AS FAR AS THE ADMIRALTY and the Victualling Board were concerned, with two small exceptions, there was no difference in the way officers and men ate. The official ration was the same, as we have seen there was to be no preferential choosing for the officers, and they were, exactly like the men, provided with no mess ‘traps’ beyond what they chose to buy for themselves. Officers were not provided with these until 1856 and then only when a ship was newly commissioned; they had to provide their own replacements. It was another forty years before anything was provided free for the men.1 The two minor exceptions were that captains were traditionally supplied with a cask of ox-tongues on commissioning a ship, a practice which was referred to as ‘ancient’ in 1703 and which carried on until 1915; and that commanders-in-chief were given ‘table money’ as an acknowledgement of their need to entertain.2
By the social mores of the time, officers, as gentlemen, were expected to eat in a better way and on a different level than the ‘people’. The obvious way to set themselves apart was to eat at different times. Although they breakfasted at 8am, as did the men, they supped at 6pm and dined at least one hour later than the men. On some ships, the captain ate an hour later than the lieutenants and warrant officers; Nelson’s dinners were served at 2.45pm. There were some practical as well as social aspects to these different timings: the officers would be available to take over some of the essential watch duties while the men ate, the younger and more agile of them (probably midshipmen) going aloft as lookouts. And since the officers’ cooks, stewards and ‘waiters’ also had to eat, they would do so with the rest of the men and be free to attend to the officers in due course.
Captains and admirals kept their own tables, while other officers formed their own messes, where they clubbed together to buy their own wine and food, or at least some embellishments for the ration food. This must have created quite a financial problem for the more impoverished officers, who would be almost unable to resist the social pressure to pay up. One can imagine the embarrassment for a man who declined to join the ‘club’ and was forced to eat ration food at a table where everyone else was eating something better.
One of the members of the mess would be appointed ‘caterer’ for an agreed duration, of several months if not indefinitely, and he held the mess’s money and bought whatever they needed when they touched shore. In the commissioned officers’ mess this was unlikely to be the first lieutenant, whose executive duties would have kept him too busy, but there was no hard and fast rule. They chose the most suitable, and on a foreign station the choice might well have fallen on someone with a gift for languages. In Gloucester, when Edward Mangin sailed in her in 1812, the mess caterer was the marine captain. His abilities where food was concerned were adequate but with wine they were not; Mangin reports that his fellows ‘swallowed the nauseous and pernicious liquids, nick-named Port and Sherry, with wry faces both at its flavour and its costliness’.3 For this dubious privilege, each of the twelve members of the mess contributed £60 a year, a not inconsiderable sum when a junior lieutenant’s salary was barely more than that.4 £60 a year seems to have been fairly standard for that year; the purser Thomas Peckston paid the same on Volontaire.5
There were two officers’ messes on a ship of the line: the wardroom, where the commissioned naval officers, the marine officers and certain of the warrant officers such as the surgeon and master ate; and the gunroom, where the other officers ate. In frigates and smaller ships there was only a gunroom, which might have included both sets of officers or might not, depending on the individual ship. Pursers, masters and surgeons were considered ‘wardroom officers’ and joined that mess. Where there was a chaplain, he would be included, as might the admiral’s secretary in a flagship. Various people of appropriate rank taking passage as supernumeraries to join their own ship or diplomatic post would also dine in the wardroom. The ‘tradesmen’ warrant officers (the boatswain, gunner, carpenter and sailmaker) would form their own little mess in the gunroom or elsewhere; other ‘not-quite-gentlemen’ such as the captain’s clerk, the schoolmaster, the surgeon’ assistants and any supernumeraries in transit of the same type, such as Richard Ford’s clerk John Geohegan, would form another, each mess in its own little stratified world. One wonders what the financial arrangements would have been for Richard Ford. Once he had joined Victory, his important task and high salary (more than a post captain’s) should have given him a place in the wardroom despite his ‘trade’ status; the same applied to his numerous buying trips in other ships. Presumably he made arrangements to pay his share of each mess’s expenses, and no doubt returned from each trip ashore bearing useful contributions to the mess’s storeroom, not least of these being wine. Ford’s peripatetic work was probably rare outside the ranks of diplomats; there were few other people with such a need to move around so frequently.
In a ship of the line the wardroom occupied a substantial space on the lower deck, extending right aft to the stern. It had roundhouses for the officers’ toilets, flimsily-constructed cabins on either side where the officers slept, and a long table down the middle where they did all the other things which required a table. Other than the first lieutenant in a line-of-battle ship, who might have a large enough cabin to include a desk, the other commissioned officers only had enough room in their cabins to sleep and keep their sea-chest, often sharing the meagre accommodation with a gun. So at this table, they read, played cards, wrote up their journals and ate their meals.
