The Giant Time-Sucking Hole that is Mission's series of Articles on Food

[Mission]

I am currently working on a variety of articles on food during the golden age of piracy. It was originally going to be one article, then three, then five and now it's completely spiraled out of control and will probably end up being 25 articles.  I have been working on it for over two years now. It will probably take another two to finish it at this rate. Most of the articles look at the five basic types of long-haul sailor types I have identified - navy, merchant, privateer, buccaneer and pirate. Some of them add sixth category - explorer. Nearly all of them are data-driven, presenting all sorts of statistics on what I have discovered. (I have this unbelievably complex assortment of Excel spreadsheets.... but enough of that.) 

Anyhow, there are still going to be 5 basic articles. Think of them as the overarching articles. Three are finished, one is partially finished (actually, it has been split into about 20 articles, but there is a top page for them). The last one hasn't been started. The underlined words are hotlinked to articles. (Because they are complete. Sort of. I keep finding new material as I research new articles and will eventually go back and add the new material to the old articles. I digress...) The five overarching articles include:

1. Food and Health - Food was intimately tied into health and humor theory, with each food having humoral properties. This article will eventually be tied into the series of articles I am currently working on which is about the individual food found in sailors' account during the the GAoP. These are organized by food type, including: Fruits - Vegetables - Grains - Non-Meat Proteins - Meat Proteins - Fish.  (I am presently working on Non-Meat Proteins.)

2. Food Procurement - Looks at how each of the five types of sailors got food, some of it legitimate, some of it not,  including - gifts (of food), sharing, purchasing, taking, hunting, fishing, catching turtle and live animals (animal pens). Each section provides statistics on the percentage of sailors I've found who used each method.

3. Food Organization - The first third of this article is primarily about the complex structure of navy food procurement and dissemination. Since nearly all sailors were in the navy at one time or another, parts of this structure were disseminated to the other types. These  are treated separately and include the East India Company (which was a thing unto itself), non-EIC merchant ships, privateers, buccaneers and pirates. It talks about food-related officers including pursers, masters/supercargos, stewards, quartermasters on legal and illegal voyages (their roles were different) and cooks. You get a generous dollop of info on the cookroom at then end of the article.

4. Provisioning Locations - I decided to talk about two categories: English navy provisioning stations and the pirate locations. To be fair, any port city could be a provisioning location, so I focused on those places frequented by pirates mentioned in accounts from around the golden age of piracy. This includes three areas - the Western Hemisphere (Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados and Juan Fernandez Islands), the Eastern Coast of Africa (Azores, Madeira, Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Sao Tome, Principe & Annabon, St. Helena and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Western Coast of Africa (Comoros, Mauritius & Reunion and  Madagascar. ) You will notice only a handful of them are hotlinked and that is because only the navy and Western Hemisphere locations are complete. These will probably be the last articles I write.

5. Sailors and Food -  This is the article the average person wants to read. What did each type of sailor eat? How and where did they eat it? I quit the Provisioning Locations article to write this and as I got into it, realized it would be much easier to finish if I wrote a complete account of the individual foods found in the sailors accounts. (Remember, back at #1?) I was NOT going to write those article because I knew they would be a giant PITA, but... here I am writing it now. Been writing just these for over a year. At least I've learned a lot. (I mean A LOT.) So you must wait for this one until I finish that one.

[Stynky Tudor]

You friken Pirate Nerd, this sounds awesome!

[madPete]

you need to embrace your inner nerd and build a database!

[Duchess]

On 2/11/2023 at 1:47 PM, Mission said:

I have this unbelievably complex assortment of Excel spreadsheets....

Of course you do. My ability to believably be shocked at this revelation is unbelievably low.

[Mission]

 I have all sorts of Excel spreadsheets that I've assembled over the years.... pirate ship data, medicine data, where water was found, alcohols sorted by sailor type, pirate nationalities, all manner of food spreadsheets. And you know what's great about them? The data overlaps so I can search them to quickly find dates, current locations and ships when I'm building a new spreadsheet. So it sort of is a database, but not really.

[William Brand]

I can appreciate this thread on too many levels.

[Duchess]

17 hours ago, William Brand said:

I can appreciate this thread on too many levels.

By levels, surely you must mean rows!

18 hours ago, Mission said:

 I have all sorts of Excel spreadsheets that I've assembled over the years.... pirate ship data, medicine data, where water was found, alcohols sorted by sailor type, pirate nationalities, all manner of food spreadsheets. And you know what's great about them? The data overlaps so I can search them to quickly find dates, current locations and ships when I'm building a new spreadsheet. So it sort of is a database, but not really.

Is Access still a thing? I was doing some consulting years ago and they wanted an access database built. It was way overkill and none of their people were ever going to learn to use it. Still a fight to talk them out of it!

Anyway, point me to any cheese based recipes please.

[Mission]

Ah, Wisconsin... I haven't got to it yet, so I am only partially versed in the uses of cheese at sea. (Meaning I have a bunch of references I vaguely recall, but have not looked into them to see how everything is tied together, where it goes, from whence it comes and who it goes with.) However, I can tell you that cheese was a staple in the navy diet. It was served three times a week, beginning before the GAoP and ending well after it. The 1731 Regulations (which were created using orders which had mostly been issued during the GAoP) stated that a pint of olive oil could be substituted for "two Pounds of Suffolk Cheese; and Two Thirds of a Pound of Cheshire Cheese, [and] is equal to one Pound of Suffolk." (Regulations and instructions relating to His Majesty's service at sea,1st ed, 1731, p. 60) So that tells you what types of cheese the navy was doling out. The cheese often went bad though. I recall reading somewhere that the men sometimes carved buttons out of it, it got so hard.

