Food
This week, I have a tasteless parlour game for you. If you had to choose which war in history you would have fought in solely on the basis of food, which would it be? You have to disregard all extraneous details such as your likely mode of death, probability of lasting mental and physical trauma, atrocities witnessed. Cast out, too, any nonsense about being on the winning side. We are concerned only with the food here.
Some wars, and in particular some battles, are non-starters. Bully beef in the trenches is unthinkable. And only an anorexic would choose starvation in the bitter winds of Stalingrad. The German troops were calcium-deprived and hollow-cheeked, often forced to survive on a mere 100 grams of bread a day and a little horse flesh if they were lucky. Serious malnourishment ensued. According to Antony Beevor, one German prisoner of war "who managed to grab a handful of butter in the kitchen died in agony because his stomach was so unused to fats". Nor did the Soviet victors fare better. Soldiers sometimes subsisted on frozen soup and drainpipe water - not my idea of fun.
I would rather have fought on the American side in Vietnam or Korea. In either war, I could have chowed down on standardised corned beef hashes, apple pie and oodles of Spam - "ham that failed its physical", as the joke went. It would at least have been filling, though hardly sybaritic. Or if I'd fought in the American civil war, I suppose I'd have enjoyed cans of Borden's condensed milk, the unctuous white nectar. But imagine how sickly it would have become after a few days of combat.
A more exotic option would be the Trojan wars. Homer describes feasts of fat goat and hogs turned on spits over huge fires and seasoned with holy salt. It sounds glorious, but hideously indigestible. You would need the constitution of a god and heroic quantities of retsina to eat like that for several days on the trot.
No, if I could choose my ideal culinary war, it would be the Crimean - on the British side. In the words of one historian, this skirmish over the Turkish Ottoman empire was "completely pointless and manifestly avoidable". But at least it offered the troops some consistently fine food, thanks to the celebrity chef Alexis Soyer.
Soyer (1809-1858) was the complete Victorian. An insufferably vain Frenchman, he dressed in lavender-striped trousers, cooked at the Reform Club and penned the Gastronomic Regenerator. Yet he also organised soup kitchens and, during the Crimean war, became a Florence Nightingale for the stomach. Before Soyer's arrival in the Crimea, the British were condemned to an "eternal ration of pork and biscuit". Soyer took the basic barracks ingredients and transformed them into clean and economical dishes such as pot-au-feu, Irish stew and salt meat with mashed peas. With the help of his "Soyer's field stove", he taught army cooks kitchen economy for vast numbers. And if you were fortunate enough to lie wounded in a military hospital, you might be served Soyer's jelly flavoured with Marsala and oranges, chicken broth, lemonade, creamy rice, lemony custard and plums poached in claret and cinnamon. Almost worth getting your limbs blasted off for.
Soyer's Turkish Pilaff
Fry four pounds of onions in two pounds of fat, then add 12 pounds of rice and water to cover by two inches, seven tablespoonfuls of salt and one of pepper. Simmer until each grain is "swollen" and "separate". In a separate pan, stew rations of "mutton, veal, pork or beef". Combine rice and meat when done. "Any kind of vegetables may be frizzled with the onions." Serves 100.
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