The table, and presumably also the chairs, were supplied by the dockyard when the ship was commissioned; those tables would have been constructed in such a way that they could be taken apart rapidly when clearing for action. Alexander Dingwall Fordyce regretted that they were not fitted with drawers, but the ship’s carpenter could have added them if desired. There were various methods of keeping the dishes in place in rough weather: Fordyce recommends baize-covered wedges of different sizes for keeping dishes upright (especially those containing gravy, he says) or pudding bags filled with pease and fitted with beckets and lanyards at either end. An alternative was to put several layers of wet cloths on the table to prevent plates and dishes sliding. For decanters and glasses a ‘fiddle’ was used, this being a sort of lightweight railed enclosure, again with beckets and lanyards from each corner, and a grid-work of yarn to hold the individual items in place.6
The wardroom might have had two sets of tableware: good glasses and porcelain for Sundays and visitors, tumblers and pewter or earthenware crockery for other days. Thomas Peckston reports that they ate off Delftware, a reasonably priced soft clay pottery coated with a thin opaque whitish glaze, most popularly decorated in blue. There was plenty of earthenware or porcelain to choose from; by 1770 the potteries in Staffordshire were in full swing, and the opening of the Grand Trunk Canal in 1777 connected the pottery towns with Liverpool and the coasters which would take their goods to London, no doubt pausing at Plymouth and Portsmouth en route to supply the shops in those naval ports. In London itself, the East India Company had been importing Chinese porcelain in enormous quantities since the late 1600s, using it as flooring (ie ballast) for their tea cargoes. Tableware of all sorts was readily available, though then, as now, the best quality was not cheap. Moneyed captains and admirals could have it made with their own designs; Nelsons personal collection of china included a set of ‘Baltic’ pattern china from the Coalport factory, each piece of which included his crests and coat of arms and the inscription ‘Nelson 2nd April Baltic’. It is not known whether this was used at sea or at Merton, but it does indicate what was available to those who could pay for it. Nelson also had some silver serving dishes, some of these chased with his arms and crests, delivered in their own wainscot chest, fitted and lined with green baize. These came from the big City firm of silversmiths Rundell & Bridge, and cost a total of £627.0.2.7 He also had solid silver cutlery in a set for twenty diners, again kept in a compartmentalised sea-chest.8 Cutlery might be made of steel, pewter or Britanniaware, sometimes with ivory, bone or wooden handles. Well-off senior officers might also have had some silver tea- or coffee-pots and cream-jugs.
Some other evidence for the type of crockery used at sea comes from a recent excavation of the wreck of Swift in Argentinean Patagonia in 1770. Items found at the stern, where the wardroom and captain’s cabins would have been, show a clear predominance of high-quality ceramics and porcelain, including numerous ornamentally edged white English plates and bowls and some fine Chinese porcelain bowls and plates with blue decorations of a pagoda and trees. There are also many square ‘case’ bottles (so-called because they fitted into a lockable case), and many semi-glazed stoneware jars and jugs.9
There are no published reports of tableware at the lower warrant officers’ messes, or details of where they actually ate on smaller ships where they were not included in the gunroom. Each of them would have some sort of office desk for their paperwork which they might have used as a dining table, either on their own or perhaps in pairs, desk size permitting; or the carpenter could have organised a trestle table so they could eat together. There are one or two reports of captains’ clerks or schoolmasters being disgruntled at having to eat with the midshipmen for lack of any alternative.
The midshipmen ate in their own berth. Depending on the makeup of the group (age-range, family background, etc), conditions varied from the civilised to the squalid. Where there was a responsible older midshipman he would be the most obvious mess caterer. The very young ‘young gentlemen’ (also known as ‘squeakers’) were put under the charge of the gunner, although the captain usually took responsibility for their money and expenses, doling out pocket-money as appropriate and writing to their fathers for more when necessary. Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood wrote to his friend Walter Spencer-Stanhope of his son, William, ‘Your son’s debts are not enormous yet – you cannot think how cheap salt water is, and there is nothing else to buy.’10 No-one seems to have reported what happened with the older midshipmen, at the age between squeaking and financial responsibility; perhaps the captain delegated the task of mess caterer for these boys to one of the other officers. William Dillon reports joining the Alcide (74) in 1790 as an eleven-year-old and paying a 5-guinea entrance contribution.11 Jeffrey de Raigersfeld reports having 12 guineas when he joined his first ship and says it did not last long. He also took ‘plates and spoons of pewter, a dozen knives and forks, two cooking kettles, a frying pan, a copper tea kettle, a dozen tumbler glasses, two decanters, a dozen cups and saucers of the old blue dragon fashion and a tin teapot.’ One can imagine his loving mother buying all of this; little could she have suspected that these items, together with his stock of tea, sugar, onions and celery seeds (‘to add interest to the pea soup’), would immediately be seized ‘for the common good’. However, the common good did at least involve members of the mess taking it in turns to wash the dishes ‘lest the blackguard boy should be the cause of breakages’.12
