Food at Sea: Shipboard Cuisine From Ancient to Modern Times

Spalding, a scholar and sailor who has worked and cooked at sea, posits in the introduction to this academic work on how food was prepared on ships from the Viking age to the Titanic. The slender volume manages to cover the entirety of human history at sea. Spalding's tone is dry, but readers hungry for eccentric facts about cooking and eating in the ocean may delight in its specificities: a chart detailing rations of pork and beans and bully beef during the Civil War, the Gala Dinner Menu from aboard the S.S. United States (Foie Gras in aspic, Kangaroo Tail soup), and how canned salmon came to replace salt cod with the advent of canning. The book's standout section, however, is the chapter devoted to immigrant and slave ships, which describes meals given to slaves in the Middle Passage, opening up a larger discussion of conditions and life on these ships. Immigrant families were forced to share a stove, each family expected "to prepare its own food." The book concludes with several as sample recipes throughout time B&W Photo. (Dec.)