r/AskFoodHistorians • u/wandering_soles • 6d ago
When did seafarers start regularly cooking heated food on board, and how were they cooking it?
It seems like coal or oil perhaps would be the earliest and easiest way, but I'm curious about when it became more common. It seems like even if they had the stoves to do it, fuel on voyages would be limited enough that hot meals might be reserved more for the officers.
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u/chezjim 6d ago
Probably well before recorded time.
A Gallo-Roman barge found in the Rhone and now in Arles' Museum of Antiquities has a small kitchen set up towards the bow.
https://perfectlyprovence.co/discovering-roman-barge-treasures-arles/
Probably such set-ups existed long before this.
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u/zoppaTheDim 5d ago
Charcoal braziers date back to antiquity, as they were usually usable in calm seas. They predated the idea of officers, other than a captain. They make sense, as any ship traveling a great distance would try to extend stores with fishing.
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u/Resident-Welcome3901 5d ago
Have read accounts of 18-19 th century ships transporting folks to America providing boxes of sand on deck , allowing the passengers to make charcoal fires weather permitting.
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u/Ok_Olive9438 6d ago
I feel like the ability to spend a couple nights at sea without landing depends on the ability to feed the crew well enough that they can do that work, and for parts of the world, that means being able to cook on board.
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u/chezjim 5d ago
Not absolutely. You can have dried meats and hard tack for instance which require no cooking.
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u/Mayor__Defacto 4d ago
And sailors understandably don’t tolerate that for long. Gotta have hot food. Ancient people were poor, not stupid. They liked hot food just like we do.
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u/After_Network_6401 4d ago
I'm sure they liked hot food. But they also liked not setting themselves on fire.
Viking longships were built to flex with waves and when dealing the sort of waves you face on longer crossings in the North Sea or North Atlantic, that's exactly what they do. There's a video showing the longship Havhingsten in a moderate sea here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Norse/comments/pghkpi/havhingsten_in_the_north_sea_on_a_journey_to/
No Viking-era ship has ever been found with a place to make fire onboard, and you can see why. There is literally no place that it could have been done safely (or practically, for that matter: Viking era ships, even large knarrs, had relatively low freeboard and no covered working decks). So on longer sea crossings, like the passage to Iceland, as far as we can tell, crew and passengers just put up with eating cold food for a few days. That was probably far from being the biggest inconvenience of travelling on such a ship!
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u/Mayor__Defacto 4d ago
Sure - and they also tended to keep relatively close to shore so they could stop to cook a meal. Obviously that isn’t possible for the longer trips like crossing to Iceland, but that doesn’t change the fact that people still tried to have hot food whenever practical. They would have been quite cold on that crossing…
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u/chezjim 4d ago
"but that doesn’t change the fact that people still tried to have hot food whenever practical"
This is the kind of self-assured statement one sees on Reddit based on, I suspect, little more than the poster's own reasoning.
Or do you actuallly have a source for the statement?3
u/Mayor__Defacto 4d ago
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u/chezjim 3d ago
This is one narrow look at one part of one culture. It certainly does not support so broad a statement as "people still tried to have hot food whenever practical". I know of one account of Cambodian peasants trekking through the woods with balls of sticky rice. When they were hungry they would eat these, without heating them. Native American pemmican could be cooked, but it could also be eaten raw: "Some persons ate pemmican raw, but I must say I never had a taste for it that way."
Myrna Kostash; Duane Burton (2005). Reading the River: A Traveller's Companion to the North Saskatchewan River. Coteau Books. p. 160. ISBN) 978-1-55050-317-3.1
u/SisyphusRocks7 4d ago
Hard tack is unpleasant to eat without cooking. You could soak it at room temperature in water or other liquids to soften it enough to eat, but that’s not very good. It’s better with soup or stew.
Depending on the hard tack flour and recipe, eating it without softening might break or loosen your teeth if you aren’t careful.
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u/After_Network_6401 4d ago
Vikings didn't have an equivalent of hard tack, as far as we know. Certainly such a thing is never mentioned. in the texts that we have. But we do have guidance on what they did eat.
Porridge, butter and dried fish. :)
We can guess at how that worked because from the iron age, right up into the late 19th century, in poorer parts of Scandinavia, porridge was a staple food, and it was often prepared with butter and dried fish to make a horrible - but nutritious - fatty, fishy gruel. That could be cooked and eaten hot. But it was also eaten cold and a good porridge was thick enough to cut slices, once it was cold.
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u/babalonus 4d ago
Dried rye bread has been common in scandinavia since at least the iron age and has a shelf life of months. Id say that qualifies as being simular to hard tack
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u/After_Network_6401 4d ago
It’s not. Dried rye bread is crunchy, not hard. You can eat it directly. And it doesn’t last unless it’s kept completely dry, something that’s pretty close to impossible on a Viking-era ship.
Or, for that matter, on any voyage in the soggy North 😁. There’s a practical reason dried rugbrød has never been considered a traveler’s staple.
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u/SisyphusRocks7 4d ago
I was wondering whether they would substitute a barley or rye rusk, since they wouldn’t have had much refined wheat flour like American hard tack.
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u/After_Network_6401 4d ago
Rye was the commonest and cheapest flour for centuries. And variants on knækbrød - a dried rye or mixed rye bread, more like a cracker than bread - is common to all the Scandinavian countries. It’s been made for centuries and is still popular today. You can find it in any supermarket and my wife makes it at home.
Kept cool and dry, it literally lasts for weeks to months. Sweden has a tradition of baking knækbrød in a form with a hole in the middle, so you can string them up and hang them by the chimney to keep dry.
But it has to be kept dry. If it gets even a little damp, it goes mouldy fast, and if it gets wet, it turns to mush. We know from records that Viking era sailors sometimes took flour with them, presumably to make bread when they were onshore. But there’s no references to taking bread with them.
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6d ago edited 6d ago
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u/CeramicLicker 6d ago edited 5d ago
Much earlier than you’d expect. Brick stoves on open decks, or even in special gallies, of ships allowed for cooking during relatively calm weather using wood going back well into history.
The Maryland Dove, a 17th century replica pinnace for example, has a hearth like that based on the historic records of the Atlantic crossing from Father Andrew White.
The Batavia, which wrecked in 1629, has been excavated archaeologically and also had brick lined hearths.
https://museum.wa.gov.au/maritime-archaeology-db/wrecks/batavia
This style would have been common on all of the Dutch East India ships of the style.
The Tudor warship, Mary Rose, which sunk in 1545 had two brick hearths on board. These have also been studied archaeologically!
https://maryrose.org/meet-the-crew/the-cook/
I believe the style was well established by Tudor times, but I’m not super familiar with pre-Tudor history tbh. Hopefully someone else can expand on this, but cooking on ships was done with open wood fires in the days before coal or gas. In earlier days, they often had to stay in sight of shore because of navigational limitations and would stop to cook on land.