Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  The limitations of balloons as passenger craft were obvious, since they could not be steered in any meaningful way, but they continued to be used for both pleasure flights and scientific research. The Swedish explorer S. A. Andree took advantage of modern food storage techniques for his ill-fated attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon, taking with him canned pemmican, sausages, hams, and condensed milk. They also brought cases of Champagne, port, and beer, and their food and beverage weighed 767 kilos in all (1,690 pounds), enough for three people to last through the winter if necessary. The balloon launched from the Swedish island of Svalbard in July 1897 for a trip projected to last thirty days; it crashed on an ice floe on the third day. Most of the canned food was abandoned at the crash site, but the trio of explorers took some with them on sleds as they headed south in an attempt to get to a place where they could be rescued. They still had plenty of food left when they died, and many unopened cans were found with their bodies over thirty years later on the island of Kvitoya. It has been suggested that the lead with which the cans were soldered could have contributed to their death by poisoning, but a more probable explanation is that they died from eating contaminated meat from the polar bears they were shooting to extend their food supply.

  Andree’s expedition was the last attempt to use unpowered balloons for serious exploration, but ballooning continued to be a popular pastime among the wealthy. Among those who developed a passion for aerial excursions was an eccentric Brazilian millionaire who was destined to prove the utility of powered flight. When he made his first flight in 1897, Alberto Santos-Dumont enjoyed a lunch of roast beef, chicken, ice cream, cakes, Champagne, and Chartreuse. On his return he amused aristocrats at the Jockey Club by saying “No other dining room is so well decorated.”

  Santos-Dumont made many more balloon journeys and became obsessed with creating a steerable craft, called a dirigible balloon after the French word for “directable.” He achieved that goal in 1901 with a craft known only as “Number 6” that was thirty-three meters long and carried only the inventor himself. The airship covered eleven kilometers within thirty minutes on a course that used the Eiffel Tower as a pylon, winning fifty thousand francs in the process. The inventor won the hearts of Parisians by dividing the reward money between his ground crew and the poor of Paris, then lost interest in lighter-than-air craft and devoted the rest of his career to inventing an airplane.

  Santos-Dumont did not seriously consider the possibility of expanding his airship design to transport passengers, but the person who would was already testing his designs at a lake in the Alps. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin would take Dumont’s interesting toy and make it a reliable form of long-distance transportation, creating the need for food service vastly more sophisticated than anything previously attempted.

  chapter 2

  Luxury in the Skies

  The Zeppelin Era

  Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was that rarity, an innovative inventor who was also a shrewd businessman. Alberto Santos-Dumont designed seven airships but apparently never considered the idea of carrying passengers. Zeppelin’s earliest designs were for commercial craft, including an aerial version of a train complete with linked freight cars. This entrepreneurial attitude is more surprising because the Count had a military rather than business background. Though he had been involved in the engineering corps of the Prussian army, he finished his career as a general commanding a regiment of cavalry. By most accounts he was inept as a commander of horsemen, but he proved superb at assembling a team of engineers and raising interest and money to build airships.

  Zeppelin’s first design, the LZ-1, was described in detail in the International Year Book of 1901, which noted that the 420-foot-long gasbag “corresponds with a fair-sized steamer. . . . The accommodations for crew and passengers are provided by two aluminum cars, suspended fore and aft below the body of the shell.” After noting that the airship had taken off, maneuvered accurately, and landed “with perfect safety,” the article concluded that

  there are many high authorities in aerostatics who look upon mechanical flight as the future of navigating in the air, if it is ever navigated successfully in any such sense as water is now navigated. Contrivances of this sort are altogether too unwieldy and offer too much surface to the attack of the wind to be practicable for navigating the air except under the most favorable conditions.1

  Only nine years after that was written, Zeppelin’s airships were offering scheduled sightseeing flights from their base at Friedrichshafen, with the first long-distance transportation test flights following shortly afterward. The twenty passengers in the zeppelins Schwaben and Viktoria Luise dined in a mahogany cabin inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with a steward serving meals and pouring Champagne. The gourmet delicacies they enjoyed in flight were catered by restaurants and loaded immediately before departure, and they were served in classic style at tables with white linen and china. Hot coffee and tea were available despite the lack of onboard heaters thanks to the thermos bottles that had recently become available, so passengers in the unheated cabins could enjoy a warming cup on cold mornings.

