Not great enough for Great Debates, but so as not to hijack the GQ post about eating implements (nut spoons) any further, I offer some thoughts and links on Sh*t on a Shingle (SOS), etc.
The SOS nickname has been used to refer to many concoctions, mainly creamed chipped beef (CCBOT) on toast. In my old navy days, we referred to CCBOT as creamed foreskins because its pink slices resembled (assumedly) them - not to be confused with Scotch Woodcock, which we had for Sunday breakfast.
We reserved the SOS term for the darker brown ground beef on toast or ground beef gravy on toast (GBGOT).
You can watch an 11-minute video of Trailer Park Cook Genie B. Delishus prepare GBGOT mostly one-handedly - lit cig in other hand) in this link.
A cookbook for several navy dishes can be seen on my ship’s sister ship’s website (which does refer to CCBOT as SOS):
As for Scotch Woodcock, which we had for breakfast on Sunday if we had shipboard duty, ours was composed of segmented hardboiled eggs in cream sauce, rather than scrambled.
My dad was a Navy vet, and we ate a lot of GBGOT (which we called hamburger gravy) when we were kids. It was surprisingly tasty and an economical way to feed a big pile o’ kids.
His military service also caused us to eat a lot of Spam-based meals. I liked them when I was a kid, but I can’t stomach Spam now.
The chocolate bar sometimes found in C-rats was affectionately termed a John Wayne bar. Not as good as you’d think, since it was heavily fortified with vitamins, but prized anyway. Beanee-weenees were dog turds and rat turds.
I thought I read somewhere that the chocolate bar was specifically designed to be high in calories, heavily fortified with vitamins, and to taste good enough to eat but not so good that the soldiers would want to eat too many of them. I think Hershey’s may have gotten the contract to design and produce it? Not sure.
That sounds like the spec for the D ration bar:
Weigh 4 ounces (112 g)
Be high in food energy value
Be able to withstand high temperatures
Taste “a little better than a boiled potato”
The real problem with the D-rat chocolate bar was the requirement that it not melt if the temps got over 80. The result was the chalky lump that we all know and loathe.
In the NYS prison system, there’s always a choice of two entrees and one of them is meatless. So if Chicken ala King is the regular entree, Meatless ala King (which is made with some soy substitute) is the alternative.
For reasons of space limitations, Meatless ala King usually got abbreviated as ML ala King. Which led to it being nicknamed Martin Luther King.
My favourite meal on the boat was breakfast with French toast. I’d get an omelette with “everything” (which usually meant ham, cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes, green pepper and onions) and two slices of French toast, eat half of the omelette, and then make a sandwich out of the remaining half and the French toast…
When she first lit up, I thought that it was going to be a sort of joke, an ironic commentary about trailer park inhabitants. But she’s much to adept at handling that cig while she’s cooking.
When my husband was in the Air Force, I know that some of the cooks smoked while cooking. It just gives that food a special flavor, you know? I’m not saying it’s a GOOD flavor, mind you, just a noticeable one.
Possibly didn’t loathe it any worse than Allied troops in Burma hated canned corned beef, which at those temperatures did come out of the can as very thick beef soup. :smack:
The polite term was “pony peter sandwiches”. The can opener that you always got in a C-rat box was officially designated a P-38, but was universally called a “John Wayne”.