Chapter XXII: The Cook (in Steam)

In many respects the cook is the most interesting figure on board ship. From him of the vast floating hotel, where the cook is a man of many attainments, an artist in foods, who should, but does not, command as great a salary as the chef of a first-class London hotel, down to the miserable urchin who crouches low over his scarcely-shielded pot on the open deck of a foreign-going barge, they not only deserve our attention, they demand it, dumbly yet imperiously. How are the cooks of first-class passenger steamers trained? Whence are obtained those able manipulators of provisions who are always to be found on board of excursion steamers that are laid up half the year, as soon as they commence running? What do they do in the dead seasons, these magicians who, in a space no larger than a reasonably-sized cupboard, succeed in turning out a dinner of several courses for five hundred people, no matter what the weather may be? Magician is surely the word, if only for the marvellous way in which every corner of cramped space is utilized, every trick of the culinary art--whereby the same thing is presented under two or three totally different aspects and flavours, and roasting, boiling, frying, and stewing go on apparently in the same glowing chamber at the same moment--is practised. These things amaze me; but, after all, much of the work may be done ashore, or in the quiet of the moorings before starting-time in the morning, and pastry may be bought all ready for table, also cold side-dishes.

But none of these adjuncts are available to the sea-going ship. His dinners must be prepared, down to the smallest item, by the cook himself and his subordinates. It is true that he has a large staff in a liner, and that those assistants are carefully selected for their several duties; but he has not, as his far better paid brother ashore has, the power of dismissing any assistant summarily if that assistant be incompetent or worse. That is, he has not such a power at the time when it would be of use. In the day of battle, when the great organization of an Atlantic liner's catering is going on, he must use such men as he has; they cannot be exchanged for others. But how very striking is the moral to be drawn from such a state of affairs. It is that, considering the excellence of the work performed by these men, there must be a most exalted standard of quality among them. And they would seem to be a contented folk. We know, most of us, that the great steamship companies have a reputation for treating their servants generously, but generously-entreated workpeople are not always the most contented. The cook and steward class in these vessels must be, or we should hear them, for they are by no means a feeble folk. You will find them occupying comfortable positions ashore while still in the prime of life, having earned sufficient within a few years to enable them to abandon the strenuous toil demanded of them at sea. They have earned every penny, and have not been compelled to "carry the banner" in order to get more. And in strangest out-of-the-way places of this wonderful England of ours, you will come across quiet, gentlemanly men who, upon opportunity arising, will inform you that they were cook of the steamship _So-and-so_, or steward of such another one. They enjoyed the life, but presently, like sensible men, they felt the need of a wife and home and children, and they therefore looked about for something suitable ashore, found it, and made room for a younger man.

No one, unless he belongs to the cooking-staff, has much opportunity afforded him for prying into the galley on board a big passenger ship during working hours. Those splendidly-fitted hives of industry may be viewed at other times, but then they reveal nothing to the outsider. This exclusiveness is not malicious, or for fear of being found fault with. It is solely because there is no room for any but the workers, who work indeed. Every inch of space is needed. Look down through the hatch above, or peer in through the ports, and you will be astounded at the way in which the cooks are handling the food, how in a space where, by all ordinary rules of cookery, they should not have room to move, they are turning out with conjurer-like dexterity a state dinner of ever so many courses for a couple of hundred saloon passengers. And then contrast their surroundings, if your previous experience enables you so to do, with the palatial spaces of a grand hotel kitchen. Only, you must remember at the same time the gale raging over the wide sea, and the complicated movements indulged in by the ship as she strides over the tremendous waves. So shall you acquire a respect for the sea-cook that will endure all your days.