  The company that ran these sightseeing flights, called DELAG, has been called the first airline, and they did make the first international passenger flight in 1912. That trip from Hamburg to Copenhagen was made with Count von Zeppelin at the controls, and the 375-mile round-trip took just under twelve hours. The Count and his twelve passengers welcomed Danish officials aboard to dine on turtle bouillon, lamb chops a la Jardinière, bread, cheese, butter, red wine, Champagne, and sherry.2 The feat was covered by newspapers as far away as the Sydney Morning Herald, which noted that the zeppelin had “inspected the British squadron which is on a visit here before alighting at the airdrome” and mentioned that journalists “remarked on the ease with which it could fly to England.”3

  If any officers in that British fleet felt uneasy about the giant airship hovering above them and found the ease of flights to England ominous, they might have been reassured by a response from the British Army’s fledgling Royal Air Force. A day after the flight, the Press Association reported that “aeroplanists at Hendon state that the Hansa’s flight was merely spectacular, and that a single aeroplane was able to destroy several zeppelins.”4

  As a former military man, Count von Zeppelin certainly understood the potential of airpower in warfare, and he courted business from the German military at the same time as he worked to increase passenger traffic. The improved design of the Sachsen, which operated scheduled flights between Baden-Baden and Vienna in eight hours beginning in 1913, inspired other companies to compete with DELAG, and money was raised to build several competing airships. By the time any of these were complete, Germany was at war and civilian traffic ceased. When World War I began in July 1914, the German military had already taken delivery of ten zeppelins, and the ones under construction and already in civilian use were requisitioned.

  As the journalists had suggested, zeppelins could indeed reach England, and as the RAF strategists suggested, they could be destroyed by aircraft. Neither the navigation from Germany to often-foggy England nor shooting down of the zeppelins that made the journey was as easy as had been predicted, and the armed zeppelins bombed London, hampered minelaying operations, and performed reconnaissance duties for the German army and navy.5 A total of 103 airships were delivered to the German military, and though dozens were shot down in all theaters of war, they demonstrated their effective range even when dodging enemies, and ranged as far as Malta, Greece, and Norway. One zeppelin headed for Africa to resupply troops there set a distance record, traveling 4,225 miles in 95 hours—a distance greater than that from Berlin to New York.

  The crews of those military zeppelins did not enjoy the standard of food that civilians had experienced, but in the early part of the war they ate well. A crewman on the L-22 named August Seim reminisced after the war that on his ship the crew ate much better than the soldiers in the trench
es below, dining on

  sausages, good butter, thermos flasks containing an extra strong brew of coffee, plenty of bread and chocolate, and fifty grammes of rum or brandy per man. We were forbidden to open the alcohol flasks until we reached a height of 3,000 metres, but of course we often did so. Then if the ship never went above 3,000 metres for the whole voyage there was trouble ahead, for when we were in port again the commander made us hand over full flasks. Thank heavens he never tasted the contents, which were mostly water.6

  The quicklime heaters used in the ballooning age made another appearance, as Seim mentioned that

  We had several peculiar and very practical kinds of tinned foods, which might be described as chemical and gastronomical miracles. These were tins containing hashes and stews which were heated up by a certain chemical process as soon as you opened them. We were not allowed to cook anything on board on account of the danger from inflammable gas, and for the same reason I was forbidden to fire my machine gun on the platform just when and where I pleased.

  This standard apparently declined over the course of the war, and when British soldiers examined the wreckage of the L-32 which crashed near Great Burstead in Essex in September of 1916, they found that the crew had breakfasted on “greasy war bread, bacon and delicately sliced potatoes.”7

  Count von Zeppelin died in 1917, having spent much of the war working on plans for a commercial fleet to be built when peace was restored. The improvements in engine technology and airship design almost doubled the top speed of the airships, from forty-six to eighty-seven miles per hour, and they became much more reliable. When peace was finally at hand, the Zeppelin Company was ready to supply the world with fast, reliable airships.