Raigersfeld’s list of food supplies suggests enhancement rather than replacement of the official ration. He does remark later than they had their Saturday meat ration roasted for Sunday dinner, a diet also borne out by Dillon: ‘One o’clock was the dinner hour, fresh meat in harbour with vegetables and salt at sea [with] potatoes and such, puddings and pea soup…we might have a slice of cheese and biscuit previous to turning in.’13 However, they seem to have had some of their ration issued on a larger than daily scale, unless butter was something they bought for themselves. Raigersfeld tells of the tub of melted butter which started with some small hairs in it and grew progressively hairier as they used it up, eventually to discover a bald dead mouse at the bottom.14 He does not say whether they threw the rest of the butter away; knowing the propensities of growing adolescent boys, one is left with the horrid suspicion that hunger may have overcome squeamish scruples. Nor would most of them be over-nice about the table linen: Frederic Chamier reports a midshipmen’s mess where the table cloth, changed once a week on Saturdays, was used as a towel when not on the table and bore the marks of dirty hands and fingers. It was also used to wipe spoons and to clean the tines of forks by the simple method of poking them through the fabric. Chamier also throws some light on the methods by which hungry midshipmen acquired extra food, although in his case the plan misfired: he and a fellow midshipman stole some tripe from a dish intended for the captain’s dinner; when the captain found out, he turned them before the mast (relegated them to the status of common seamen).15 Like the wardroom officers, the midshipmen had servants to wait on them, a number which might only theoretically be expressed in the plural. Abraham Crawford reports ‘notwithstanding the berths of the midshipmen were so numerously furnished with inmates, from the reduced state of the ship’s crew, the idlers list could not be conveniently increased; and one wretched boy allotted to each berth had alone to perform the three-fold functions of steward, cook and attendant.’16
At the other end of the scale, captains and admirals ate in considerable style. The young ‘commander’ captains of the smaller ships might not be able to afford much beyond the basic ration, but they ate it at their own table in their day cabin. In the larger ships the captain had a separate dining cabin. Unless they chose to invite a guest, they ate in solitary state, although it was traditional for them to be invited to dine in the wardroom once a week. Most captains made a point of regularly entertaining the wardroom officers, in small groups if not en masse, and would include at least one midshipman at such meals, deeming it part of their duty to the boy’s parents to show him how to behave on social occasions. Some, including Nelson, often took a midshipman with them when they were invited to dine ashore. An impoverished captain could fulfil at least part of his obligations by inviting the officer and midshipman of the watch to join him for breakfast.
The same situation of dining up and down happened with admirals: in their flagship they would invite and be invited by the captain of the fleet and the ship’s captain and the wardroom; when the weather and the movements of the squadron allowed, with the captains and higher-ranking lieutenants of the other ships. In one letter home Nelson remarked that he was to have entertained William Elliott (son of Sir Hugh Elliott, minister at Naples) in Victory ‘but a fair wind came and that cancels all invitations’.17 In squadrons where there were sufficient freemasons (and this may well have applied to Nelson himself) such dinner parties would have coincided with a lodge meeting. Admirals, while in port, would also have to entertain diplomats, local worthies and other senior naval personnel such as the port admiral and dockyard commissioner. On many of these occasions, ladies would join the party.
Officers were allowed a number of personal servants dependent on their rank, these servants being men or boys carried on the ship’s books. Marine officers’ servants would be marine privates – Glascock mentions that while negro boys waited on the naval officers, the marine officer’s servant was a tall marine, ‘whose head and the beams above were in perpetual collision’.18 All levels of admiral and commander-in-chief were allowed fifty servants, captains were allowed four for each hundred men of their complement, the wardroom officers of ships of more than sixty men had one each, and the boatswain, gunner and carpenter had two on ships of over sixty men, one on ships with less.19 Some of these captains’ and admirals’ ‘servants’ were actually young gentlemen being taken to sea to oblige their parents, others would be adult seamen, while some would not be seamen at all but personal servants whom the officers kept with them on shore as well as at sea. These latter servants would include a steward to perform the duties carried out by a butler on land, and also a cook. A moneyed captain who liked his food, and an admiral or commander-in-chief who entertained a lot, might have more than one cook.
Officers had their own storerooms for wine, comestibles and table accoutrements. This would be a personal store for captains and upwards, a group store for wardroom officers, and perhaps another for midshipmen. The better-quality table settings, especially if they included silver, would be kept in the storeroom and returned to it after each meal, to avoid ‘disappearances’. On some ships one of the roundhouses off the wardroom might be fitted up to serve as a steward’s pantry, where everyday mess traps could be stored. James Anthony Gardner mentions such a pantry ‘fitted in the wing to stow our crockery and dinner traps with safety.’20 A small sink, draining out through a pipe, would facilitate the washing-up. Otherwise, the mess traps would have to be carried away for washing. Although no-one has mentioned this, the cook may have refilled one of the boilers with water for this purpose after the men’s dinner was served.
