“duff days”; Tuesday, bean day; Friday, codfish and potato-day; some vessels have one or two special days for pork; salt-beef, hardtack, tea and coffee are fluids and solids to fall back on every-day. I dreaded the making of duffs, or flour puddings, to the end of the voyage. Rarely did I attain success with them. A duff is a quantity of flour and yeast, or yeast-powder, mixed, tied up in a bag and boiled until it is light. Plum-duff argues the insertion of a quantity of raisins. Plain duff is duff without raisins. But the proper cooking of a duff is rather a delicate matter. If it boils too long the flour settles into a hard, putty-like mass whereunto there is neither sponginess, lightness, nor that porousness which delights the heart of a cook when he takes his duff from the seething caldron. If the duff does not boil long enough, the interior is still a paste. If a duff stops boiling for ever so few minutes, great damage results. And sometimes duff* won’t do properly, anyway. Mine were generally of the hardened species, and the plums evinced a tendency to hold mass meetings at the bottom. Twice the hands forward rebelled at my duffs, and their Committee on Culinary Grievances bore them aft to the door of the cabin and deposited them there unbroken and uneaten for the “Old Man’s” inspection. Which public demonstration I witnessed from my galley door, and when the duff deputation had retired, I emerged and swiftly and silently bore that duff away before the Old Man had finished his dinner below. It is a hard ordeal thus to feel one’s self the subject of such an outbreak of popular indignation. But my sympathies now are all with the sailors. A spoiled duff is a great misfortune in the forecastle of a whaler, where neither pie nor cake nor any other delicacy, save boiled flour and molasses sauce, come from month’s end to month’s end.
In St. Bartholomew’s or Turtle bay, as the whalers call it, where for five months we lay, taking and curing abalones, our food was chiefly turtle. This little harbor swarmed with them. After a few hours’ hunt one of our whaleboats would return with five or six of these unwieldy creatures in the bottom, some so large and heavy as to require hoisting over the side. Often the green fat under the callipee, or under shell, lay three inches in thickness. I served up turtle fried, turtle stewed, quarters of turtle roasted and stuffed like loins of veal, turtle plain boiled and turtles’ flippers, boiled to a jelly and pickled. A turtle is a variously flavored being. Almost every portion has a distinct and individual taste. After all, old Jake, our black boatsteerer, showed us the most delicate part of the turtle, and one previously thrown away. This was the tripe, cleansed of a thin inner skin. When the cabin table had once feasted on stewed turtle tripe they called for it continuously. After many trials and much advice and suggestion, I learned to cook acceptably the abalone. The eatable part of this shell-fish when fresh is as large as a small tea saucer. There are two varieties, the white and black. The white is the best. Cut up in pieces and stewed, as I attempted at first, the abalone turned out stewed bits of gutta percha; fried, it was fried gutta percha. Then a man from another vessel came on board, who taught me to inclose a single abalone in a small canvas bag and then pound it to a jelly with a wooden mallet. This process got the honey out of the abalone. The remains of four or five abalones thus pounded to a pulp, and then allowed to simmer for a couple of hours, would make a big tureen of the most delicious soup man ever tasted, every drop of which, on cooling, hardened to the consistency of calves’-foot jelly When my cabin boarders had once become infected with abalone soup they wanted me to keep bringing it along. The Americans do not know or use all the food in the sea which is good.