  The first of the improved designs was named the Bodensee and flew for the first time on August 20, 1919. It could carry twenty-four passengers in a luxurious saloon, and unlike every airship previously built, there was a kitchen for creating inflight meals. It wasn’t particularly fancy, a single oven with two compartments and a stovetop with two electric heaters, but it was the world’s first all-electric kitchen using all-aluminum utensils. Electric stoves had been invented in 1896 and proved their value in wartime submarines, another environment where open flame could not be used.8 Since the electric thermostat had just been invented and was not yet commercially available, heat control was approximate—there were several electric heating elements, and the cook switched on as many as he judged necessary. The expensive and hard-to-shape aluminum utensils were used not only because they were lighter, but from fear of sparks that might be struck from iron pans with thousands of cubic feet of flammable hydrogen directly overhead.

  The Bodensee began commercial service between Berlin and Friedrichshafen, a distance of about 375 miles, with the intention of extending the route to Switzerland, Italy, and Spain in the south and Sweden in the north. Between August and December 1919 the Bodensee made eighty trips, having to cancel only three scheduled flights due to heavy winds. In 1919 a sister ship called the Nordstern was built, and several more were on the drawing boards. They were not to be built, at least not immediately, because the treaty that ended the First World War forbade further production of any craft that might have the slightest military value. Production ceased, and existing zeppelins were confiscated and turned over to Russia, England, and France, all of which used them exclusively for military purposes. The Zeppelin Company was reduced to making replacement parts for their existing stock, and to projects building industrial motors, cars, and other machinery.

  Though British, Italian, and American companies had been formed to build airships using the plans from captured zeppelins, they had no experience in the business. Harry Vissering, who was the chairman of the Goodyear Company and an enthusiast of lighter-than-air flight, lamented in 1920 that the most competent company in the business had been shut down.

  The Zeppelin organization today is prepared to build, deliver and operate rigid airships for any purpose. It has under contract virtually all the competent airship personnel in Germany. Practically all the engineering staffs and workmen employed in developing Zeppelins have been retained, one way or another, that they may be prepared to guarantee satisfactory performance of any Zeppelin turned out.9

  The sorry performance of the Zeppelin Company’s competitors is well known, and the inexperience of the French and British crews who took over existing zeppelins doomed most of them to early destruction. Only Russia succeeded in building and operating a fleet of rigid airships, which they used until at least 1942. Though no detailed records of these flights have survived, we might surmise that the food and accommodations were spartan compared to the glamorous zeppelins.

  So there was a great deal of pent-up demand when the Treaty of Locarno in 1925 loosened the restrictions on German industries, and the Zeppelin Company was ready for the challenge. The airship that became the marvel of the world, the Graf Zeppelin, was launched in 1928 and set new standards for luxury. Twenty-four passengers could fly the Atlantic in comfort in a craft that boasted showers, a lounge and dining room, and a full-time chef and steward. A New York Times article about preparations for the flight noted that along with attention to the quality of the meal, weight was a factor.

  In order not to overload the dirigible and yet serve the passengers adequate meals, it was decided after careful calculation to allow seven and a half pounds of victuals per capita daily, including food and drink, with an additional meal for the night watch. Breakfast between 8:30 and 9:30 will consist of coffee, tea, bread, butter, eggs or sausage. For dinner, from 1 to 2 P.M., there will be soup, vegetables, roast, compote, or dessert, and for supper, from 7:30 to 8:30 P.M., coffee, tea, cold meats, bread and butter. The passengers are privileged to order drinks between meals. The drinking water is shipped in the form of ice which is chopped off and melted as it is needed.10

  An incident aboard the Graf Zeppelin in 1928 shows one of the problems with dining aboard early airships—the vast amount of surface area to catch the turbulent winds over the Atlantic. The passengers were just finishing breakfast when a sudden gust buffeted the ship, and famed British journalist Lady Margaret Drummond-Hay was covered with coffee that fortunately had been poured some time before and was no longer scalding. Luckily she and the other journalists on the flight found the mishap amusing. A redesign of the control surfaces of the airship and a change in the shape of the hull reduced the wind resistance, and the final generation of airships was much more stable.