The tradesmen warrant officers were actually better off for private storage space than the lieutenants. They had, as did the purser and the surgeon, lockable storerooms for their trade equipment and stores and would be able to stow some personal edibles in them as well; the wardroom probably had a single private storeroom on the orlop. The content of these stores, as well as wine, would mostly be preserved foodstuffs and tracklements. These were freely available. There had been a thriving trade in spices from the East into Europe as far back as the eleventh century and by the seventeenth century food retailing had divided into salters, who dealt in wet goods, and grocers, who dealt in dry goods. As well as salted foods such as bacon, ham and other preserved meats, salters sold such things as anchovies, oil, pickles and vinegar. Grocers stocked sugar and molasses, dried fruit, rice, oriental spices and other dry foods such as pease and flour.21 As well as the big outlets in London, there were shops in the main naval ports to cater for naval officers.
Receipts for St Vincent, Nelson and other officers show a wide variety of spices, pickles, chutneys and flavoured vinegars: white, black and ‘Chyan’ (cayenne) pepper, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, nutmeg and mace, mustard and curry powder; lemon and mango pickle and ‘yellow Indian pickle’ (piccalilli), mushroom ketchup, pickled onion and walnuts, cucumbers and cabbage; soy sauce; tarragon, chilli, herb and elder vinegars; anchovies and French olives; capers and celery seed; and horseradish. Many of these would be served with the cold meats: hams, tongues and, listed in one of Nelson’s requests to his agent Alexander Davison, ‘Hamburgh Beef’. (Although Germans, possibly inspired by the Tartars, were already eating finely chopped raw beef at this time, this is more likely to have been the dried and salted beef which was also known as ‘Dutch’ [Deutsch] beef which features in several contemporary cookery books.)22 That same request also included twelve ‘Gloster’ cheeses and four kegs of ‘sour crout’; on other occasions Nelsons purchases included forty-two pounds of Parmesan cheese, ‘sallad oil’, Brunswick sausages and pickled tripe.23 Much of this would have been intended for his guests. Nelson himself was a very moderate eater; according to his surgeon William Beatty, ‘[he] often contented himself with the wing or liver of a fowl and a small plate of macaroni and vegetables’.24
On the sweet side, St Vincent bought milk chocolate and candy, currants, raisins and muscatels, Jordan almonds, ‘moist’ sugar and loaves of sugar, with a pair of sugar nippers to break pieces off the loaves. In the summer, during a return visit to port, he bought cherries, raspberries, currants and gooseberries. Nelson bought macaroons, dried cherries, raspberry and apricot jam and ‘currant’ jelly (whether red, white or black is not specified). Other officers took strawberry jam and marmalade; these fruit preserves would have made a considerable contribution to their Vitamin C intake. Midshipmen (or their mothers) would probably have packed cakes or sweet Naples biscuits. The biscuit manufacturing firm of Carrs started up towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, making a refined version of ships’ biscuit called ‘Captains’ Thins’ (an even thinner version of these is still for sale and popular for eating with cheese: ‘Carrs Table Water’ biscuit). Other firms whose names are still to be found on the supermarket shelf, in Britain at least, include Huntley & Palmer and Jacobs, who all started by supplying ships’ captains and then moved on to other and sweeter biscuits.
As well as preserved meats, officers bought fresh meat (beef, pork and mutton) and prepared poultry. Nelson received a reminder in 1791 from Mary Saunders of the Isle of Wight that he owed her a total of £7.10.0 for two-dozen fowls, a pair of ducks, and four crocks of butter.25 Officers sent each other gifts of food and when operating reasonably close to home often received hampers of food from their wives or friends. Nelson, at Copenhagen in 1801, took the opportunity of one of his sailors catching a fine turbot to patch up his relationship with Admiral Hyde Parker by sending the fish to him.26 Admiral James de Saumarez, when off Ushant in 1800, had been sent a fine salmon and a sucking pig, and when in the Baltic between 1808 and 1812 was sent a haunch of venison and a turtle by friends; his wife sent some porter, some hearts, pickled oysters, butter and biscuits, and arranged for a Guernsey cow to be sent. The cow was a great success, providing cream for the breakfast table and, reported Sir James to his wife, becoming ‘a great pet on board…there is no fear of her starving’. He also reported receiving salmon, turbot and cod when off Gothenburg, and elsewhere ‘plenty of fine mackerall’. Peas and other vegetables came out on the packet from Harwich and some of the officers cultivated a small garden on one of the islands; for a while they had great hopes of salad, spinach, new potatoes and green peas, but alas, the peas fell victim to thieves.27 Such gardens were not new: Saumarez and other officers had cultivated small gardens off the French coast while serving in the Brest blockade in 1800.28
