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.
COOKING FOR THE OFFICERS
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; Leon
ard 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
EATING AND DRINKING
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.
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