
With rare exceptions, any actual cooking skills would be minimal and learned along the way. There was certainly no training in the culinary arts for these ships’ cooks. Their main duties, as specified in the Regulations, were: to have charge of the steep tub and be responsible for the meat put into it; to ensure it was properly secured in stormy weather to prevent it being washed overboard; to ‘see the meat duly watered, and the provisions carefully and cleanly boiled…’; to see that the vegetables were ‘Very carefully washed’ before cooking; and to be frugal with fuel. This last was either coal or wood, and part of the ‘necessaries’ bought by the purser.
Other than the possibility of a friendly cook allowing occasional frying or grilling, as far as the men were concerned all their food was boiled in large boilers or coppers. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there was little facility for anything else, just a brick-built hearth with a single riveted copper boiler on top and a chimney venting to the upper deck. In 1728 iron fire-hearths were introduced as preferable to the weighty brick hearths; in 1757 the Navy Board issued stove dimensions for each rate of ship.9 These also included a double boiler with two lids and other refinements such as grilling racks and a small oven. One version had a spit operated by a fan in the chimney.
Then, in 1780, the Scot Alexander Brodie patented a new type of stove.10 Almost square, it came in several sizes (each adequate for feeding a specified number of men), the biggest of which was just over six feet square and about five feet high. It was made of wrought iron with cast iron for the fire boxes, with a ventilator and hood of copper. The whole thing was put together with nuts and screws so that it could easily be taken to pieces and individual parts replaced if damaged in battle. It had two separate fires, one of which was open at the front and was divided into three separate sections, each of which could be used independently of the others. In front of these was a facility for one or two spits extending the full width and thus large enough to roast a whole sheep or pig, a significant joint of beef or several fowls. The spit was operated by a system of chains and pulleys connected to a smoke jack in the flue. Level with, and extending across the top of the fire, was a hotplate on which pots would stand. Other larger pots could be swung onto the fire on what the patent calls ‘cranes’: simple hinged arms with cut-outs for the pot handle to rest in. Behind the fire, also extending across the whole width of the stove, was an oven and behind that was a separate, closed, fire. Above the oven and the second fire were two lidded boilers, with (for the largest-sized stove) a capacity of 100 and 150 gallons respectively.
Along the two sides and the back of the stove were rails, on which were hung separate ‘stewing stoves’. These stewing stoves could also be free-standing; if the replica examples on Victory are correct, they can best be described as small barbecues, each about a foot square, with a grill for pots to stand on over a shallow fire-box. These could have held either hot coals taken from the main fire or charcoal when the main fire was not lit. As seen on Victory, they could have been used for frying or grilling but would be more effective for keeping a saucepan of food warm than cooking large quantities. The number supplied varied according to the rate of the ship: seven stewing stoves for First or Second Rates, five for a Third Rate, three for a frigate and one for the smallest ships. According to a Navy Board directive, these stoves may have been rather larger than those to be seen on Victory and they also seem to vary in size according to the ship’s size, having a variable number of grates, trivets, furnace bars and plates in the additional bottoms’.11
The closed fire had a ventilator under the firebox ‘for carrying off foul air’, intended to go through the deck below the stove from where it could ‘be conveyed to any part of the ship, or where the sick people are kept’. The boilers vented through a condenser which produced a small amount of distilled water for use in the sick-bay. The whole thing stood on short legs to raise it from the brick or flagstone surface which protected the deck timbers. Given this clearance and the height of the stove itself, it cannot have been easy or comfortable to reach into the boilers when the fires were lighted. Victory, as those who have visited her will know, has a replica Brodie stove which sits so close to the beams above that it would have been extremely difficult to remove the boiler lids and fill or empty the boilers, and virtually impossible to reach inside and clean them. One hesitates to suggest that this replica stove is incorrectly fitted or over-large; perhaps there used to be a hatch above so that these essential operations could be done from the deck above. The boilers do have large cocks underneath for drawing off liquid, and it would have been possible to use a pump to fill them with liquid. Equally, an agile boy might have been able to wriggle onto the top of the stove and swab them out with some sort of mop, but this operation would have to be left until the stove was cold. Nor can one imagine the mate of the watch, who was meant to inspect their cleanliness, being anxious to perform such contortions. (The captain’s orders for Amazon required this inspection to take place at 3pm.)12 It would have been impossible to stir porridge in these boilers, unless that hatch was fitted above. Porridge making was more likely to have been done in very large pots on the open hearth at the front, or on separate stoves. On ships where the range was lit early in the morning, the first option is the easiest, but St Vincent’s orders in 1796 on the timing of range-lighting remark on ‘the stoves being sufficient for breakfast’; however, if those stoves were like those to be seen on Victory today, one doubts their being big enough to provide enough for her 837 men.13
