1 June 2023— While NMHS Senior Staff Writer Shelley Reid is away for a few weeks this summer, we're sharing encore installments of Sea History Today. This week, we hope you enjoy this installment from 2019.

Sailors’ Grub

The summer season is in full swing here in the US, and it’s a time to enjoy our food culture: barbecues, fresh in-season fruits and vegetables, food festivals, and exotic dishes sampled on vacation and outings. While we are enjoying the bounty of the season, we thought it might be fun to reflect on folks who had hardly any choice at all: sailors “before the mast.”

Let’s face it: when casting about for dinner ideas, no one is going to suggest trying that new authentic galley fare restaurant downtown, and copies of Hardtack and… Some Sort of Meat?: Grub Just Like Our Ship’s Cook Used to Make would never fly off the shelves of your local bookstore. But it’s still extremely interesting to look more closely (just not too closely) at the culinary options of sailors on long voyages at sea.

The barque Elissa. US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Roadell Hickman.

Nautical archaeology PhD student Grace Tsai did just that. She and a team of researchers from Texas A & M examined one wreck—the 17th-century English galleon Warwick, a ship that sank in Castle Harbor off Bermuda in a hurricane in 1619—and set out to recreate that vessel’s provisions, based on the items found in the wreck site, including meat bones (indicating the cuts and types of meat consumed). In what they dubbed the Ship Biscuit & Salted Beef Research Project, the team studied the Warwick site and archival records of shipboard diet, and assembled their best estimation of what would have been the Warwick’s main provisions: ship biscuits, peas, salted beef (butchered by team members in the cuts common to ships’ provisions), and beer.

Packed into barrels, these foodstuffs were loaded into the hold of the barque Elissa in Galveston, Texas, to recreate storage conditions on board a ship. The team returned every ten days to open up the barrels, check on the contents, and send samples to the lab. So far, it appears the study is confirming our suspicions: it might not kill you, but the sailors’ fare wasn’t very appetizing.

Ship's biscuits, or hardtack. What it lacked in charm, it made up for in indestructibility. Photo: Science Museum, London. Wellcome Images.

From the safe vantage point of a reader’s comfy armchair, seafaring cuisine has a certain charm. The book Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels takes a closer look at the foods mentioned in the Patrick O’Brian series of books, helpfully providing the recipes for the many colorfully-named dishes. One Amazon reviewer confirms that the dishes are “appropriately vile.” She apparently tried the recipe for hardtack: “[It] requires steeping in hot tea for at LEAST twenty minutes and then eats like warm mush—in fact, it has only two stages of life: ‘440 carbon steel’ and ‘watery gruel.’”

Where the magic happens: the galley stove and kettle aboard the Alden schooner Mayan. Photo: Colin Dewey.

Of course, these were the limitations of what one could store before the days of refrigeration and advanced preservation techniques. And foodstores were supplemented, where possible, by fishing while the ship was underway and obtaining fresh provisions in port.

The cooks in today’s sail-training fleet have more variety and more appetizing ingredients to work with, but it’s still no mean feat to keep a crew well-fed and content, especially on a tight budget. Our own Sea History magazine editor, Deirdre O’Regan, served as ship’s cook aboard Spirit of Massachusetts for ten months on a voyage from New England to the Caribbean and back; she confirms that it’s a challenging job, and “a diesel-fueled cast-iron stove takes a cast-iron stomach in rough sea states.”

Sea History Today is written by Shelley Reid, NMHS senior staff writer. Past issues can be read online by clicking here.