Mutton was considered suitable for the sick at that time because it had properties which served to balance the ‘humours’, and it continued to be popular as food for the sick well into the nineteenth century. However, another possible explanation is that provisions for the sick had to be accounted for separately. It would have been easier to charge a single purchase of sheep to the sickbay than a series of small amounts of beef. Even more likely, though, is the comparative ease of keeping a small flock of live sheep on board against a number of bullocks, even allowing for the fact well-known to farmers that sheep only have one ambition in life, and that is to find a reasonable excuse to die! Even allowing for this propensity, live sheep meant an ongoing supply of fresh meat for the sick instead of the less desirable salt version.
Although lamb is sometimes salted in Norway, making a product called fenalår, this is exceptional; neither lamb nor mutton seem to be salted elsewhere, either for nautical or land-bound use. This may be related to the small size of the animal, but is more likely because sheep meat has a higher water and fat content than beef and thus penetration of the salt into the tissues could be slowed down to an extent which could allow the centre to rot before the salt reached it. To embark on a major operation such as salting-down large quantities of meat, you have to be sure it will work well.
Salting was not the only method of preserving meat. In the 1660s, Robert Boyle described his successful experiments in preserving cooked meat in butter. The meat was roasted, cut up and packed into a cask and melted butter was poured in to fill all the airspaces. He claimed that it kept well for over six months, even in the hot voyages to the East Indies. This is more or less the same method as used for making the French delicacy confit de canard (or d’oie), where the thighs of duck or geese are cooked and preserved in their own fat. The British version of this is ‘potted’ meat, which had become so popular in the eighteenth century that a subset of the pottery industry developed to supply the pots. However, those pots were quite small and not practicable for large-scale supplies, although no doubt many officers brought them to sea with their private stores. The principle of hermetic sealing with fat eventually developed into the method using glass jars which the British call bottling and Americans canning. Glass was not a practicality for general ships’ victualling on a large scale, but the idea of canning eventually developed and transformed the whole business of victualling.
POULTRY
Chickens were kept on most ships, where they supplied eggs for the officers and the sick until they went off lay and were eaten. Officers also brought cockerels, clucks and even geese to sea, but rarely turkeys, which are not the easiest of birds to keep alive in cold, damp conditions. The seamen were, however, not averse to eating any migrating birds which were rash enough to rest within grabbing distance; some of them would ‘fish’ for albatrosses or other sea birds with a baited hook on a fine line.
And sometimes, on special occasions, an indulgent captain might treat them to a feast. Basil Hall did this for Christmas in 1815, when he was fitting out the sloop Lyra at Deptford, buying one goose and one turkey for each mess at Leadenhall market. All went well until after dinner, when one of the crew could not resist showing off to the crew of an adjacent ship, asking them how many geese and turkeys they had eaten that day. ‘None’ said the others, and ‘Look at that and weep, you hungry-faced rascals!’ said the sailor, waving a drumstick in each hand. This was too much to bear; the drumsticks were pulled out of his hands and flung in his face and a general melee ensued.
The following year, the ship was in the Canton river alongside several Indiamen, and Halls steward reported that the main topic of conversation below was Christmas dinner and the fact that there were plenty of chickens, ducks and geese in the nearby village. Hall felt that it would be unkind to deprive the men of such a treat and agreed that the poultry could be bought. He thought no more of it until dawn on Christmas morning when a tremendous racket broke out, bringing on deck not only Hall but the crews of all the Indiamen. Hall’s crew had taken the poultry aloft during the night, tied their feet to the yards, cross-trees, gaff and jib-boom on six-feet long pieces of twine and then sat there with them, trying to keep them quiet (and getting scratched and bitten in the process). When the sun came up, the birds were dropped, setting up a screaming, quacking, cackling and flapping, accompanied by yells from the men, to draw the envious attention of all viewers. Hall does not report whether a general scrap resulted this time!
