But it's interesting to note that the authors of science fiction have never bothered about the serious business of cooking in space. This attitude is understandable in stories dealing with long, lean, bronzed heroes sworn to wipe out the space pirates swarming in the rings of Saturn—that breed never sleeps, much less eats. But what about the short, fat, pasty tourists of A.D. 2060 who plank down their $2060 for a first-class seven-day round trip to the moon, including a three-day stopover at the Lunar Hilton Hotel? This breed demands luxury accommodations, and would raise hell with the Matson-Moon Line if they were served pills or parsnips or even schlumphh.
Let's take a tourist on a luxury trip to the moon and see what may happen. In this case the tourist is you.
You have paid for your ticket and are packing on the morning of the take-off. You are packing very carefully because the Matson-Moon Line has warned you that weight is the critical problem in space flight, and the weight allowance is 200 pounds per passenger, including the passenger. If you are a big man, weighing around 185 pounds, you are allowed fifteen pounds of baggage. If you are a small woman, you may be able to take ninety pounds of baggage with you. Matson-Moon has kindly given you a list of your fellow passengers with their telephone numbers, and all of you have been phoning back and forth, trying to locate lightweights willing to include something of yours in their allowance.
You weigh in at International Spaceport. You are wearing featherweight clothing and carrying your gear in a transparent plastic wrap bag. No one can afford to waste weight even on the lightest of valises. Passengers stand around hugging bundles of clothes, linen and toilet articles to their bosoms, looking like old-clothes dealers.
When the officials put you on the scales you are not permitted to pay an extra fee for overweight. You discard something then and there. There are agonizing last-minute decisions to be made. Tempers are short because everybody has been dieting frantically for weeks to increase his baggage allowance. This means trouble for the chef.
You board the ship and are greeted by the maintenance engineer, who immediately confiscates all tobacco. Smoking will be permitted only at specified hours, after meals and before bedtime. This is not only a question of oxygen supply; engineers have discovered that the chemicals in tobacco smoke are dangerous to the delicate electronic equipment aboard spaceships.
You are packed into your coffin-sized cabins and strapped down. The ship takes off with the roar of a Niagara, crushing you deep into your berth with its frightful acceleration. Then you burst into outer space. The sky turns from atmospheric blue to vacuum black; the stars appear in the sky; the sun is a diamond glory; the rocket thrust is cut off; there is a stark silence, broken only by the sounds of you and your fellow passengers being very sick.
This is the result of being in free fall, of being cut loose from the bonds of gravity. When you unstrap yourself from your berth, you float in the air. Everything inside you seems to be floating too. The sensation is strange and unpleasant at first, but then you begin to enjoy the weightlessness. Without gravity straining at you, you breathe easier, your heart beats gently, you feel wonderfully carefree.
You float out of your cabin to the narrow corridor and wriggle and push yourself forward to the salon which serves as lounge, observation room and dining room. It has no furniture. Since there is no gravity, no up or down in free fall, this makes no difference. No one can sit or stand anyway. Everybody simply floats. The salon is walled all the way around with portholes. You and your fellow passengers float around the portholes like fish in an aquarium, staring, exclaiming, photographing.
The chef appears from the galley. He is a small man with a fierce mustache and a savage expression. The mustache is French; the expression is savage because he must be his own waiter, and this galls the artist in him even though he is paid a fabulous salary. His colleagues, anchored on Earth, kid him about the job.
They call him espaçon, which is a combination of espace and garçon with overtones of assassin.
The chef carries a net bag filled with plastic globes the size of baseballs. From each globe protrudes a plastic straw. "Hot!" he warns. "Hot!"
And he demonstrates how the hot globe should be picked out of the bag by its straw. Each globe contains steaming bouillon, and you have your first snack in space, intended to settle your stomach and teach you the vagaries of eating without benefit of gravity.
It's a strange sensation. The soup must be sucked through the straw into your mouth. Then an effort must be made to swallow the mouthful, rather like deliberately swallowing a large pill. There is no gravity to trickle the broth down your throat. You can feel the muscular action of our throat doing the job all by itself, gently pressing the food down into your stomach.
