Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

Cooking. During the winter we were kept busy maintaining the various limited
supplies and facilities. Merely keeping alive took up most of one's time down
there, especially when there were only three of us to do things. In summer
water was brought up in Jerri cans from a dam at a stream about [150] yards
away over very rough, boggy and stony ground - and for much of the time
through snowdrifts into which one sank at least up to one's knees. In the winter
all our water had to be obtained by melting snow - for drinking, cooking,
washing ourselves, our clothes, and dishes. For at least six months of the year it
was necessary to obtain water in this way, a very laborious job.
I didn't much enjoy cooking and towards the end of the duty week it got a
bit difficult to think of a menu - and the customers were very particular, but we
did very well really. In my opinion the main reason it was the worst
occupation, was because it imposed a regular pattern of mealtimes (though we
might go without lunch), which broke into time needed for research. As we
took spells of one week at a time, it came round every third week in the first
year and every fourth week in the second year. Towards the end we had
become quite good cooks and made excellent pastry, cakes (even meringues). I
was never able to be certain of making good bread; it was somewhat
unpredictable as to whether the dough would rise or not and the coldness of
the hut and icy draughts didn't help!
Even so early as two weeks after landing, the ‘pièce de résistance’ of our
meal was Derek's Veal and Ham pie. We made steak and kidney pies with
‘rough puff-pastry’ crusts - we were already getting quite technical about such
matters. Early in March Ralph made an excellent Swiss roll which
unfortunately tasted of margerine; the margerine stocks had deteriorated with
age and tasted very oily and tainted – a bit like whale oil.
The key to success as cook was the ability to control the performance of the
stove. But this wasn't always possible. For example 12 March was another wet
and windy day, if anything worse than usual, the temperature rising to about
3°C and winds gusting to over 70 mph. The stove was still going great guns
and much too hot. We all felt very heavy that morning and later when Ralph
came to make the bread the solder on the baking tins melted in the oven! The
warm spell had caused the remainder of the tin of yeast in use to go bad, and
the remains of our first sheep carcass had gone off and had to be scrapped.
Next day the great rise in air temperature associated with the current storm,
which had begun three days earlier, had resulted in the scrapping of a second
carcass. We had chops from this at lunch and all had stomach disorders. Ralph
cut a joint for that evening's meal that smelt bad, so I examined the rest of the
meat and condemned it, to be consumed by the skuas.
A week later Derek made a baking which came out very well. We had
cheese and rice for dinner - an excellent combination, followed by coffee and
rum - even better! It was very odd that one forgot about such things and could
manage well without them; sweets and chocolate also went almost untouched
and I didn't see us finishing our ration for the year. After lunch that day I
worked out the calorific value of our daily food consumption: it was about
[7,000] calories/ man - that was over twice what I had been consuming as a
student in England in the previous few years! No wonder we were all putting
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