The Floating Gourmet

The sea is a wilderness, and shipboard cooking has always been rather like camping out. You have to bring along everything you eat except for any wild game (or fish) you manage to bag.

One difference is that you can’t build a fire just anywhere when you’re afloat. In fact, fire was one of the greatest dangers in the days of wooden ships. The square-rigged merchant ships and men-of-war of the 17th through the 19th centuries, which had crews of several hundred, used big iron ranges to contain the flames under their caldrons.

But on smaller vessels, shipboard cooking was usually done on braziers or hibachis. Roman shipwrecks have yielded pottery braziers that look like big clay pots with stoking holes at the bottom and knobs on top to hold cooking pots. The Romans also had peculiar braziers made of lead. They looked like big clumsy shoes, and you stoked them through the “toe.”

Seafaring food always tended to be the same, whether in Roman times or the 18th century: rock-hard ship’s biscuit, peas or beans, hard cheese, salt meat or fish--and scarcely any vegetables. Roman sailors didn’t stray so far from land, so they probably ate better than British limeys struggling to round Cape Horn, and their rations always included olives and olive oil.

They had to take their drinking water along too. And, sailors being sailors, there had to be alcoholic beverages--wine in ancient days, in later days often rum or brandy, which saved space and wouldn’t spoil. At least, not by sailors’ standards.