By 1810 a new stove, patented by Lamb & Nicholson, had been adopted. This was larger and had three boilers, making it possible, said one of the captains who performed trials, to cook potatoes separately. He had also, he remarked, when transporting troops to the Schelde, been able to feed 1164 men at a time; other captains reported feeding 1200 and 1300 men. But the biggest advantage of this larger stove was its ability to produce significant quantities of fresh water: up to twenty-five gallons per hour if all three boilers were used. Indeed, the Lamb & Nicholson patent was as much about providing fresh water as cooking for large numbers.14 The Lamb & Nicholson stove was fully enclosed (ie no open grate) and looks much like a giant Aga or Raeburn. As well as the boilers, it had an oven and ‘warming plates’ on the top where saucepans, frying pans and griddles could be placed.
To a certain extent each captain could influence the internal arrangements of his ship. There was not much scope for doing this with the stove itself but there may have been some with the rest of the galley; a captain who took pride in keeping a good table would have wanted more preparation space for his cook than would a captain who just regarded food as fuel. Even so, space was restricted and the reconstructed galley on Victory is probably typical. Situated amidships behind the foremast, the front (ie the end with the open grate) of the stove actually faced aft. Apart from ‘stable’ doors on either each side for access, this end of the galley is enclosed, consisting of a workbench with drawers and cupboards underneath and some windows at the back; these would have gained the advantage of any light coming down the adjacent stairway. The bench extends for the whole width of the galley (about eight feet) and is about two feet deep. Made of deal, it could be scrubbed clean and holystoned smooth. On the solid sides of the galley is space for hooks where utensils and nets of food could be hung. This preparation area was reserved for officer’s and sick-bay meals; the crew mess cooks did their preparation at their own mess tables.
Most captains allowed their men to chose their own mess and change it if they wanted. These changes were allowed once a month, after asking permission from the first lieutenant. A new captain, coming to a ship for the first time, would be able to gauge the nature of the crew by studying the purser’s mess-lists. Few changes would indicate a settled crew; several changes which were not associated with drafts of new men or battle losses might indicate some short-term problem; a lot of changes continuing over a long period would indicate general unhappiness which might flare up into trouble.
Given the tendency of different trades to form cliques, it is likely that men who worked together would eat together, in a mutually self-supporting team of mess-mates. Such a group would probably include a boy, taken under the wing of one of the older men, but it would have been difficult for adult newcomers to find a place except with other newcomers. In fact, such newcomers, especially groups of newly-recruited landsmen, would tend to stick together for some mutual support against the scorn of experienced seamen. But there must also have been some anti-social men who made themselves obnoxious to everybody and who were refused entrance to established messes, ending up eating alone or with other misfits. One captain, Anselm Griffiths, made a practice of designating some punishment messes: a ‘thieves’ mess or a ‘dirty’ mess, in which those found guilty of those crimes, remarking that ‘placing a man in one of these messes … had more effect on his conduct than corporal punishment’.15
The marines, part of whose purpose was to protect the officers from mutiny, were never encouraged to mix with the seamen and were also required to eat in their own messes. Petty officers were usually forbidden by captains’ orders to mess with the other men, for obvious reasons of discipline, and thus would eat together. The actual location of the mess tables for these men is not known, but since some had reserved hammock spaces under the cable tier on the orlop, it is possible they may have eaten there too.
Although some reports do occasionally suggest larger numbers, most messes consisted of between four and eight men; Victory, with her complement of 800-plus, had 165 messes, which gives an average number of five men to a mess. The size of messes may have been related to the size of ship, the higher-rated and thus wider ships having room for longer tables. Basil Hall mentions messes of ten to twelve men in a frigate, each at a separate table, then remarks that the line-of-battle ships had larger tables which seated two messes, one each side. However, twelve does seem rather a lot and most other reports give lower numbers and also say that each mess had its own table.
