Recipes From Disaster - Part 3
Alexis, not commenting at this stage, next went to the storerooms, where he found the 'mixed vegetables' to be mainly only one variety, and half of them rotten. The 'poultry' turned out to be skinny old fowls, badly plucked and drawn. The heads feet and gizzards were thrown away instead of being kept for soup. Only the bread was above criticism - he found it excellent. He took note of the additional foodstuffs in store - preserved meats, soups etc. Careful to take time to call on Lord Paulet and Dr Cumming to brief them on his progress, he went back to the kitchen to observe the orderly waiters collect the midday meal.
He found chaos. 'Such a noise I have never heard before. The market at old Billingsgate, during the first morning sale, was nothing compared to this military row. Each man had two tin cans for the soup. They kept running about and knocking against each other, in most admirable disorder. Such confusion, thought I, is enough to kill a dozen patients daily...several must go without anything, as owing to the confusion, some of the orderly waiters got more and some got less than their allowance.'
The orderlies' free-for-all was partly caused by their anxiety to make certain that they got their own piece of meat off the spit. They used various ingenious methods of identification - bits of uniform cloth, buttons, scissors, even a pair of candle snuffers - all of which were boiled along with the meat they were attached to!
Alexis then met up with Florence Nightingale, and together they went to the wards to watch the cooked ration distribution. He noticed the patients eating the meat before the soup - that was because there was only one plate, he was told. So why not cut the meat into small pieces and pour the hot soup over it?
They next sampled the food on offer. The soup was thin without seasoning, the meat - mutton - was tough and tasteless, the potatoes watery. Alexis explained to Flo that the meat was unevenly cooked because the joints were all tied tightly together and as the meat swelled in the boiling water there was no way the interior could be cooked.
That evening he took six regular rations of soup ingredients - half ration of beef, 1/4 lb barley, the vegetable allowance and a little salt and pepper into eight pints of water and
Latest Articles