Note: this article originally appeared in my printed zine Bread & Salt. Not that many people read it, so I’m reprinting it here.

Ah, the life of an English sailor back in the olden days.  The ocean breeze in your hair.  The salty tang in your mouth.  The azure water stretching to the horizon.  The exclusive company of men, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.  The food–well, the food was a pretty good reason to stay as far away from a ship as possible.  It was usually awful.

The food on board ship was monotonous and of poor quality.  I’ll get to the quality in a minute.  It was monotonous because there were only a few foods that could be stored for months at a time without refrigeration.  Here, for example, is the weekly menu for the English navy in 1588:

• Every day: 1 pound of biscuit and 1 gallon of beer
• Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday: 2 pounds of salt beef
• Monday: 1 pound bacon and 1 pint dried peas
• Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 1/4 stockfish or 1/8 salt ling, 4 ounces cheese and 2 ounces butter.

Yo ho ho, it must be Monday because we’re having peas.  Just think what it would have been like to be at sea for months with that menu.  The Spanish navy at about the same time wasn’t much better:

• Every day: 1.5 pounds biscuit or 2 pounds fresh bread and 1.5 pints wine or 1 pint Candy wine
• Sunday and Thursday: 6 ounces bacon and 2 ounces dried rice
• Monday: 6 ounces cheese and 3 ounces dried beans or chickpeas
• Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 6 ounces salt fish (tunny or cod, squid or 5 sardines), 1.5 ounces olive oil, .25 pint vinegar, 3 ounces dried beans or chickpeas.  On Wednesday sailors also received 6 ounces of cheese.

Note the vinegar on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.  Vinegar prevents scurvy although I’m not sure to what extent this was known in the 1580’s.  The British navy didn’t get around to adding vinegar to the provisions until over 150 years later; until then sailors just accepted it as a natural danger of shipboard life.

The English shipboard diet provided about 5,000 calories per day, at least on paper.  Unfortunately, over the course of a long journey much of the food would spoil, and the navy compounded this problem by ignoring spoilage as a factor in any calculations.  By the navy’s calculations, a ship with 100 men outfitted for a three month trip would need exactly 9,100 pounds of biscuit (100 men x 1 pound per person per day x 91 days), and the person in charge of the ship’s stores would be held personally accountable for any difference when the ship came back to port.  Over time the bacon got moldy, the beer went flat and the bread…had some problems.

The bread eaten on ship was called biscuit, a word that comes from an Old French word meaning “twice baked” (the Italian biscotti and German zwieback both mean the same thing).  Ship’s biscuit was indeed baked twice to get all the moisture out of it; if done properly it could last for up to a year in the right conditions.  Those conditions included keeping it dry and in tightly sealed containers which ship’s builders attempted to provide but this was in those dim, dark years before zip-lock bags.  The biscuits didn’t stay dry.

There were two main problems with biscuits.  Well, three, if you count the fact that they were nearly indestructible and had to be either hammered apart or soaked in water to be edible.  But the two basic problems were rats and worms.  Rats were endemic to any wooden ship.  The worms came from lord knows where and infested the biscuit, burrowing through until the bread became so delicate it turned to dust if touched.

There were several ways to deal with the worms.  The simplest was just to wait until dark to eat.  You didn’t see the worms but you could still taste them–the weevils tasted bitter while the maggots tasted cold.  You could also put a freshly-caught fish on top of the biscuit, which would attract the worms.  Or you could set the bread in the sun for a few hours to kill the worms, or rebake the biscuit.  This last one wasn’t really an option because a ship didn’t have an oven for baking.  It just had a single huge cauldron.

Mealtimes worked like this: each group of six to eight men chose one guy to be the cook.  His job was to take whichever stores the men wanted boiled (like the salted meat or dried peas), put them into a mesh bag and drop them into the boiling water for a few minutes.  He’d then fish the bag out and take it back to his mates.

Shipboard cooking, as you can see, was pretty simple.  Consequently, the ship’s cook was usually the most worthless man on board.  His only real job was to keep the fire going (someone else was responsible for doling out the food to each person).  He was often a sailor who was too old or lame to do anything else.  They were considered to be so worthless that men in ports trying to get away from navy “recruiters” (the kind that grabbed you and hauled you straight off to a ship) often smeared their faces with soot and claimed to be cooks, knowing that the recruiters wouldn’t be interested in them after that.

By the eighteenth century British ship’s rations had gotten a little better:

• Every day: biscuit and beer.
• Sunday: pork, peas, butter.
• Monday: oatmeal, butter and cheese.
• Tuesday: nothing additional.
• Wednesday and Friday: peas, oatmeal, butter and cheese.
• Thursday: pork and peas.
• Saturday: beef

Amounts are: 1 pound biscuit, 1 gallon beer, 2 pounds salt beef, 1 pound salt pork, 1/2 pint peas, 1 pint oatmeal, 2 ounces butter, 4 ounces cheese.

Sailors could bring their own foods on board and usually ate a bit better in the weeks after leaving port because of this.  Using the rations they received and foods they bought themselves they were able to make a number of dishes:

• Lobscouse: salt beef or salt pork with water with biscuits crumbled up.
• Sea pie: meat and peas layered with biscuit.
• Dunderfunk (which means thunder and lightning): biscuit soaked in water, mixed with fat and molasses and baked in a pan.
• Midshipman’s crab: salt beef, pickles, biscuit crumbs and cheese.
• Scotch coffee: powdered, browned biscuit in hot water

Okay, ship’s food still generally sucked.  It’s hard to be a gourmet if you’re 1,500 miles from dry land.  Here’s one more tidbit about the connection between food and sailing:

The meat the sailors took with them from Europe was salted.  It lasted okay for a trip across the Atlantic, but when they got to the New World they wanted to take on fresh stores.  The sources of salt here were limited but that was okay because sailors could buy meat from the Indians which was dried on racks over an open fire.  The French word for the rack was boucan and the name given to the French and English hunters who began selling the meat to passing ships was buccaneer.  And this word, over time, became the name not of the people who dried and sold the meat but of the people, often pirates, who bought the dried meat.*

Sources: unless otherwise noted, all facts in this article come from either “Dancing with the Mermaids: Ship’s Biscuit and Portable Soup,” by Layinka Swinburne, or “Survival Kit (16th Century Seaman’s Fare)”, by Maggie Black.  Swinburne’s article appeared in the 1996 edition of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery while Black’s article was in the 1989 edition.  Both editions are published by Prospect Books.  Information in the last paragraph came from an unpublished manuscript from another author on the history of barbeque.