BUTTER AND CHEESE
Butter- and cheese-making were, like meat-packing, seasonal activities, the difference being that these were spring and summer tasks, when the new grass and the newly-calved cows produced the most milk. Yet, although they both started as milk, as far as the navy was concerned most of the butter came from Ireland while all of the cheese came from England. For many decades the cheese favoured by the Victualling Board was the hard Suffolk cheese, which, being made from skim milk, was cheaper than the full-fat versions from Cheshire or Cheddar. Suffolk cheese kept a long time but even at its best it was not popular – hard enough to start with, it became harder with keeping and there are stories of it being carved into buttons. Badly or hastily made, it became either too hard to eat or turned soft, went bad, stank, and became infested with long red worms (Eisenia foetida). During the Seven Years’ War the urgent demand for naval provisions led the Suffolk cheese-makers to cut the necessary curing time and the complaints about this cheese became so common and so bitter that in 1758 the Victualling Board more or less abandoned Suffolk cheese and turned instead to Cheshire, Cheddar, Gloucester or Warwickshire cheese. Although more costly and not so long-keeping, these cheeses immediately reduced the level of complaints, although they were issued on the basis of two-thirds of a pound of Cheshire being equal to one pound of Suffolk. For shipboard purposes, these would be whole cheeses, wrapped in the tough muslin-like fabric called cheesecloth. Packed in barrels until needed, they were then kept in shaped racks in the steward’s room. The individual cheeses weighed between twelve and thirty-seven pounds, depending on the place of manufacture, the smallest being from Gloucester and the largest from Cheshire. They were stored in casks until 1799, then kept in shaped racks in the bread room.22
Fully aware of the comparatively short ‘shelf-life’ of cheese and butter, the Victualling Board introduced two rules: one for the suppliers which said that if any of a batch of these products did not stay good for six months, they would not be paid for any of it and would have to remove the remainder from the stores at their own expense; and another to ships’ pursers which required them to issue all their stocks within three months of receiving them, failing which they would receive no credit for the unused portion.23
Bad cheese rotted and stank, while bad butter became liquid and rancid. This was partly due to the difficulty of keeping it sufficiently cool, but mainly due to inadequate care in manufacture. To make butter, you start by leaving milk, which is an emulsion of fat and water, to stand so that the cream rises, then put the cream in a churn and agitate it so that the fat globules separate from the water and adhere to each other. In time, the fat becomes a solid mass separate from the watery liquid now called buttermilk. However, droplets of this buttermilk will be trapped within the mass of butter and these must be removed by a process of washing and working it with paddles. It is this watery buttermilk content which makes the butter rancid. It is impossible to get it all out and so all butter will go off eventually, but if too much buttermilk is left in or the butter is handled by dirty hands or paddles, it goes rancid even more quickly. Adding salt to butter helps retard the process; almost all butter made in England and Ireland was salted to help it keep. One process which does extend the keeping quality of butter is to heat it gently until the last of the buttermilk separates and sinks to the bottom. The fat can then be poured off and left to set; this is known as clarified butter or, in India, ghee. The East India Company’s personnel must have been aware of this, but the concept does not seem to have worke
d its way back to Britain and the Victualling Board.
Unlike rotten cheese, which was good for nothing, there were uses for rancid butter. Whether or not it was still within the allowed date when found to be bad, if the boatswain did not want it for lubrication purposes, it was to be returned to the victualling stores and then sold. Although some of this was no doubt bought for land-bound lubrication tasks, some of it may have gone to butter cleaners’ who washed it in fresh water to remove the salt and the smell, then washed it again with fresh milk and finally worked it back into a product which could be sold to the unsuspecting as ‘fresh’ butter. This practice was mostly carried out in London; in Ireland, where they took butter-making very seriously, the butter industry was subject to strict legislation, one section of which forbade mixing old butter with new.24 Whether produced in England or Ireland, the standard practice was to pack butter in 56-pound firkins.
There were various official substitutes for butter and cheese. For one pound of cheese, these were one pound of rice, one pound of sugar, half a pint of oil, half a pound of cocoa, or a quarter of a pound of tea. For one pound of butter, the substitutes were one pound of sugar or one pint of oil. The type of oil is not specified, but at that time and given that ships going to the Mediterranean were not supplied with oil, the purser having to buy it there, it can have been none other than olive oil.
Butter and cheese were issued on the same day as oatmeal and sugar, on the three meatless or ‘Banyan’ days. There was, of course, the usual pound of biscuit, so if no meat had been saved, the cheese was probably eaten with the biscuit, as the butter might have been. On the other hand, the butter might, as with the sugar, been added to the cooked oatmeal, turning it into a dish of ‘buttered groats’. Quite how the oil was eaten, we can only guess. Soft bread dipped in oil will absorb quite a lot and is a common snack in Mediterranean basin countries to this day, but biscuit will not absorb oil like this. Smollett’s novel Roderick Random describes a dish of hot pease with oil and chopped onion mixed in; it could also have been used as a dressing for cold or raw vegetables. Oil might also have been added to soup, or, with the co-operation of the cook, used as a frying medium for fish, onions or pieces of meat.
VINEGAR
Added as an afterthought to the official list, half a pint of vinegar was issued once a week, but whether it was wine or malt vinegar is not specified. As with the oil, it could be used as a condiment or even, when circumstances permitted, used to make simple pickles. On a large scale (not from the seamen’s issue) it was used as a disinfectant about the ship; the seamen might have used some of theirs to deter vermin and sweeten their mess areas, just as before the introduction of modern cleansing agents housewives used it to wipe out fridges and cupboards.
PEASE
Pease, meaning the hard dried pease which were one of the staple foods of the time on land as at sea, come in two forms. The oldest, the Carlin pea (Pisum sativum ssp arvense), is a small, dark brown pea which is still traditionally eaten during Lent in some north-eastern counties of England. Also known as grey peas, these are a sub-species of the green garden pea which we mostly buy in its frozen form today (P. sativum ssp sativum). By Georgian times, this earlier pea had been replaced for most purposes, including naval victualling, by the mature form of the garden pea. For those who wonder if the term ‘pease’ means the dried form while ‘pea’ means the soft fresh form of this vegetable, it should be explained that the modern spelling is just that: a modern way of spelling the old word; here we will continue to use the old form unless the fresh version is meant.
