The Poor Sailor's Feast

Some days I just want to get away life  is too complicated I want to get in my   wooden sailboat and sail away. That idea is  nothing new hundreds of thousands of men in   the 18th and early 19th century did exactly  that same thing and while they were able to   get away from it all they found themselves  doing a job that was harder than imaginable.   Every day I study the 18th and early 19th century,  it's my job and I love it. For fun I dig even   deeper into shipboard life of this time period.  The memoirs and books by the people who lived in   the time period Samuel Kelly, Spavens, Dana. These  books are great and they give us a glimpse of what   sailor's life is like in that time period from  actual sailors not from somebody from the outside.   If I really want to have fun and what I do for  fun is read and listen to the Patrick O'Brien   novels the Master and Commander series with Aubrey  and Maturin you may know the Master and Commander   movie. I love it. This common sailor's life is  fascinating. What always amazes me is the work   that these common sailors have to do. It is  probably the most difficult and dangerous job   at this time period. And it was done by hundreds  of thousands of men. They are working before the   age of steam they've got nothing to propel these  ships but sails and ropes and these ships are very   fragile. And they're putting them into the most  dangerous circumstances on the earth. Dealing with   horrible storms, rocks you can't see, it's just  incredible that anybody survives at all. And they   do this over and over and over again every day of  their lives. Sometimes it's the most monotonous   thing ever and nothing happens and then 10 minutes  later they're fighting for their lives, literally.   Sometimes after a storm or maybe a battle or  just before you're coming into a port there   are opportunities when the sailor has a chance  to have a feast, to have a special meal. They   may not have anything different than they've ever  had with their typical rations but they do have   an opportunity to combine things they normally  wouldn't to make a special meal to make a feast   that's what we're doing today. So the first  dish for our hard-working and hungry sailors   is going to be a pease pudding now they're eating  pease pudding at least once a week and sometimes   every single day but their pease putting this  everyday pease pudding is just these dried peas   boiled in a bag that's it that's pease pudding  nothing special ours is going to be a little bit   more special we're going to take our peas we're  going to boil them for about a half hour or so   then we're going to take them out of their  bag we're going to add some butter right into   the middle of this clump and a bunch of salt and  pepper and then we're going to close that back up   and boil it some more another half hour or so and  it's going to make this wonderful infused flavor   inside of this pease pudding which is normally  a very very plain dish. They didn't get butter   every day they got butter maybe once a week so  this is special to be able to add pepper and salt   and butter into this pease pudding it's going  to give it a great flavor. This dish goes by a   couple of different names pease pudding of course  or dog's body which the sailors more likely would   have used. In Samuel Kelly's Memoir as an 18th  century sailor he speaks of pease pudding he   says "our daily food from month to month was only  beef and pease pudding for dinner and for supper".   One of the most important aspects of getting a  ship ready for sea is provisioning you have to   have the supplies on board to feed all the men  for the trip you're about to take and probably   times two. Because you don't know how long your  trip might take sometimes your average trip might   take three or four weeks and then another time  of year it might take four months. So you have to   have lots and lots of provisions on board what  are the provisions? You're going to have salt   meat so salt beef and salt pork. You're going to  have lots and lots of sea bread or ships biscuit   we know it today as hardtack. You'll even have a  special room on board the ship tin lined so that   the rats can't get in that you store all this  bread and it's got to stay dry. We also have   other kinds of provisions oatmeal dried peas we're  going to have butter and cheese. So the dish I'm   most excited about here is the main dish lobscouse  it's got a fun name to it it's one of those names   that nobody's quite sure where it comes from but  it is classic lobscouse from the 18th century the   main component here in lobscouse is something  like salt pork which the sailors are eating   a couple of days out of every single week we're  going to take some onion again kind of a special   treat for sailors and we're going to take that  onion and brown it a little bit in a frying pan   I'm gonna toss in potatoes again a special  treat for a sailor we're gonna put in some   diced up potato into these onions. Once  it's cooked up can go into our pot. A pot   of water with some chopped up salt pork in  it if we're using salt pork we want to start   off with the water cold. If we were making our  lobscouse with fresh pork Well we'd put those   pork pieces in with those onions and brown them  toss them into the hot water already boiling.   We're gonna let those boil half hour or so  maybe a little bit longer and then comes the   extra special part of lobscouse and that is ship's  biscuit. Ships biscuits are the thing that sailors   get each and every day almost a pound of ships  biscuits each and every day and ships biscuits   are almost inedible in the state that you would  get them. These are just flour and salt a little   bit of water you need them up into these hard  little biscuit shapes and they get baked at a   very low temperature for a very long time. You're  driving out all the moisture they last a long time   they do go bad and bugs and weevils find their  way into them but the sailor's gonna eat them   anyway. The ship's biscuit is going to thicken and  add texture to our lobscouse right now it's just   a soup but this will go in and give it a real  stew texture. The small parts just thicken it   the bigger parts will stay nice and chunky they'll  add to it they'll make it seem like we have twice   as much meat as what's really in here we find  lobscouse showing up in dictionaries and literary   works in the 18th and 19th century and we never  find it in a cookbook you're not going to find it   there because sailors aren't writing down their  recipes but the dictionary reference here in the   dictionary the vulgar tongue from 1788 gives us a  quick snapshot what is lobscouse? it says a dish   much eaten at sea composed of salt beef biscuit  and onions well peppered and stewed together. These two main dishes are ready the dog's body   pease pudding and the lobscouse and  let's give this just a little try. This is not something I eat  every day that's for sure   but you can tell this one's special with  that buttery flavor and the salt and pepper   infused in it this is what I really want  to make sure to test this is the lobscouse That is so good This is going to be completely different  than what a sailor gets each and every   day. A different texture it's got a  different mixture of things all put   together cooked in a way that they're  you know you don't get every day.   This is really really good we've got our  vegetables we have our meat our protein but   we need dessert we need to set this off so we're  going to make the sailors delight. They called it   plum duff it is a boiled pudding made with flour  sometimes with suet or with slush from the ship's   galley and the sweetness raisins. They would have  pounds and pounds of raisins just for this dish.   There are truly some harrowing stories from this  time period written by the sailors themselves. In   Dana's "Two years before the mast" he talks  about coming around Cape Horn and just how   incredibly difficult it was having to run up  on deck in the middle of the night you don't   know exactly when you haven't slept more than four  hours no matter what. The decks are icy you have   to climb icy rope ladders a hundred feet above  the deck and bring in a sail that's as hard as a   board because it's frozen solid. Again without  a single light to see by in the middle of the   night. And then you have to come down on deck and  is there anything to eat? Well if the weather's   been really bad you can't light the galley fires  so there's no warm food I can't even imagine it. For a meal we have to have a drink what did the  sailors want? They wanted grog. In home waters   they got a gallon of beer a day but that wasn't  what they really wanted once they were out of   home waters they got grog which was rum mixed with  water three to one. That's the drink they wanted   it's the drink we're gonna have for our feast.  These men were not well paid they were drawn from   the lower classes and yet they were asked to do  an impossible job. Probably the most dangerous and   difficult job of the time period and without them  we would have no 13 colonies. We wouldn't have   overseas commerce in any shape or form the world  would look completely different and much much   poorer. This is a wonderful Feast our Sailors are  going to love this it makes me want to buy a ship.

Channel: Townsends

Views: 1,316,523

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: dLxPVmRc8kk

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023