I’m typing this from inside your house!
Do you want to play a game?
::Looks around warily::
picks up phone, dials 999*
I want to be the fly on the wall when Hazle Weatherfield tells a bunch of cold, tired soldiers that they’re having cucumber sandwiches for dinner.
Yannow, I must have a really filthy mind;)
That cracked me up!
Hot food smells and tastes better and warms the body. Even a mug of steaming tea or cocoa will warm the body and provide comfort. I remember reading about life on a corvette in the North Atlantic during WWII and how they were cold and miserable and how a mug of hot beverage was indeed a great comfort.
On the other hand it just seems to me that troops should be trained to expect a certain level of hardship. Fighting a war is not a nine to five job and if soldiers require hot meals or their morale suffers then they are at a clear disadvantage when their enemy can eat cold shit and keep fighting. It may explain a lot about Vietnam and other conflicts.
Personally, I love hot soups in cold weather but in warm or hot weather I can go for weeks or even months without anything hot. Salads do just fine and I can eat pizza leftovers and hot dogs right out of the refrigerator. I guess I am just used to it and heating food seems to me more trouble than it’s worth.
I read George MacDonald Fraser’s excellent memoir of his time in Burma in WWII, Quartered Safe Out Here. He was pretty emphatic on the importance of stopping mid-jungle for the afternoon brew-up. Not much porcelain involved. They brewed it in steel jerry cans. In one scene, things were looking pretty dire – they were out of sugar. Fortunately at just the right moment they stumbled across a company of Sikh troops who had sugar and were willing to trade it for the Brits’ tinned mackeral in tomato sauce, of which the Sikhs were unaccountably fond.
As the song says…
Just remembered a photo from the American Heritage Book of World War II that showed a grizzled G.I. sipping from a tin mug, with a plate of food on the fender of a Jeep during the (freezing) Ardennes campaign. IIRC, the caption said it was his first hot meal in several weeks. For him, I’ll bet it was a big deal (cucumber sandwiches or not).
Not necessarily true at all: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57799
I believe a fair amount of military food also has a pretty high fat content in order to provide energy. Serving high-fat food hot is likely to make it a lot more palatable.
OK, I only got halfway through the first page of that thread before my reading comprehension bar got reduced to zero. Would you mind giving a quick summation?
In many conditions the body is, by sweating and/or sending blood to surface capilliaries, voluntarily dumping to the environment heat created as a byproduct of normal activity. The heat to warm a cold meal may simply be derived by your body utilizing (ie refraining from dumping) byproduct heat, rather then by “spending extra effort”.
That is not to say that your body won’t spend extra calories warming a cold meal. If you are cold and inactive, your body may well do so. It just depends on the conditions.
Gazpacho doesn’t require refrigeration, although a spot hidden from the sun comes handy. It was invented way before people had these fancy machines in their houses that make ice and cool stuffs, you know.
Patés don’t require refrigeration either if you keep them in cans or mason jars (boiled closed) and don’t open them until you’re going to eat them. I understand that one of the motivations for a certain brand of Spanish patés to come up with non-foie-gras varieties was to try and sell their single-portion cans to the militray.
I also think it’s psycological more than physical. There’s a lot to be said about the morale boost from a nice hot meal rather than some cold sandwiches and canned stuff. As a civilian I can see it in my crew, if I offer to get them cold cut sandwiches for lunch they cheer up a little (hey, free food is free food) but if I offer them something hot, even something as simple as hot dogs and baked beans, their morale spikes up considerably more.
As my mother used to say, perhaps the most important ingredient in any meal is love, and it may be that’s what hot food represents.
No, but with limited refridgeration and some rough prep skills I can think of something more comforting in the field than that: a nice plate of sausage and potatos with gravy.
I presume CHOWDERthat your knowledge of HOT meals is a purely hypothetical one seeing as you’re ex British Army Catering Corp.
But I digress…HAZL.You can call raw fish by any fancy name you like but its still raw fish and I HAVE had Sus****hi in the past.
I would hazard a guess that anyone offering a British soldier raw fish in anything but a survival situation would soon be trying to extract it from their nether fecal evacuation point.
One glimmer of sunshine in all this would be that if ever the A.C.C. ever tried to serve up cold raw fish intentionally it would most likely end up hot and cooked somehow.
I’m glad this sentence didn’t end the way I thought it would.
Troops are trained to expect a certain level of hardship. It’s just really hard to deal with indefinitely. Hot food helps them to deal with it. So does getting their mail, USO shows and other small things. I know my husband had field problems in Alaska where he was camped out on a glacier for weeks at a time and he was ridiculously grateful when a hot meal was delivered every two weeks. He was also happy when temporary toilets were assembled that had real toilet seats on them. Basically, they were toilet seats fixed on top of 5 gallon buckets but that was a big improvement over the 5 gallon buckets alone.
I think this answer is the winner here. Fatty savory foods don’t serve very well at room temperature or colder. Doubtless the other factors such as the perception of internal warmth are valid factors too, though.
What’s the typical fare at a British field kitchen, and how does it compare with other nation’s catering, in your experience?
Incidentally, I’ve heard that US sailors like being invited onto RN ships for food because of the beer ration.