Experienced space travelers are expert at eating without benefit of gravity, and you can spot your fellow first-timers by their clumsiness. Like you, they sputter the hot soup, which does not stain their clothes but rather floats around their heads in tiny droplets. The old-timers advise you to chase the droplets and lick them back into your mouth.
"Can't have the lounge swimming with soup," they tell you.
The chef collects the empty plastic globes and takes them back into the galley with him. Let's follow and watch him prepare dinner.
There is no floor in the kitchen. The chef floats in midair, surrounded on all sides by his kitchen equipment. He can stand on his head, as it were, and reach up to tend the stove. He can kick open the refrigerator, stir a sauce behind his back and crack eggs over one shoulder. He never has to worry about spilling things: nothing ever spills in free fall. On the other hand he has a hell of a problem getting eggs out of their shells once they're cracked. Nothing ever pours in free fall. Everything has to be shaken, pushed, nudged, coaxed.
His stove is a battery of hot plates set in the sun side of the spaceship. The naked sun in space is incredibly hot, far hotter than gas flame or electric coils. In fact, the entire ship must be insulated against it. The stove is a solar stove. By adjusting regulators, the chef can open the insulation masking the undersides of the hot plates and allow the sun to heat them from lukewarm to broiling hot.
On the shadow side of the spaceship, the temperature is the absolute zero of outer space, and the chef's refrigerator and freezer are built into this dark wall. Space does his chilling for him, just as the sun does his cooking. These conditions are the source of continual warfare between chef and pilot.
If the ship rotates a few feet in the course of its flight, it may slowly revolve the stove out of the direct glare of the sun, cool it, and ruin the cooking. The chef picks up the intercom phone and howls at the pilot: "Imbecile! You are assassinating my souffle!" The same rotation brings the refrigerator out of the ice shadow into the sunlight and warms it. The chef phones again: "Bandit! You are sabotaging my aspic!"
The first night's menu is characteristic of the meals served on this de luxe trip:
Caviar Beluga
La Tortue Verte
La Mousse de Brocheton Homardine
Accompagnée de Petites Bouchées
La Coeur de Charolais Beaugency
Endives Meunière
Beurre Noisette
Fond d'Artichaut Châtelaine
La Peche Flambee au Feu d'Enfer
Cafe Noir très Chaud
Just to be sure you're not under the impression that this is more Venusian grxzb and Martian schlumphh, and to enable you to understand how the chef goes about cooking all this in space, I translate:
Sturgeon Roe
The Green Turtle
The froth of lobstered baby
pickerels accompanied by little
greedy mouthfuls
Beef filet from Charol with a sauce
in a state of beauty
Endive as the miller's wife would cook it
Nut butter
The bottoms of artichokes as served
by the lady of the manor
A peach enflamed by the fire of hell
Black
coffee, very hot
The sturgeon roe presents no problem. The chef has stocked a quart can of "Super-Pressed" caviar. It looks and operates exactly like a can of aerated shaving cream. The chef presses the button and phbt!— out comes the caviar. A quart can is good for one hundred servings.
The green-turtle soup is a powder packed in single-portion capsules. Each capsule is the size of a sleeping pill. Not only is the powder the quintessence of concentrated turtles but it has been treated so that it can absorb water from the atmosphere. Nothing need be added. The chef opens each capsule and taps the powder into an empty plastic globe. In five minutes each globe is full of la tortue verte. Since the process of water absorption produces heat, the soup is hot. Add straw and serve. Voilà!
The froth of lobstered baby pickerels is a sore point with the chef. It is essential for the dish (and his reputation as an artist) to enhance it with a hint of garlic. The maintenance engineer has absolutely prohibited the use of garlic in cooking; he finds it almost impossible to remove all traces of garlic from the air in his atmospheric reprocessing plant. But in this age of caffein-free coffee and nicotineless tobacco, the chef has located "No-Gar," a garlicless garlic, and smuggled a few fleurettes aboard. He tries a clove. The intercom shrills.