The mess tables were either suspended from the beams above at both ends or resting against the side (sitting on a batten) at the outboard side and suspended at the other. Originally the suspension was by ropes, later by rigid Y-shaped bars – whichever, the tables could be rapidly drawn up to clear for action. It is generally stated that the mess tables were between the guns, which some of them undoubtedly were (this was in the larger two- and three-decked ships; frigates had no guns on their mess deck), but when you do the arithmetic on the number of inter-gun spaces, the number of men to a table and the size of the complement you realise that unless they ate in shifts (which we are told they did not) there must have been some other tables. A print of Vengeance, dating from 1796, shows two sets of tables on either side of the ship, one between the guns and one inboard, with some others on the centre line between the hatches: eighty-seven tables in all for a complement of about 600 men. This print is the only available evidence for this practice but that does not mean it was not common.
A Cruikshank cartoon of men drinking and yarning at their mess table shows a rack on the ship’s side containing plates. This has been taken to indicate that this was the norm and has even been extended to assume that cutlery was also kept there; both these assumptions are dubious. The cutlery is the easiest to deal with, for there would have been little. Each man would have owned an all-purpose knife, which he used for everything from cutting his meat to working cordage or whittling wood; he would have carried this with him all the time. They would also have had a spoon, made of wood, tin or horn, and would have been more inclined to tuck this away in their ditty-bag than leave such an easily-stolen item on a rack in clear view. The mess as a whole might have had a large spoon for serving soup and gravy but equally might have used a mug for this. Stirring, when called for, can be done with any piece of dowel and does not need a spoon as such. The plates and bowls also belonged to the individual men, who would be more likely to stow them away when not in use than leave them out where they could be filched. There is also the problem of putting such things away in a hurry when clearing for action. So perhaps Cruikshank’s plate racks were an artistic shorthand for ‘this is where the men eat as well as drink’, or perhaps they were used to let the dishes dry off before they were stowed, rather than as permanent storage. It must also be remembered that the mess decks were also sleeping decks; hammock space was cramped enough without such things as plate racks intruding.
The mens plates and bowls would only rarely be ceramic, even the strongest stoneware being too vulnerable to breakage in rough seas. The better-off men might have pewter, purchased on shore; the others would have wood, either purchased from the purser or made by the owner. The square plates consisting of one or two flat pieces of plank with nailed-on batten rims which gave rise to the expression ‘a square meal’ were probably made by the men, as the items stocked by the purser were referred to as ‘turneryware’, which means they were made on a lathe and therefore round. The purser would also stock spoons and, for those who felt the need, forks. Each man would also have his own mug, bought from the purser or made up from wood or horn, or a combination of both: horn sides with a wooden bottom. To what extent the mess kids were supplied or privately owned by each mess is not known; there is no mention of them in any of the Victualling Board documents. They needed to be watertight, so would have been made by coopers; it is possible that the ship’s cooper, where there was one, made them up as part of his duties.
The members of each mess took it in turns to act as mess cook, each serving for a week at a time and presumably to an unofficial rota. Although there may have been some men who did not want to do it and others who would prefer such work to the alternatives, the inevitability of a permanent mess cook being considered idle by both officers and crew rendered such a scenario unlikely. The only men officially exempted from this job were those belonging to the boats when the ship was in harbour.
The mess cook’s duties were those which would allow the others to do no more than come to the table, eat, drink, and go away again. So as well as collecting the food and drink when it was issued, he did any pre-cooking preparation, such as mixing the flour, suet and raisins for puddings (whistling while doing so, as it is impossible to clandestinely eat raisins while whistling), taking such items to the galley in their labelled bags or nets and seeing them placed in the boiler. There are, incidentally, other things besides raisins which you can add to a suet pudding to make it a bit more interesting, and this is where the private bumboat-bought stocks come in. Any sort of dried fruit (including apples) will swell to softness in the cooking process. Chopped bacon (or some of yesterday’s salt pork), carrot or onion will give a savoury version. There are even recipes using mussels for those occasions when a watering party had been ashore at low tide.