I was an experimental cook, and once or twice, while cutting-in whale, tried them with whale meat. The flesh lying under the blubber somewhat resembles beef in color, and is so tender as easily to be torn apart by the hands. But whale meat is not docile under culinary treatment. Gastronomically, it has an individuality of its own, which will keep on asserting itself, no matter how much spice and pepper is put upon it. It is a wild, untamed steed. I propounded it to my guests in the guise of sausages, but when the meal was over the sausages were there still. It can’t be done. Shark can. Shark’s is a sweet meat, much resembling that of the swordfish, but no man will ever eat a whale, at least an old one. The calves might conduct themselves better in the frying-pan. We had many about us whose mothers we had killed, but we never thought of frying them. When a whaler is trying-out oil, she is blackened with the greasy soot arising from the burning blubber scraps from stem to stern. It falls like a storm of black snow-flakes. They sift into the tiniest crevice. Of all this my cookery got its full share. It tinged my bread and even my pies with a funereal tinge of blackness. The deck at such times was covered with “horse pieces” up to the top of the bulwarks. “Horse pieces” are chunks of blubber a foot or so in length, that being one stage of their reduction to the size necessary for the trypots. I have introduced them here for the purpose of remarking that on my passage to and fro, from galley to cabin, while engaged in laying the cloth and arranging our services of gold plate and Sevres ware, I had to clamber, wade, climb, and sometimes, in my white necktie and swallow-tail coat, actually crawl over the greasy mass with the silver tureen full of “consomme” or “soup Julien,” while I held the gilt-edged and enamelled menu between my teeth. Those were trying-out times for a maritime head butler.
The cook socially does not rank high at sea. He stands very near the bottom round of the ladder. He is the subject of many jests and low comparisons. This should not be. The cook should rank next or near to the captain. It is the cook who prepares the material which shall put mental and physical strength into human bodies. He is, in fact, a chemist, who carries on the last external processes with meat, flour, and vegetables necessary to prepare them for their invisible and still more wonderful treatment in the laboratory which every man and woman possesses—the stomach—whereby these raw materials are converted not only into blood, bone, nerve, sinew, and muscle, but into thoughts. A good cook may help materially to make good poetry, An indigestible beefsteak, fried in grease to leather, may, in the stomach of a General, lose a battle on which shall depend the fate of nations. A good cook might have won the battle. Of course, he would receive no credit therefor, save the conviction in his own culinary soul, that his beefsteak properly and quickly broiled was thus enabled to digest itself-properly in the stomach of the General, and thereby transmit to and through the General’s organism that amount of nerve force and vigor, which, acting upon the brain, caused all his intelligence and talent to attain its maximum, and thereby conquer his adversary. That’s what a cook may do. This would be a far better and happier world were there more really good cooks on land and sea. And when all cooks are Blots or Soyers, then will we have a society to be proud of.
CHAPTER VII.
SIGHTS WHILE COOKING.
St. Bartholomew or Turtle Bay is a small, almost circular, sheet of water and surrounded by some of the dreariest territory in the world. The mountains which stand about it seem the cooled and hardened deposit of a volcano. Vegetation there is none, save cactus and other spined, horned, and stinging growths. Of fresh water, whether in springs, rividets, or brooks, there is none. Close by our boat-landing was the grave of a mother and child, landed a few years previous from a wreck, who had perished of thirst. Coyotes, hares, and birds must have relieved thirst somewhere, possibly from the dews, which are very copious. Our decks and rigging in the morning looked as though soaked by a heavy shower. Regularly at night the coyotes came down and howled over that lone grave, and the bass to their fiend-like yelping were furnished by the boom of the Pacific surges on the reef outside. To these gloomy sounds in the night stillness and blackness, there used for a time to be added the incessant groaning of a wretched Sandwich Islander, who, dying of consumption, would drag himself at night on deck to avoid disturbing the sleep of the crowded forecastle. Small hope for help is there for any thus afflicted on a whaler. There is no physician but the Captain, and his practice dares not go much beyond a dose of salts or castor-oil. The poor fellow was at last found dead, early one evening, in his bunk, while his countrymen were singing, talking, laughing, and smoking about him. It was a relief to all, for his case was hopeless, and such misery, so impossible to relieve, is terrible to witness on a mere fishing-schooner so crowded as ours. The dead man was buried at sea without any service, much to the disgust of one of our coopers, who, although not a “professor,” believed that such affairs should be conducted