To compare great things with small, this mental picture brings before me by association the cooks in the Australian coasting steamers. We have nothing like the same lavish arrangements for cooks and stewards on our own coasts, because our system is different. Here the fare is exclusive of food. You may dine or not as it suits your purse or your appetite. When you dine, you pay. But in the colonies the fare between ports includes sumptuous feeding arrangements for the first-class passenger, for the second--there are no third or deck passengers, as with us--rough accommodation, but an unlimited supply of excellent plain food. Australasia is truly the land of plentiful eating. And the cooks--well, they are good, some of them super-excellent, and all of them trained by hard experience to do much work in a very small compass and with a tiny staff. The cook of the _Wonga Wonga_ stands out boldly in my memory as one of the characteristic figures of my sea experience. A huge negro with a voice of thunder, and an effervescing humour that made him a prime favourite, he succeeded in his vocation where many a better man might have failed. He was a fairly good cook, but in his details of work reminded me strongly of the elderly negress in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," who dished up a dinner out of chaos and old night somewhere down below. Such an extraordinary jumble of pastry-making, poultry-trimming, and all the varied operations required in the preparation of a dinner was surely never seen. And out from the weird confusion of things Sam would burst, smeared with blood and grease and dusty with flour, brandishing a big knife and declaiming Shakespeare on the slightest provocation. But in spite of the fact that the whole preparation of a dinner for sometimes as many as five hundred people, except peeling potatoes and the actual cooking, devolved upon Sam alone, he was always up to time. It was dangerous to come near him, though, as that time drew near. For then he drew perilously near being a howling maniac. Yet no sooner had the last dish disappeared aft, than Sam would sally forth from the galley, his ebony countenance aglow with satisfaction, and a big pipe in his mouth. Down anywhere he would fling himself, ready to discuss any question in the world, from the ruling of an empire to the winning moves in a game of draughts. His successor, when he got promoted to the _City of Melbourne_, was a far better cook, and a paragon of order and cleanliness, but there wasn't a man in the ship to say a good word for him. He was a shy Englishman.

Then, dropping still lower, I have every reason to remember the cook of the _Helen M'Gregor_, sweetest of small passenger steamers had she been on the London-Margate route, but a grisly terror when scaling the steeps of the Southern Pacific waves in a "southerly buster" between Grafton and Sydney. She was far too small for such an arduous service. Yet we carried over a hundred passengers when full. All her cooking was done in a caboose--just such a square box as may be seen on the deck of any old sailing barque--a cube of about eight feet clamped to the deck by iron rods. There was no table within it, only a locker seat which contained coals running across it in front of the stove. Two men could not pass between this locker and the stove without careful edging or one of them getting burnt. Most of the implements had permanent abiding places on the stove, but a few lived on racks above when not in use; and when the skittish little ship was dancing they would clatter down at intervals. Outside, in an angle between the back of the galley and the steam-chest, was a movable board for pastry (and other things). Its dimensions, with liberal measurement, may have been two feet square--not another inch, if I were bribed to say so.

The presiding genius of this most primitive of arrangements was a hunchback, a shrewd little Yankee with a French face, who received £11 per month and earned £50. He had one assistant, a nondescript man of indefinite age, who never wore an apron, and whose duties were confined to peeling potatoes, stoking the fire, plucking fowls, and washing up pots. But these things he would do as long as there were any of them _to_ do, mechanically, even though, as was frequently the case, the conditions all about us looked as if another ten minutes would see us all at the bottom of the sea. He earned £5 a month. But what he lacked in ability or initiative was more than made up by his chief. That man was a miracle. On that two-feet slab he would make pastry of all kinds, prepare most elaborate dishes, yes, although the salt spray whistled around him, and on occasion an eddy of the gale would flip a dish with its contents off his board far away to leeward. He would shout an order to his acolyte for half a dozen fowls and a bucket of boiling water. A few rapid motions of the hands, and they were all gyrating in the scuppers, while one after another he plunged them into the steaming bucket and slithered the feathers off, flinging each as he did so to his waiting henchman for the minor picking. Thus I have seen him serve six fowls at noon--at 12.35 they were being eaten. Ask me not how, for the details are unpalatable.