Dried pease are either whole, green and wrinkled (still in their skins), or yellow, ‘split’ (ie separated into their two halves), unwrinkled and skinless. The whole green variety take a lot longer to soften and cook; they really need overnight soaking as well as several hours of cooking. Yellow peas are more accommodating: they can be cooked in a pudding bag, in which case they will swell and form a mass which is soft enough to eat with a spoon when hot and sets into a solid cake when cold, which can then be sliced and eaten in the hand. If boiled loose in plenty of water, they will break down into an unctuous thick warming soup; this soup is traditionally enhanced by adding pieces of pork or ham.
There is some dispute about whether the pease used by the navy during Nelson’s period were whole or split. An editorial note in James Anthony Gardner’s recollections remarks that at that time pease were issued whole, and that split peas were not issued until ‘about 1856’.25 What they mean by ‘about 1856’ is that the Admiralty circular was issued in that year and said that once the existing stocks of whole peas were used, split pease would be supplied instead.26 However, this is not to say that split pease were never used before that date; although the author has been unable to find any conclusive evidence either way, given the Victualling Board’s propensity to choose the cheapest option every time, it is quite possible that split pease were used earlier than 1856.
Whether whole or split, these pease mostly came from East Anglia, either grown there or imported from the Baltic countries through the port of Yarmouth. Pease are a crop of northern climes; ships on stations further south substituted the local dried pulse. In the Mediterranean or the West Indies it was ‘calavances’, a type of haricot bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) also known as the French, canellini or navy bean; sometimes chick peas (Cicer arietinum) might have been substituted. In the East Indies the substitute was referred to as ‘dholl’, which equates to the modern spelling of dhal or dal; this could be anything from split chick peas to the larger forms of lentils (Lens esculenta), some of which are very much like the yellow pea. All these were issued weight for weight for pease. There is just one problem attached to these assorted pulses: they have an unfortunate effect on the intestinal system, which cannot have improved the atmosphere below decks. However, for those of a competitive nature and a robust sense of humour this probably had some entertainment value!
OATMEAL
This also came from East Anglia or the Baltic, and was a coarser version of the ‘porridge’ oats we use today. It was mainly used to make porridge or ‘burgoo’ and eaten for breakfast with some form of sweetening, either sugar or molasses. Nelson got into a terrible tizzy about this sweetening in the Mediterranean when Victory’s captain, Hardy, wrote him a formal letter in September 1804 stating that there had been no molasses in the ship since the previous June, and requesting that since there had not been an additional issue of oatmeal to make up for this, the men should be paid for the missing molasses as ‘savings of provisions’. Nelson sent a copy of this letter to the Admiralty with his own covering letter, remarking that he thought the men should be paid for the daily allowance of oatmeal when there was no molasses to go with it, ‘as it was found that generally a man could not get a pint of dry Oatmeal down his throat’. Could there not be a supply of cocoa or tea sent in lieu of molasses, as had been the case when he was in the West Indies, or at least sugar, he asked. These two letters were passed from the Admiralty to the Victualling Board, whose response was on the lines of ‘What is he talking about?’ They never had tea or cocoa as a substitute for molasses in the West Indies, and anyway, no-one was expected to eat dry oatmeal, since it was always made into porridge in a big batch by the ship’s cook; furthermore, the issue of oatmeal was a pint every two days, not a pint a day.27
It would have been surprising if there had been any need to find substitutes for molasses in the West Indies, where it came from; unless this was a piece of heavy sarcasm, Nelson’s memory was at fault here, as was his knowledge of breakfast below decks. He may have been confused by the situation of substitutes for the oatmeal: one pound of sugar for two quarts of oatmeal, or five and three-quarters pounds of molasses for one gallon of oatmeal. These substitutes may have been another situation like that of suet and flour as a substitute for beef, where a sweet-toothed mess could juggle the individuals’ issues to benefit all. The other possible substitutes for oatmeal were wheat or ‘pot’ barley (a version of the grain which ha
s some of its hull removed, but not as much as does modern ‘pearl’ barley); these were substituted on an equal weight basis and both were boiled and sweetened to make an acceptable substitute for oatmeal porridge, rather like the Medieval dish frumenty.
Oatmeal was never terribly popular with English sailors. Jeffrey de Raigersfeld reported that when operating in the Shetland Islands during an oatmeal shortage, his men were nothing loath to trade their oatmeal with the islanders for eggs and poultry.28 Eventually the Victualling Board recognised this and the thrice-weekly issue of oatmeal was halved and two ounces of sugar issued instead.
Feeding Nelson's Navy Page 4