Other islands in the Baltic provided partridges, hares and other game, shot by the officers and occasionally contributed to the admiral’s table. Raigersfeld reports shooting pigeons at St Helena and feeling guilty afterwards on thinking the survivors were mourning their dead companions. Other officers have reported shooting various birds, including doves, wild duck and snipe, and even peafowl on the Javanese islands; no doubt they also bagged the odd wild pig, goat or sheep when the opportunity presented itself.29 The difficulties of such activities are explained by William Stanhope Lovell, who was a midshipman in Renown in the Mediterranean: when visiting Sardinia he took part in shooting parties, but these were ineffective without dogs to flush and retrieve, and ‘Although some species of game were numerous, and flocks of blue pigeons, to the amounts of thousands, were seen, few were brought on board for no person would dare to follow them for fear of the wind changing, when we knew the fleet would sail immediately to regain our station.’30 Basil Hall reported that when in Leander in 1802, at Bermuda, many of the officers kept pointers for their shooting expeditions ashore.31
And of course, the officers had their own livestock on board. They kept a full range of chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, but the author has seen no mention of tame rabbits, although these are very efficient converters of food into meat. They may have been too temptingly pettable; as it was, many captains found the poultry-keeper (known as ‘Jemmy Ducks’) had to be changed regularly, lest he grow too fond of his charges. Cows for milk were rare but goats were common, as were sheep and pigs, both of which would provide a series of good meals, starting with the offal.32 That intention could not always be realised, as Basil Hall found out on one voyage to China. Jean, the last of a litter of piglets had become very tame ‘cruising along among the messes, poking her snout into every breadbag and often scalding her tongue in the soup-kids’. She even took her grog but was rarely seen to be drunk. Then, when halfway across the China Sea, Hall decided it was time to kill her. ‘Let us have the fry today, the head with plenty of Port wine as mock-turtle soup tomorrow; and get one of the legs roasted for dinner on Saturday,’ he told his steward, who listened to this and went off, only to return shortly to announce that the ship’s company had begged for Jean’s life. She had been trained to keep off the quarterdeck, but ‘if the captain will only call her, she will show how tame she is’. Hall duly called Jean, she came gambolling up to him (tripping the first lieutenant as she passed him) and Hall relented. As time went on, Jean became fatter and fatter, until she could only lie on her side with her upper legs up in the air, grunting for food to be brought to her. When they arrived at Whampoa, visiting Chinese were much impressed by Jean, but then a horrid realisation set in: the Chinese were only waiting for Jean to die and be thrown overboard, so they could scoop her up as they did any other dead creatures that were thrown over. This was not acceptable to the crew, so when Jean did die, they sounded the river for a really muddy place and having bound some pieces of ballast rod to her snout, dropped her over at night in the selected spot, where she went straight down, deep enough to evade the grappling hooks, to great Chinese disappointment.33
And, just as did the men, officers bought fresh produce whenever they had the chance. St Helena provided vegetables for ships going to or from the East Indies and was famed for its watercress; one officer bought bunches of bananas in Madeira and slung them from the boats’ davits, another had netsful of grapes, oranges, peaches and nectarines hanging from his cabin ceiling.34 Admiral Rainier, commander-in-chief of the East Indies station from 1794 to 1804, was reputedly so fond of mangoes that he was said to have delayed his seagoing activities so that he did not miss the mango season on the Malabar coast.
To drink, as well as wine and the stronger sherries, ports and Madeiras, officers bought cider, porter and stout. Claret was very fashionable, bought in casks for general drinking and, after the last quarter of the eighteenth century when cylindrical bottles and long corks were introduced, the better sorts in bottles for special occasions. Admiral Bartholomew James recalled that as a midshipman he and some colleagues were in charge of some prizes, one of which had three cases of the best Bordeaux. His captain directed these to be sent to him, but Christmas intervened and the midshipmen drank the Bordeaux, refilled the bottles with cask claret, replaced the original corks and sealed them carefully. When the wine came to be drunk by the captain and his guests, they remarked that while it might be very good claret, it tasted little different from the cask claret.35 Champagne, and its non-sparkling ‘cousin’ Sillery, were also drunk when the exigencies of the war allowed, and as well as the latterly ubiquitous rum, they drank gin, brandy or arrack, depending on the station. Punches were popular, cold or warmed with a hot poker and often spiced; this may have been one of the uses for the stores of nutmegs, ginger, cloves and cinnamon. Many of these punches included juice or slices of lemon; all were strong and involved mixing at least two kinds of drink, as a sort of precursor to the modern cocktail.
On the non-alcoholic side, officers bought the better sorts of tea and coffee. Souchong seemed to be the favourite tea, but St Vincent also had Hyson tea, Nelson had some other unspecified ‘black’ tea as well as Souchong and ‘Turkey’ coffee, while Hoste’s coffee preference was for ‘Moka’. Those on the East Indies station would have had their choice of all the teas coming back from China.