The mess cook then collected the food when it was cooked and served it out to his mess, having in the meantime lowered the table into place, fetched the benches and generally made everything ready for the meal. When serving meat, he carved it and handed it out at random, again using the question ‘Who shall have this?’, with someone else, with his back to the table, singing out a name. When the meal and the socialising was over, the other men went back to work and the cook tidied up. One assumes that any edible crumbs went to the poultry or pigs and the rest went overboard in the approved manner; the order book for Superb says that bones, dirt and dirty water are to be disposed of down the heads and not thrown out of the gun-ports.16 This order book also says that the mess cooks were responsible to the officer of the watch; Jack Nastyface says he might also be subjected to the judgement of a ‘court’ of other mess cooks, called by hoisting a mess swab or beating a tin dish. ‘Crimes’ might include failing to prepare the food properly or not keeping the table and utensils clean; the obvious punishment would be for the culprit to forego some of his drink ration.
Although theoretically the time and duration of meals was at the captain’s discretion, when a squadron was working together such things were laid down by the senior officer. Sir Edward Pellew took over the East Indies squadron in 1805 and put out a general order that said ‘The commander-in-chief…will hoist a red pennant at the main when he makes it noon, that all the crews may dine at the same time… [they] are to breakfast at eight bells [in this case, 8am] and sup at half past five pm.’ This makes good sense: a commanding officer who is contemplating mass manoeuvres wants people available to perform them and since mealtimes were sacrosanct he would want to know when they were. The norm was forty-five minutes each for breakfast and supper and an hour and a half for dinner.17 Pellew stated this and went on to say that ‘the meal times of the people are not [to be] broken in upon’; Nelson remarked in one of his general orders about turning the men up for muster when demanded by the senior officer at a port ‘meal times excepted’, and many captains said much the same in their own order books.18 So we can accept that with the exception of essential watch-keepers such as lookouts or steersmen, who were known as ‘seven-bell men’ because they ate half an hour early, all the crew (ie everyone except the officers) ate together. Mealtimes were piped by the boatswain.
At this point one begins to wonder whether they ate their meat dinners hot. This doubt comes from contemplating the length of time it would take for the meat to cook, and the time it would take the cook and his assistants to serve each mess cook. Obviously this varied according to the size of the ship and the number in her crew – a large ship bearing less than her full complement having less of a problem than one which mustered nearly 100 per cent of her complement – but since we do have some actual figures for Victory, we will continue to use her as an example. During the first year when Nelson had her as his flagship in the Mediterranean July 1803 to June 1804) she was carrying an average of 811 men, so although the officers would not be eating from the main boilers we can say that roughly 800 were. Whether there were still 165 messes, as five years previously, is not known, but it seems likely. On a pork day one boiler would contain pork, the other pease; on a beef day one beef and the other vegetables or pudding. We can say that with fair conviction because the pease, vegetables and pudding would not take as long as the meat to cook and would anyway be awkward to cook in the same pot. Even so, the boilers were going to be pretty full of nets and bags, each of which had to be given to the right mess at serving time.
The cook also had to skim off the slush. Because the boiler was full of nets, because the lid was high up and because the slush was suspended in the water during cooking, this could not be done during the cooking process. Another consideration here was the danger of dripping wet greasy liquid down the outside of the hearth and onto the deck in the process; one of the earliest things any cook learns is that the floor should not be allowed to get wet and slippery around stoves (even more dangerous when you are short of a limb). So the best time to remove the slush would be when the cooking was complete and the liquid could be drawn off through the cocks into tubs; the fat would then rise to the top and could be removed easily. However, the cook could not leave the meat in the boiler as without liquid it would stick and burn; it had to come out straightaway.
The cook had another problem, which was ensuring that each mess got its own net and bag. Without some organised way of doing this, he would end up with a time-consuming gridlock at serving time and many of the messes would have had a long wait for their dinner. What follows is pure conjecture, but would work: to start with, he had to put the nets and bags into their respective boilers in number order. He did this by arranging them in batches before they went in the boiler, perhaps using a spare tub, and then he had a set of hooks on the rail which went round the stove and attached each batch to one of these, still in order and perhaps having previously tied each five or ten nets together, or even put them into a larger net (not too many in a batch as he would end up with too much weight to handle).