[Duchess]

5 minutes ago, Mission said:

Ah, Wisconsin... I haven't got to it yet, so I am only partially versed in the uses of cheese at sea. (Meaning I have a bunch of references I vaguely recall, but have not looked into them to see how everything is tied together, where it goes, from whence it comes and who it goes with.) However, I can tell you that cheese was a staple in the navy diet. It was served three times a week, beginning before the GAoP and ending well after it. The 1731 Regulations (which were created using orders which had mostly been issued during the GAoP) stated that a pint of olive oil could be substituted for "two Pounds of Suffolk Cheese; and Two Thirds of a Pound of Cheshire Cheese, [and] is equal to one Pound of Suffolk." (Regulations and instructions relating to His Majesty's service at sea,1st ed, 1731, p. 60) So that tells you what types of cheese the navy was doling out. The cheese often went bad though. I recall reading somewhere that the men sometimes carved buttons out of it, it got so hard.
 

To be fair I was equally interested in cheese when I lived in Washington.

 

Thank you for this! Bad is not the same as hard. I suspect they were working with quite hard varieties to begin with.

[Mission]

I have several references to bad, as opposed to hard, cheese but you'll have have to wait until I get to that article.

[William Brand]

5 hours ago, Duchess said:

By levels, surely you must mean rows!

Is Access still a thing? I was doing some consulting years ago and they wanted an access database built. It was way overkill and none of their people were ever going to learn to use it. Still a fight to talk them out of it!

Anyway, point me to any cheese based recipes please.

I'm not sure what I mean now.  I better chart it.

[William Brand]

Also...please feel free to post as many well researched, time-sucking articles as you want.

[Mission]

Here's a link to the latest addition to the series of food articles: cereal grains. I added the link to the first post in the appropriate place.

https://piratesurgeon.com/pages/surgeon_pages/food_type_grain1.html

[William Brand]

I was genuinely surprised to see corn and rice rank up so high in account mentions.  Barley and oats were mentioned much less than expected.  Thank you for the details on these.

[madPete]

I imagine one solitary diary or recipe book from a ship's cook, would have made your life much easier and given us a more intimate knowledge of how food was prepared, mixed, and served.

We appreciate that you spend hours in that Giant Time Sucking Hole (GTSH). That acronym makes me think of goats...

Now we just have to find a way to apply it to our meals at events! Massacre island will allow us to experiment with the grains making bread in their ovens.

The only grain based meals at events I recall, seems to be the chowder/bread bowl at a certain restaurant at PIB and maybe an adhoc rice dish from someone. But my memory of happenings at events can be pretty thin and fade fast. Just ask William LOL

I do recall a few highlights from events tho, the corn chowder comes to mind and memory serves that the braised red cabbage Iron Jon made one year was a delightful surprise even for this meat-a-saurus. I know, I know not a grain...

[Mission]

Actually, it's not so bad. Naval ship's cooks for the before mast men knew how to do one thing during this time: boil. Remember, the navy was directed to choose the cook by his disability, not by his skill. So nearly all the hot food served was boiled in water. There were racks for roasting on the outside of the stoves in some larger naval vessels, but they were not used nearly as much as the giant caldron(s). (In fact, they were primarily used when the ship was stopped and near land. Roasted meat appears to have been a treat, not a staple.) Merchant ships would likely have had the simplest cooking facilities and would have taken their lead (and their menu) from the navy for the most part, so...boiling. Pirates primarily got their ships from merchants, so their cooking facilities depended upon what merchant vessels had. As a result, knowing the limited foods that were taken to sea (thanks to the navy's menu), it's not that hard to extrapolate the menu at sea.

Most of the foods I talk about in the fruit and vegetable articles were only relevant to ships that were in port or near land, where anything goes. (Wait to you see the list of meats they ate when they made land fall... they loved meat more than anything else and would try just about anything.) The sea menu was a little grain heavy, so three of the six cereal grains I describe in that article were relevant to food at sea, but the other ones are only really relevant when near land or if the ship was resupplied in a place where the other three types of wheat weren't available. So the menu at sea was really quite simple. When I write the article on Sailors and Food, this will become clearer. That one will be divided by food at sea (simple menu) and food when on or stopped near land (much more complicated).

Then there's officer's food... much more complicated and meat focused.

[Mission]

15 hours ago, William Brand said:

I was genuinely surprised to see corn and rice rank up so high in account mentions.  Barley and oats were mentioned much less than expected.  Thank you for the details on these.

Rice turned out to be the surprise grain for me. A lot of the counts come from the East Indies (the first part of the GAoP primarily occurred there, after all). However, there is a variety of rice, oryza glaberrima, which originated in Africa and was carried from there across the Atlantic thanks to the slave trade. There is also a really interesting story about how rice became a huge crop in the Carolinas during the GAoP which involves a privateer surgeon and (allegedly, although this is probably not true) the captain of a ship trading with pirates in Madagascar. While I hope people read all of the article (a lot of info, not to mention blood, sweat and tears went into it), the section on rice is particularly fascinating.

Corn is similarly important because of the records of the West Indies. (Corn was a giant PITA to research because I was trying to find information about sweet corn as I mentioned in the vegetable article. I basically found no evidence of it, so I had to assume when it wasn't specified, sailors were talking about dent or field corn.)

As for barley, it was mostly looked down upon as food for the poor. The English market as well as the navy food requirements focused on wheat. (See the section on bread for that.) Oats probably don't get their due in the counts because they replaced fish in the naval diet and the men (apparently) didn't like that. It makes sense. Meat reigned supreme on the menu in the minds of the English.