As we have seen, commanding officers could, and many did, bring a suite of personal servants with them. For those who cared about food one of these servants would be a professional cook, but those who saw food as mere fuel and were not too concerned about providing ‘fancy’ food for their guests would have someone called a steward. Nelson certainly knew the value of keeping a good table but did not seem terribly interested in food for himself. Rainier and Pellew came into the first category if their portraits are anything to go by: Rainier’s portrait by Davis is rather dominated by his pebble glasses but when you look more closely you see a very large stomach jutting forward; Pellew changes from an early portrait which shows him as a post captain, substantially built but not desperately overweight, to a later portrait showing him as an admiral, considerably wider and with every garment bulging. He remarked himself when in the East Indies that it was time he went home as he was getting as fat as a pig. One suspects that both these admirals had professional cooks. At a slightly lower level Thomas Pasley, when a captain in 1778 to 1782, kept a delightful series of journals of his several convoy-escorting voyages, where a running theme is the food and dinners with his fellow captains. He refers to making ‘the Hungry Signal’ to invite guests to dine, dining sumptuously on Indiamen, sending milk and hot rolls for a lady’s children and receiving in return six geese, being invited to share a turtle, sending a quarter of mutton and some fowls across to a fellow officer, and so on. His portrait also shows him to be distinctly chubby.36
What level of cook the wardroom officers had is not clear but no doubt any new intake of landsmen was eagerly scanned in hopes of finding someone skilled in the culinary arts. A well-off wardroom could, like the moneyed captains and admirals, hire a professional cook. Such a professional cook, engaged to perform his art, would arrive on the ship with his own ‘batterie de cuisine’, the pots and pans and everything else he felt he needed. Many of these cooking utensils would have been made of copper (for its good conduction) but well tinned inside to avoid poisoning by verdigris, the green cupric acetate which forms on bare copper. This would be for the pots which stood by the fire; those which stood or hung directly above it would be more likely to be longer-lasting iron. St Vincent’s shopping list when he went back to sea in 1806 gives a good idea of the level of cooking he enjoyed: fish kettles, several stew pans and saucepans of different sizes (one described as ‘a steam saucepan’), a ‘hamlet’ pan and other frying pans, soup pots, two sausage fillers, a Yorkshire pudding pan, a ‘rooling’ pin, some tartlet pans and a box of pastry cutters, an oval pudding mould and a cheese toaster, plus cooks’ knives, ladles and a ‘hand chopper’. This last was probably one of those half-moon knives with a handle at each end which we now call a ‘hachette’, invaluable for chopping the meat for sausages.37
It has been suggested that the type of cooking possible on board ship was restricted by the cooking facilities offered by the stoves, but this is faulty thinking. The Brodie, and then Lamb & Nicholson, stoves and their predecessors were each in their turn pretty much what the land-bound kitchen of the time had to cook on, the only difference being that the land-bound kitchen did not cavort about. The professional and experienced cook would deal with this problem by modifying the menu according to the weather, keeping the dishes simple when it was rough, more complex when it was calm, and taking advantage of the calm to prepare cold dishes for the rougher days to come. It is not the facilities of the cooking stove which make for good food, it is the expertise and care of the cook. What is done nowadays by turning the heat up or down was done then by moving pots closer to or further from the heat source, or moving them about in the oven. Equally, a practised wrist and a balloon whisk work just as well as an electric beater, and a set of sharp knives as well as any number of gadgets. The two secrets of producing good food (added to practice and good recipes) are having a well-stocked store cupboard and being prepared to stay in the kitchen and attend to what is going on, not having numerous gadgets and a fancy cooker.
They had butter and flour, so they could make pastry for tarts and pies; they also had eggs, dried fruit and sugar, so could make cakes; add milk to eggs and flour and you can make pancakes or batter puddings; with beaten egg whites and jam added to those other things you can make all sorts of tarts and puddings. They had plenty of varied meats, and whether using the spit of the Brodie stove or the closed oven of the Lamb & Nicholson, roasted meat means fat and juice for gravy and soups, as do bones; if all else failed there were the ubiquitous pease or onions for soup. Those onions would brighten up any savoury dishes, as would cheese. About the only thing they do not seem to have used was tomatoes, which, like potatoes, took a very long time to gain acceptability. And of course, given the right patch of sea, there was any amount of fish.
They could also, given those ovens, make bread and rolls – not every day, perhaps, and not on a grand scale, but enough to keep the cabin, the wardroom and the sickbay supplied (the oven on the Brodie stove was supposed to be big enough for eighty loaves). Until the process of making dried yeast as a brewing by-product was mastered, the leaven would have been some dough saved from the last batch. This is confirmed by A Edlin, the author of A Treatise on Breadmaking, writing in 1805, who quotes from ‘The Hon Captain Cochrane’s Seaman’s Guide to Making Bread’ ‘…which advocates retaining some dough from the last baking’. The same author also mentions the possibility of making bread with ‘the artificial Seltzer water prepared by Mr Schweppe’; this would give a result more like the later Irish soda bread than yeast bread.38 The main problem for an on-board baker would be maintaining an even and draft-free temperature during the rising stages but this could be more or less achieved by shutting the access doors at the front of the galley. This would not inconvenience anybody, as this end of the galley belonged preferentially to the officers’ cooks. Finally, as well as the main stove, the senior officer’s cook/steward had a small serving pantry close to the cabin dining room, where one of the hanging stoves could be mounted and where there could also be a spirit lamp for last-minute preparations or late evening tea-making or cheese-toasting.