By serving time, he had emptied both boilers and he then had one tub full of meat nets, one full of pudding/pease bags, and a tub full of soup/gravy, lining these up across the back of the galley, with himself and an assistant standing by each. He needed to have this operation completed a good half-hour before dinner time. Meanwhile, the mess cooks had lined up, in mess number order, kids in hand, and as soon as the cook was ready, they filed past the tubs, collecting their own net/bag and some ladlesful of soup and off they went to their messes, getting there before the general stampede that followed the boatswain’s pipe for dinner. In the interests of fairness, the cooks would have to change the mess number order from day to day. Maybe one day they started with the lowest number and worked through to the highest, the next starting in the middle and the next starting at the end and working backwards. To prevent confusion, they would always do it in a particular order on certain days of the week. But even so, the food was not going to be very hot. Actually, that would not matter too much with the meat, which tastes just as good and may be easier to cut when cold. Cold soup is not pleasant, but the tubful could be reheated, either by returning it to the boiler until the last minute, or by dousing some hot irons in it. What about those seven-bell men? It would cause considerable confusion if they ate anywhere other than in their usual mess, so the cook kept a separate hook for the seven-bell messes, the mess cooks announced that status when they brought their food to be cooked and they came back to collect it a good 35 minutes before dinner time.
One other piece of evidence for cold meat (or possibly reheated meat, although that raises the question of where it was kept in between cooking and reheating) is another part of St Vincent’s order quoted above:19 ‘[to save fuel] no fire to be lighted in the ranges of the ships of the fleet until 11 o’clock in the forenoon and [to be] put out as soon as the captain’s dinner is served…’. This means a total of three hours of fire, and given that it would take at least half an hour for the water to boil, leaves no more than two and a half hours for the meat and other items to cook. One suspects that this particular order was either ignored when St Vincent was not in sight of the galley smoke, or that someone pointed out its impracticality and it was countermanded.
A few more questions to which we have no definitive answers but which inevitably come to you when you start thinking about all this. Did they really have three ‘Banyan’ days each week when their dinner consisted of no more than biscuit, pease (on two of those three days) and a little butter and cheese? Such rations would not go far with a hungry man. Perhaps they saved some of their meat and duff. Maybe these were the days when they had soup; there are numerous references in Nelsons and other commanders-in-chief’s letters and orders to ‘the men’s soup’. Or perhaps, since those three Banyan days are the days when oatmeal features, they really did only have porridge on three days, and then in such quantities that it kept them going through dinner time. Or maybe those who were on good terms with the cook were able to do something with the remains of their porridge. Thick porridge, when cold, can be sliced and fried like polenta or baked into a sort of oatcake.
And for that matter, were those days of the week shown on the ration table meant to be absolute or merely advisory? Were they the days when specific items of food should be eaten, or just when they should be issued, keeping in mind that salt meat would have to be steeped for many hours before cooking? One would hope that masters’ logs, which in Nelson’s fleet at least were meant to record the opening of casks of meat, would throw some light on this, but they do not. Many do not mention opening meat casks at all; others mention it but show it to have been done on different days of the week, with no discernible pattern; others show both beef and pork casks being opened on the same day.
How long did it take to cook the dinner? This is something that has a number of variables, not least of these being how well done they liked the end product. To the modern eye, the cooking times given by some Georgian cooks for vegetables are far too long; Hannah Glasse remarks ‘most people spoil garden things by over-boiling them’ but then goes on to say that cauliflower should be boiled for fifteen minutes, which is more than enough to reduce it to mush. She also advocates boiling young spring carrots for between half an hour and an hour, and ‘Sandwich’ carrots (which probably means large main-crop) will take, she says, two hours. From all this it seems that the vegetables would cook for about an hour. Suet and pease puddings take quite a bit longer, from two and a half hours depending on the size. Porridge takes about twenty minutes once the water has boiled and the oatmeal is thrown in.