"Allo? Allo?"
"Damn it, chef, are you using garlic again? I've told you a hundred times—"
"Non! Non! Mais non!" The chef hastily shakes pepper over one shoulder into the ventilator grille. Still protesting his innocence, he is gratified to hear the engineer sneezing, and gently hangs up. The preparation of the beef filets is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of cooking in free fall. The chef removes them from his freezer and poises them half an inch above the hot plates of his stove.
There they float while he adjusts the heat of the sun to sear them at exactly the right temperature and speed. No gravity, remember? No pots or pans are needed for cooking. Everything can be poised over the stove, even liquids.
For example, to meunière the endives, the chef removes a one-pound block of butter from the freezer and sets it above a plate. It heats, melts and becomes a large golden globe, hanging in midair. Then it sizzles and browns. At the precise moment, the chef thrusts the endive into the butter and gives the globe a gentle turn. It hangs over the hot plate, slowly revolving like a miniature planet, deliciously cooking its contents.
No plates or tableware are used to serve or eat the food. Gravity is required to keep food on a plate. Gravity is required to keep food on a fork. You can't cut food without gravity; you don't even dare spear it. The risk of food sailing into midair after the slightest miscalculation is too great. The dining room aboard a spaceship would be turned into a goulash.
No, the chef serves the food in midair directly before you, using ladles and tongs. He floats half a dozen blinis under your nose. Phht! Phtt! Phtt! He covers each one with caviar. You and the caviar are floating in space, confronting each other. You poke the hors d'oeuvres, one by one, into your mouth.
Next, the green-turtle soup in plastic globes with plastic straws. Easy. You've already practiced on the bouillon. Next the froth of lobstered pickerels, looking like a foam in space, for the liquid sauce hangs in bubbles around the little greedy mouthfuls.
Then come the beef filets with sauce, the endive and the artichokes. All these are gently coaxed out of serving baskets and floated before you. And there you are, thirty passengers, floating in every possible corner of the dining room, upside-down and downside-up, with your gourmet dinner floating before you; and all of you are eating in the old barbarian manner, with the fingers, but with a new space-age skill and delicacy.
Three wines and a cognac are served with the meal: Dry Sack with the soup; Montrachet 2053 with the fish; Pommard Grands Epenots Domaine Gaunoux 2047 with the filet. Marc a la Cloche is served with the coffee. All of them are the products of Instant Wine, Ltd., and Sonny Boy Wine-Qwik of California, Inc. I will not break your hearts by describing how these beverages are prepared. All I will say is that Instant Wine's slogan is "Think Small!" and Sonny Boy Wine-Qwik's products are packaged in what look like toothpaste tubes.
The foregoing may well take place in the next century, but as one moves farther into the future and deeper into space, space cookery itself may become farther out. The time may come when the chef is no longer on board ship, but remains on-Earth, cooking by remote control via telerobot, much the way scientists in nuclear laboratories today handle radio-active materials. The chef will never burn himself, but he can administer a bad short circuit to his robot slave if he isn't careful with the controls.
Or cooking may become altogether automatic with menus for 750 meals punched into the robot kitchen's instruction tape. The kitchen itself will look like an IBM computer, and the meals will pop out of its maw with distressing punctuality, whether you feel like eating or not.
Three hundred years from now, General Foods and Continental Can may merge and electrify the Space Age by crossing spinach with plastics (don't ask me how), producing an edible food container in fruit, fish, meat, fowl and vegetable flavors.
The label will be printed with Wine-Qwik ink, of course, and the top of the can, not necessarily edible, will be microgrooved on the inside so that you can listen to Bach, Beethoven and Brubeck while you are dining.
In this case there won't be any kitchen. Each cabin will have affixed to the wall the food equivalent of a cigarette machine; or aboard one-class cruise ships it may be a combination vending machine and juke box in the main salon, and you'll pay for your meals as you eat them, with coins in a slot.