The above is informed comment on what might be produced in the way of food, but we do have a fair amount of information on what was actually served. Crawford reports eating a ‘three-decked sea-pie’ much enhanced by onions: delicious but unwise, as he and his companions then went on shore to a dance, where the young ladies recoiled from their oniony breath.39 Lovell recalled a pair of rather superior young Guards officers who begged a lift; arriving on board hungry but too late for wardroom dinner, they were presented with beefsteak, potatoes and port which was eaten to grumbles about ‘roughing it’. Lovell, writing many years after the event, commented that their stomachs would have been glad to get worse if they had lived to serve with Wellington in the Peninsula.40 On the East Indies station, while Rainier enjoyed local produce, Pellew displayed the classic English suspicion of foreign food; writing home to a friend, he remarked on the heat and his conviction that his good health was due to wearing flannel next to his skin and avoiding curry. His junior officers were not so fussy, eating their share of the ubiquitous rice, which substituted for biscuit, in the form of curry, even at breakfast.41 On an Atlantic crossing at the beginning of 1813, the marine major T Marmaduke Wybourn reported their New Year dinner as including roast beef, mutton, pork, ducks and a turkey, boiled chickens, a ham, pumpkin pie, ‘raspberry pudding [and] plum duff’. Alas, he gives no definition of the raspberry pudding; had he not followed it in his list with ‘plum duff’ one might suggest it could have been jam roly-poly but even so we can be fairly confident that the raspberries, at that time of year and in that location, would be in the form of jam.42
Hannah Glasse, whose The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy consists of recipes which she plagiarised from other writers, devotes a whole chapter to food for ships’ captains. As well as suggesting that the head of an ordinary pig can stand in for a boar’s head at a feast, she offers several recipes for globe artichokes Tried, ragooed and fricasseed’, ketchup to keep for twenty years, and a complicated recipe for what she calls ‘sea venison’ which is mutton marinated in wine and vinegar, served in a rich gravy under a pie crust.
Perhaps the most valuable of the available documents is Admiral Digby’s menu book, kept by his steward John Gulivar in 1781.43 Admiral Digby was at the time en route to New York in Prince George and one of his midshipmen was Prince William Henry (the future William IV), who dined with the admiral several days a week. This little book is doubly valuable, as it lists not only the dishes served, but also the guests on each occasion and thus allows us to see the relationship between the number and status of the guests and the number and type of dishes served. For a simple Saturday dinner, with only four guests (all of them described as ‘Mr’, so probably lieutenants or perhaps civilians) there were three meat dishes (boiled mutton, mutton hash and roast pork), a fricassee of duck, potatoes and French beans, pickles and butter, and tarts and pancakes: a total of four entrées with side dishes and two puddings. For a Monday dinner with ‘P W Hinery’ (Prince William Henry), one captain and seven misters, there was sea pie, roast mutton, salt fish, sliced ham and ‘boild foul’, potatoes, pickles and butter, fritters (whether they were sweet or savoury is not defined), tarts and fruit puddings: five entrées with side dishes and two (or possibly three) puddings. Then for a Sunday dinner with Prince William Henry, five captains and five misters, there were boiled ducks, boiled fowl, roast goose, boiled beef, roast mutton, bacon, and albacore (preparation method not defined), with side dishes of potatoes, French beans, carrots and turnips and beaten butter, and puddings of Spanish fritters (these would be dredged in sugar after frying), ‘apil pye’ and fruit fritters, with two dishes of whipped cream: a much richer and more elaborate feast for a more important occasion.
It is, perhaps, a little unkind to laugh at the quaint and varied spelling of the entries, for it is obvious from some practice sentences at the back of the book that Gulivar was comparatively new to the art of writing, but one cannot but smile at finding three versions of potatoes (potatos, potetos, purtatos) and two of gooseberry tarts (gosseboory tarts, gusebery torts), and such delicacies as ‘pilches’, ‘cabges’, ‘hareco’, ‘carits’, ‘stud inyons’ and ‘grins’, not to mention the mouth-watering ‘foul brown sous’ (probably a fowl in a brown sauce). One entry which puzzled the author for some time was ‘cavetched albcho’. Hannah Glasse provided the answer: albecore tuna preserved (caveached) in vinegar after poking into it a mixture of pepper, nutmeg, mace and salt. A modern version of this, escabech, can still be bought in delicatessens in Spain and Portugal.
Entertainment value aside, the menu book shows that the food served at Admiral Digby’s table, though generous and varied, was not haute cuisine. Vegetables seem to be served unadorned (although the ‘grins’ are sometimes served with ‘beackon’ and the cabbage as a ragout), the meat is either stewed or roasted, the fruit comes in pies or tarts and there is occasionally fried fish or bacon and eggs. Sometimes the meat is described as steaks, sometimes there is sea-pie or plum pudding (or plum dumplings) and on several consecutive days, a turtle, first appearing as ‘turtil hid and fins’.