What takes longest is the meat; in the author’s kitchen a piece of rolled salt brisket about six inches in diameter gets four to five hours of very gentle simmering, longer if it has been loitering in its brine for over six months. A large ham takes about the same time. Which means that if the meat has to be cooked by 10.30am to allow an hour’s cooling before taking it out at 11.30am, it has to start cooking at about 6am. We know that on most ships (ignoring St Vincent’s odd order quoted above) the cook lit the stove soon after 4am; he probably did so with some water in the boilers, topping them up after all the meat was in and it would then take half an hour or so to come back to the boil.20 After this point, the cook would then need to watch his fire carefully, feeding it just enough to keep the water simmering rather than boiling hard.
And finally, what did they eat for supper? Other than the second part of the day’s alcohol ration, which was issued late in the afternoon, there seems to have been no official preparation of food for this meal. They must have saved some of their biscuit, and could have eaten this with some meat saved from dinner, a little cheese, or whatever they had in their private stock. Perhaps, in cold weather, this is when they had the soup which several commanders-in-chief mention; otherwise, since the galley fire would have long since been extinguished, it had to be something cold.
There were some occasions when it would have been impossible to light the stove and cook. One of these was the days in port when they were loading powder and the rule was ‘No fires, no lights’. Any given ship would have very little, if any, control over exactly when it loaded, so on such days it would have been cold dinner and catch-up on another day. Such catching up was within the remit of the purser and since everyone would see the sense of it there would be no grumbling.
In bad weather it would have been impossible to cook. Not only would the contents of the boiler slop about with some inevitable spillage, the fire itself would shift and be difficult to control. Even the closed fire under the boilers would be a problem as the cook would not dare open the door to feed it. There are several reports of ships going round the Horn being unable to light the fires for weeks on end. It would not even have to be rough weather to create such problems; a ship moving, say, across the Trades could develop quite a heel even on a calm sea. This may not carry the fire risk of a ship lurching about on rough water, but it would restrict the amount of water they would want to put in the boilers.
The battle situation creates a problem of timing. The general thinking was that ‘Englishmen would fight all the better for having a comfortable meal’ beforehand; such a meal would not only be comforting to the belly but provide essential fuel for the coming exertions. So convinced were senior officers of the necessity for this that Howe incorporated a signal in his new system that read ‘There will be time for the men to dine’, hoisting this signal on the first of the four days that culminated in the ‘Glorious First of June’. But they needed to ensure that the fires were out before powder started coming up from below and the enemy started firing. This would not, in most situations, have created much of a problem; unlike land fights, where the enemy could often hide and pop out unexpectedly, sea battles, whether major engagements or single-ship actions, were usually preceded by a long chase or prolonged manoeuvring for position. As long as they could see three or fours hours clear, there was time to light the fires and cook some meat; if, when it was ready, there was obviously no time to eat it at the tables, it could at least be issued and eaten from the hand. If there was no time for that, it was a case of biscuit, cheese and a mug of wine or grog taken at each man’s action station.21
It has often been said that the British seaman was a very conservative eater. Perhaps he was, but there can be little doubt that any mess of men who liked their food would take whatever opportunity presented itself to buy some little extras to perk up their rations. One man might be delegated to do the buying, with the others stumping up their share in cash or kind. The surgeon of Daedalus remarked that while on the Moluccas station, the men exchanged their unwanted rice for yams, pumpkins and sweet potatoes.22 And of course, anyone who came across something good while on his own would naturally share it with his mess-mates; this has always been the norm when groups of men eat together regularly.
Whenever they touched land, even if away from a town, the locals would want to make the most of the opportunity to sell their wares. Wybourn remarked of watering at Sardinia, when ‘hundreds of the Natives [sic] flocked down bringing quantities of provisions, Animals, Vegetables, fruit, etc.,’ and when Keith’s fleet was assisting the army in Egypt in 1800, the army quartermasters regulated the market by keeping the Arab sellers on one side of a stretched rope while the army and navy buyers stood on the other. Here, as well as sheep, poultry and pigeons, the Arabs sold spinach, lettuce and onions.23
Even if the men could not go ashore, bumboats would come out bearing local produce, including both fresh and dry fruit. In European waters, dry fruit would include figs, dates, prunes or apricots, even apples and pears. All of these were actively traded into England; some ‘dry’ grocers in London specialised in them as early as the mid-1600s and most sailors who had ventured near the Mediterranean would have been aware of them; they would also have been familiar with the various types of dried sausage. All of these would have been among the wares available on shore or brought out to the ships by bumboats. Any sailor with a sweet tooth and a few coins in his pocket would also have bought some dried fruit (and nuts) for long-term keeping as well as some of the equally available fresh fruit. Exactly what this was depended on where they were: in the Mediterranean, grapes, melons, pomegranates, figs, apricots and peaches, fresh dates, lemons and oranges (Malta was famous for the red-flecked blood orange); further south at Madeira and the West Indies, bananas, limes and pineapples and sometimes ‘alligator’ or avocado pears; and in the East Indies, all of these plus guavas, mangosteens and mangoes. In northern Europe and round the Mediterranean basin, nuts would range from hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts and chestnuts, and further afield there would be more exotic nuts such as Brazils, cashews and coconuts. The bumboats would also bring sweetmeats, cakes, jams, pickles and even, for those who had a taste for them, spices and other seasonings.