Five hundred years from now the space lanes will be fairly well cluttered with debris—garbage, containers, bottles, nonedible plastics—all jettisoned by spaceships and floating in nowhere. Space, unlike the ocean, has no convenient bottom to which garbage can sink. Somewhere around A. D. 2460 the final miracle may take place. Exposed to cosmic rays and undiluted sunlight and proton bombardment, seeds and stems, leaves and fruit stones may mutate and begin to grow in the vacuum.
Can you imagine the spaceways slowly filling with spreading fields of new species of flowers, fruits, vegetables and grains; living in vacuum like orchids living on air; thriving in the light of the distant sun, feeding, perhaps, on the stray electrons, protons and stardust that pervade every inch of the universe? Can you see spaceships on long journeys stopping alongside these fields to replenish supplies, like adventuring Vikings? Can you conceive of the taste of these new foods of the future, and the strange new ways they may be cooked in space? Beyond this, the imagination can't go.
Holiday, May 1960
Place of the Month: The Moon
11,000 travelers are on the weightless wait-list When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey began its run, the public noticed that a Pan Am craft was shown making a flight to the moon. Requests for advance reservations for a moon flight began to trickle in. Then Apollo 8 flew its tremendous mission, and on Christmas Day Pan Am published a whimsical release announcing that they had more than 200 reservations for a moon flight on file. The public took it seriously and requests poured in. When we asked Pan Am to assign Holiday a reservation we were told that we would be 11,690th on the list. (The first is Gerhard Pistor of Vienna.) There will be commercial flights to the moon within our lifetime, but some of us will have to be wait-listed, for quite a while.
The moon will be an exciting, an alien, a dangerous place to visit. It will be a combination of a trip to a desert, to Iceland, to the Rocky Mountains, and skindiving, all for someone who is colorblind. It's a difficult melange to visualize, but that's what will make your trip unique.
You'll find the terrain a dirty dun expanse of grays, almost completely devoid of color. Underfoot, the ground will be gritty, sandy, gravelly, speckled with pebbles, larger stones and giant rocks, although pebble is the wrong word to use, for pebble implies a small stone that has been worn smooth by waves and weather, and the moon has had neither for hundreds of millions of years. This is one reason why geologists
will probably be members of your tour; they will be eager to inspect a terrain which has remained virtually unchanged for eons.
There will be craters all around you; tiny ones just a few feet across, giant craters hundreds of miles in diameter, ringed by mountains towering 10,000 feet high, often with monolithic peaks in the center of the sunken floors. It's said that the landscape of Iceland is about the closest thing that the Earth has resembling the lunar landscape. You will see crooked rills, believed to be moonquake cracks, and immense gorges, dwarfing the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon was cut by the Colorado River by slow erosion, but there is no erosion on the moon. It's theorized that these fantastic gorges were blasted by giant boulders shot out from the impact of asteroids on the moon's surface. Some astronomers believe that the large lunar craters were produced by such impacts; others claim that they're the result of volcanic action. Perhaps you will be able to settle the question.
One curious effect of the lunar landscape will confuse you at first; it will be the reverse of what happens to visitors to the Rocky Mountains. Out west the air is so pure that a mountain peak which seems to be only a few miles distant turns out to be a hundred miles away. On the moon what seems to be far away will be much closer than you realize. On Earth the edge of the horizon is around twelve miles distant. But the moon is only one fourth the diameter of the Earth. Consequently its horizon will be only about two and three-quarter miles distant from your eyes.
The smaller size of the moon will also force you to learn a new manner of walking. Being smaller it has less mass than the Earth, which means less gravitational attraction. You will weigh one sixth of your terrestrial weight when on the moon. The sensation of weightlessness will be delicious and dreamlike, but when you go for your first stroll you'll have to accustom your muscles to exert l/6th the effort they use on Earth. If you took a normal step you'd go soaring skyward. You'll have to learn a slow-motion shuffle, much like that of a skin-diver walking along the bottom of the sea.
Redemolished Page 31