This book also indicates the precedence ‘ratings’ of the guests, a matter of great importance at all Georgian events. Although only a midshipman, Prince William Henry was the King’s son, and so always the most important guest, to be seated on his host’s right. Other guests, at admirals’ and captains’ tables, would then proceed through a mixture of personal social rank and seniority of service, with some nice dilemmas to be resolved. For instance, should a midshipman who is the son of a duke be seated ‘higher’ than an untitled but long-serving captain? And would that titled midshipman be wise to demur and seat himself at the foot of the table, thus gaining the approbation of a senior officer who might be inclined to help his career? (On the other hand, if his father was really influential, it might be he who could help the career of the senior officer.) In the wardroom the first lieutenant was the head of the table and host when they had guests. On guestless days, each officer may have had a precedent-dictated place and kept to it, but as always such things depended on the individual ship.
There were topics of conversation which were frowned upon: religion, politics and the fairer sex, or rather specific members of the fairer sex except in the most general terms. Whether or not the tone of conversation tended to the bawdy would depend on the ship, as would other topics – a ‘reading’ ship would discuss literature and classical history, a ‘sporting’ mess would discuss prize-fighting, cricket, fox-hunting and shooting. But the most common topics would be professional: technical aspects of seamanship, gunnery and tactics, ships sailed in and places seen, and sea-battles major and minor. Any newcomer or guest who had taken part in any of the famous actions would be avidly questioned for details (as would have been the same below decks). This last topic might be postponed until the cloth was cleared and the table could be used to map out the progress of the battle using glasses, decanters and biscuits to show the movements of the individual ships.
Once the loyal toast had been drunk (traditionally while seated, as the low beams would preclude standing properly erect44), the conversation, which up to that point would have tended to the formal and been led by the host, would become more general and, as the fortified wines and spirits took over from the weaker table wines, more boisterous. Other toasts would be drunk, guests toasting each other, and there were other toasts, traditional to each day of the week: on Sunday it was ‘Absent friends’, on Monday ‘Our ships at sea’ or ‘Our native land’, on Tuesday ‘Our men’ or ‘Our mothers’, on Wednesday ‘Ourselves, as no-one else is concerned with our welfare’, on Thursday ‘A bloody war or a sickly season’ (both good routes to rapid promotion), on Friday ‘A willing foe and sea room’ and on Saturday ‘Sweethearts and wives’ – to which the proper response was ‘May they never meet!’
Nautical poems, many written by sea officers and describing battles or shipwrecks, would be declaimed and the gathering would often break into song. Wybourn reports of his New Year’s dinner ‘conviviality and harmony subsisted until 1 o’clock with songs, glees etc’, and on many of the larger ships there were bands which would play on the quarterdeck. Victory had a band; Leonard Gillespie, the physician to the Mediterranean fleet describes it as playing from 2pm ‘until a quarter to three, when the drum beats “The Roast Beef of Old England” to announce the admiral’s dinner’, after dinner (‘a sumptuous repast at which the best wines and most exquisite viands were served up, ending with coffee and liqueurs at about 5pm…’; then the band played for another hour while the diners walked the deck before returning to the cabin for tea and conversation until about 8pm when a rummer of punch was served with cake and biscuits. This all sounds rather decorous, and was soon followed by Nelson retiring to bed, usually before 9pm.45
Until the fashion of dining ‘a la Russe’ (where food was served to each diner by servants in a standardised set of courses, much as we know them today) came in at the beginning of the nineteenth century, formal dinners of the day consisted of mixed courses where the diners helped themselves and each other. There were usually two main courses, followed by a dessert course at the most formal dinners, each course consisting of a mixture of dishes which were arranged symmetrically on the table according to a plan devised by the cook, the table ideally being covered but not crowded. Some dishes were designated ‘corner’ dishes in recipe books, to describe their preferred position on the table; others, such as soup, were called ‘removes’ as they were intended to be taken away after a set time to be replaced by other dishes. The first course, which would consist of soup (to be removed and replaced by fish), meat, game, sauces and vegetables and perhaps one sweet dish, was arranged before the diners came to table. After a decent interval, the table was cleared of dishes and another course was brought while the guests waited. The second course was generally lighter but included some meat and fish as well as a variety of puddings, pastries, jellies and creams. The dessert course, when it was served, was preceded by a general clearance of the table, including the cloth, before re-laying it with plates, cutlery and glasses, and a collection of fruits, jellies and sweetmeats. At sea, this course was probably curtailed or omitted but in port would be retained for the most formal dinners with important guests or ladies; the ladies took themselves away after a while, to powder their noses, while the gentlemen remained to drink their port and discuss the important matters of the day before joining the ladies to drink tea.