Depending on the captain, they might be allowed to buy alcohol. Captain Parker of the Amazon said in his orders that liquor might be brought onto the ship by messes who first obtained permission and ‘who know how to make proper use of it.’24 However, allowed or not, no doubt plenty did make its way aboard one way or another.
Although there are few records of below-decks men keeping poultry, it is likely that many did, for eggs if nothing else. As long as the entire ship did not degenerate into a chicken farm, a reasonable captain would not object; they did, after all, allow such pets as parrots, so why not a chicken or two?
Another interesting question on how the men ate is how did they eat their onions? This might seem an odd thing to wonder about, given the obvious thought of putting them in to boil with the meat or adding them to the soup, but there are some clues pointing in another direction. Nelson put out a general order, chiding the pursers for using the onions to put in the soup when they were intended ‘for the recruiting the health of the ship’s company’ and some of the logs of his fleet report receiving onions, then serving them out to the men more or less straightaway.25 The men could indeed have put them in the net with their meat or added them to their duff, or even roasted them on the stove. On the other hand, this was in the Mediterranean, where big mild Spanish-type onions could be had, and those can be eaten raw, either with biscuit and cheese or chopped and dressed with oil and vinegar, both of which were available. Consider the taste range and texture of the rest of their diet: bland, boiled, soft (unless their teeth were good enough to crunch the biscuit without soaking it), and you can see how those men would have relished the sharp strong taste and crisp texture of a raw onion. And if they did this in the Mediterranean, they would have done the same elsewhere. There is an alternative possibility, and for this we also have some evidence: Richard Ford reported to Nelson on one occasion that because of the season, the onions were too small for anything but pickling. They had onions, they had vinegar, and before they were far into a commission, they would have had empty casks and the small butter firkins. It does not take many weeks before small whole onions are ready to eat, and if the big ones are sliced, they are ready in a week or so. There are worse ways to spend your off-watch hours than preparing something tasty to eat, especially if you do it with your mates and make a social occasion of the job, yarning while you peel.
Yarning is thought to be a major part of the social life below decks and the main opportunity for it, apart from such situations as above, was at the dinner table. Greg Dening believes that yarning takes on a ritual function, tales demonstrating experience serving not only to establish hierarchies among each group of men but also to create little areas of privacy between groups.26 One can well imagine the kudos attached to having a man in your mess who had fought at one of the famous battles or served under one of the famous admirals.
One final thing about below-decks eating which no-one has mentioned is what they did when there were women on board. And there were, it seems, quite a few. There were the women who were in some quasi-official situation, such as the tradesmen warrant officers’ wives, and those who did not exist as far as the Admiralty were concerned but were there with the full cognisance of the captain: one or two are known to have signed on with men’s names and did a man’s job; others did not pretend to be men but may have been in the muster book under a man’s name to get them a wage and victuals. The question arises firstly for those who were not on the list but stayed with the ship when she sailed; these may just have ‘belonged’ to a mess and shared its food. The second sort are those who came on board when the ship was in port and stayed there for some time. Some of these would have been genuine wives and likely to bring baskets of goodies with them. But what about the others, the ‘Portsmouth brutes’ and ‘Spithead nymphs’ and their foreign equivalents? Was their price ‘Sixpence and me dinner’? Did they bring food as well as liquor on board? Did the men share their rations or lay in a stock of food from the bumboats? Alas, we may never know.