But his great achievement was butchering in bad weather--butchering sheep. Stolid Joe would bring the sacrifice along, mercurial Bill would seize it, stab it, and unaided commence to rip off its hide immediately. There, on the deck, outside his galley door, the struggle would go on as if it were a fight to the death, so great was the fury that little man displayed. And it was one of the commonest sights to see, in the midst of the operation, a green comber of a wave come hissing along, embracing carcase and cook, and sweeping them clean off in a dishevelled heap bang aft up against the second-class berths. Knife in one hand, half-skinned sheep gripped by the other, he had no buffers wherewith to ward off bruises; but he had a voice. And he used it, not in canticles of praise. Yet punctually the meal for which that sheep was being prepared would appear on the table. And it would not be an unsavoury dinner, either. The one thing that always seemed to dishearten him was the lifting clean out of its fiery bed of a copper or kettle, that fitted into a hole on the stove-top, by a vicious plunge of the vessel. And as such an event was usually followed by a green sea thundering over all, and flooding him and his lieutenant clean out of the galley amid a smother of steam, coal grit, and spoilt food, his temporary subdual could not be wondered at.

But I must forbear. Mental pictures of that super-excellent cook's doings arise before me in almost interminable succession, tempting me to forget the fact that there were many others doing almost precisely the same things unsung, and unrewarded save by the meagre pay they drew. Who, for instance, could envy the cook of a "weekly" tramp?--a steamer, that is, which, making quite long voyages, has engaged her crew at so much a week and find themselves. Perhaps there are no cooks at sea who are more worried than these. For Jack, left to his own devices for supplying himself with food, does some of the queerest things that ever were or could be recorded. And each individual expects his own mess to be as carefully looked after as a whole saloon dinner. Natural, perhaps, on his part, but for the hapless cook purgatorially inconvenient. I was once a passenger from an Irish port to Liverpool in a weekly boat, and in the grey of the dawn was waiting at the galley door to buy a cup of coffee. Men came and went incessantly, banging oven doors and flinging utensils from side to side of the red-hot stove-top. The cook was absent, engaged aft in some business or other. Presently he appeared with a teapot, and immediately snatched at a huge copper kettle which stood on the stove in the middle, where the top plate was almost transparent with heat. The kettle flew up in his grasp, being empty. "Why, there's nothin' in it!" he screamed. "No," replied a fireman who was groping in the starboard oven; "I tried it ten minutes ago, and it was empty then." "An' you putt it back on that stove!" said the cook tragically. "Course I did," was the calm reply; "think I was goin' ter fill it?" I really thought the cook would have died of suppressed emotion before he found words wherein to express himself. But his tongue was loosened presently, and then his remarks, if sulphurous, were fairly comprehensive. The fireman only laughed.

What shall I say of the cook of the tramp pure and simple? Only this, I am afraid that, while he has a bitter, hard berth of it, he gets little better pay than his brother of the sailing ship. One consolation he has, and that not a little one--he has more to cook, and consequently he is, taken generally, a better workman. For there is nothing tends to disgust a man more, no matter of what trade he be, than the being compelled to make bricks without straw. And there can be no doubt that, hard as are the tramps in many respects for their crews, the food is much better than that provided in sailing ships, taking the average. Having such a rough crowd to cater for, however, does not tend to improve the quality of the cooks carried in tramp steamers. A decent man hardly cares to face the possibility of being violently assaulted, for no fault of his own, by members of a gang of ruffians of every nation under heaven save his own countrymen. And this is the state of affairs that any man in such a position as a cook holds must be prepared to face in most tramps. If he be fortunate enough to get into one of the north-east coast tramps, owned by canny firms, who like to have their ships manned by their own people, and whose highest ambition is to see efficiency combined with comfort on board of them, he will be as well off as any sea-cook, not an artist, can reasonably ask to be.