  In an article published in the Milwaukee Sentinel on October 6, 1928, Lady Drummond-Hay noted that despite the elegance of the surroundings, there was a drawback to zeppelin travel—the lack of heating. “We had fostered visions of course dinners, with snowy napery and gleaming silver . . . , but it is very certain that if the Graf Zeppelin pursues the northern course, leather coats, woollies, and furs will be our evening dress. Hot soup and steaming stew will be more welcome than cold caviar and chicken salad. There are sure to be quantities of German sausages, ham, dark bread and butter, cheese and eggs, with good Rhine wine.”

  In 1929 the Graf Zeppelin embarked on a voyage that was designed to show off the luxury and comfort of flight. Hugo Eckener, who headed the Zeppelin Company after the founder’s death, invited influential industrialists and party bosses on a flight from Friedrichshafen to Egypt. The embarkation was at midnight on March 21, the first day of spring after a winter that was the coldest in many years, and the passengers were impressed that they were able to shed their winter coats as the ship neared the Mediterranean. As Hugo Eckener recorded it later, after flying over the Straits of Messina at sunset, the passengers “seated themselves around the candle’s friendly flame at the attractively decorated tables. We had turtle soup, ham with asparagus, roast beef with vegetables and salad, celery with Roquefort cheese, and an excellent nut cake from Friedrichshafen, together with wine in abundance.”11 The reference to gathering around the candle’s friendly flame is remarkable, as it is the o
nly instance I have been able to find to a deliberate open flame aboard a hydrogen-filled zeppelin. If it helped set the mood, it was worth the risk, because after an aerial cruise that included sightseeing over Jerusalem, Athens, and Vienna and a return to icy German weather through the Alps, the politicians and industrialists were sold on the idea of contributing money toward the construction of an even more spectacular craft: a craft bearing the designation LZ-129, to be called the Hindenburg.

  While that great ocean liner of the skies was under construction, the Graf Zeppelin continued commercial service and was an effective ambassador for German industry and culture. The chef aboard the craft, Otto Manz, also intended it to showcase Germany’s cuisine, and in an article published in the New York Times in August of 1929, he called attention to the storage methods for his food.

  Manz proudly showed his commissary department to visitors. Large, small and middle-size cans lined the rooms of his shop and house. Into them all sorts of delicacies have been placed and hermetically sealed, then labeled by his sister. The Zeppelin chef is greatly chagrinned because newspapers say only canned goods are eaten aboard the dirigible. “Naturally people think only of canned meats and vegetables from factories,” said Manz. “As a matter of fact everything is fresh and is being put into cans now because of course, the food would not keep throughout the voyage unless hermetically sealed. I do all my own canning and my sisters affix the labels. My father was purveyor to the King of Wurttemberg, so we are used to supplying only the best.”12

  Both his culinary skills and those of local chefs were shown during the famous round-the-world flight in which passengers traveled in unparalleled luxury, as meals were catered and supplies boarded at the finest hotels along the way. The luncheon loaded aboard on the fourth day was supplied by the chefs at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York and was unusually multicultural; it included Indian Mulligatawny soup along with Veal Bourgeoise, a recipe dating from Mrs. Beeton’s English cookbook of 1861. (There were also canapés, fresh vegetables, and fruit compote.) When the zeppelin visited Japan, the dinner catered by the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo included anchovy fillets, pâte de foie gras, dill pickles, beef tea, asparagus tips vinaigrette, and a sand cake. The only item to be in any way identified with Japan, a “cold Kamakura ham with jelly,” was not remotely Japanese, and it seems that the whole meal was designed to show that the Japanese could cater to European diners without compromise.