How does one mark the passage of time? By remembering goodbyes? Homecomings? Close calls? Broken hearts? Why not memories of food eaten in unique and exotic places? Hence, “mes meilleurs repas,” - or my greatest meals.
When I got into the Navy and someone said, “Let’s go to chow,” I thought of “Bones,” my faithful “Chow Chow” dog back home in Mississippi. I soon learned that they were inviting me to lunch, and that to “chow down,” meant to eat a big meal. I had eaten a pedestrian diet before I went into the service, having never eaten fresh pineapple, olives, or pizza before boot camp. That all changed abruptly when I sat down at Uncle Sam’s table. To start with, I had to learn a whole new vocabulary.
Of Chinese origin, the word, “chow,” from the Cantonese “cha,” or “together,” in U.S. Navy usage means either the act of eating together or the food itself. It is one of numerous terms in the naval lexicon that are loan words from the Chinese language, such as “chit” (an official piece of paper or form), “cumshaw” (to borrow or steal), or “kowtow” (to act subservient), etc. While most English words have French or Latin roots, words like “chow” crept into sailor’s vocabularies virtue of American ships serving on China and Pacific stations since the mid 19th century.
And then, there’s the word, “mess,” a good example of a word that can have so many different meanings which combine to make English a difficult language to learn. It has at least six in my experience. For example, I had been in a few “messes,” as in “a state of affairs that is confused or full of difficulties;” and I had made a few by “leaving things dirty and in an untidy state;” and I had “messed” with a few people by being “unpleasant, blundering, or disorderly;” but I had to get into the Navy to learn that a “mess” was also a portion of food, as well as the actual place of eating, as in the Chief’s or Officer’s Mess.
Upon arrival at my first ship, my chain of command promptly sent me “mess cooking,” or mess “cranking” as the new generation calls it, for three months, which is a rite of passage for all fresh caught “swabs.” While the Navy has very competent professional cooks, known as “Culinary Specialists,” the “grunt” work such as peeling potatoes, loading ingredients into the huge pots, washing dishes, etc., is the job of the temporary “mess cook.” By the way, when you check onboard a new ship, there are two groups of people you need to quickly develop a relationship with – the cooks and the hospital corpsmen. You need to know the cooks because they are good for early morning freshly baked bread and doughnuts, and you need to know the corpsmen in case you get sick in the middle of the night, need some “medication,” and don’t want to wait and stand in line at “sick call” the next morning.
Although I started off in the scullery, washing dishes for 1,200 men three times a day, I caught a break after a few weeks and was appointed as the “Jack of the Dust,” responsible for the breakout of all bulk foods from storerooms throughout the ship. Many years later, after I became an officer, I became the “mess treasurer” on my ship, a collateral duty, responsible for helping plan the meals and collecting the monthly dues. As such, I was also in charge of planning the occasional “mess night,” or “dining in,” a formal dinner party for the wardroom and their guests with rules and traditions as old as the Navy itself, although I tried to avoid serving as “Mr. Vice,” or the master of ceremonies. In addition to formal toasts (with grape juice - no alcohol on Navy ships, except in Sick Bay) to everyone from the Commander-in-Chief to the Queen of England, someone would invariably stand and quote a few lines from one of Rudyard Kipling’s martial poems, usually “Tommy,” from “Barrack-Room Ballads” (1892), a sobriquet for the ordinary, but brave British soldier:
I went to a public –‘ouse to get a pint of beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez to me, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs to the street again an’ to myself sez I:
For it’s Tommy this, and Tommy that, an’ “Chunk him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please,
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!
I guess the above was an example of male bonding, c. 1971, for the ship’s wardroom was a very macho environment back in the day. Anyway, regarding “mess,’ if you travel, you must be careful, too, because in French, “messe” means either “mass” or “liturgy,” and in German it means “trade fair.”
Instead of the usual categories that one finds in a recipe book, such as meats, desserts, and salads, I will divide my “memorable meals” by “oceans” because that’s the way I lived them. I’m talking about meals in countries whose shores touched these oceans. So, let’s look at the following: Pacific, Atlantic, and Mediterranean. I will save the Caribbean, with its plantains, black beans and rice, and jerked chicken, for a later date.
THE PACIFIC OCEAN: I don’t know if the average tourist realizes it today, but the canned meat product, SPAM (“Shoulder of Pork and Ham,” “Specially Produced American Meat,” “Sizzle Pork and Mmmmm.” Take your choice.) is a common and favorite food of native Hawaiians. You can even buy SPAM breakfast platters at McDonalds. It dates to World War II necessity. The first time I had SPAM-fried rice was in a little café/bar just down the street from the main gate at Naval Station, Pearl Harbor. It was called the “Monkey Bar” because five or six live monkeys were in residence behind a glass wall above the bar. I was on my way to Vietnam, and I remember sitting there, eating my fried rice, watching the monkeys eating their bananas, watching them watch me eat my fried rice, and wondering to myself: “Who is really the master of their fate, me or the monkeys?”
Whenever a ship of mine called at Hong Kong, I would take the ferry over to the Kowloon side and head to Jimmy’s Restaurant. My favorite meal there was French Onion Soup topped off with Baked Alaska. I must have eaten this ten times over twenty years at sea. I doubt the restaurant has survived the mainland take-over as Jimmy was somewhat of a free spirit, and I doubt he could toe the communist line. He had a side-hustle selling rosewood furniture, and I bought several pieces from him, hiring a boat to ferry them out to my ship. They are still in my living room, although the export of rosewoods, as an endangered species, has long been illegal in Hong Kong and most everywhere else. I tried several times on various ships to have the cooks reproduce his Baked Alaska recipe, but the meringue never rose as high as Jimmy’s.
My favorite meal in Manila, Republic of the Philippines, was always the baked fish, “Lapu Lapu.” I would always order it at the Manila Hotel, where General McArthur kept his mistress during World War II. It is located near the ancient quarter of the city, the “Intramuros,” or the “Walled City,” where some of the most intense fighting of the war took place. The dish is supposedly named after Lapu Lapu, a native chieftain, who shot a poisoned arrow into the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, on a Cebu beach in1521, thereby ending his attempt to sail around the world. A few of his crew continued the successful voyage, however.
My wife and mother-in-law once visited me when one of my ships was in port, Subic Bay, and we rode the Philippine Rabbit (local bus line) up to Manila where I treated them to some Lapu Lapu. I thought a lot of my mother-in-law. She loved to travel, and she had previously met one of my bosses, a Roman Catholic priest, John J. O’Connor, who later became the Archbishop of New York City. When he went to Rome for his investiture as a Bishop, she was his special guest and got to meet the Pope – the trip of a lifetime for her.
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN: While I’ve eaten good meals at ports all around the littoral of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s the meals on a certain ship that stand out in my mind. I spent three years on a small destroyer escort, a radar picket ship, homeported in Newport, Rhode Island, whose mission was to maintain station in the old DEW Line (Distant Early Warning Line), a series of radar stations, some at sea, across the artic, from Alaska through Canada over Greenland and to Iceland. It was a Cold War creation whose purpose was to detect enemy bombers coming over the North Pole to bomb American cities.
From the geographic locations I’ve described, you can deduce what the weather and sea conditions were like: cold and high seas, with tides as high as 40 feet. We would go out for three months at a time, and just sit there, trying to maintain headway in the terrible weather, looking for Russians. As a radar technician, my job was to keep the electronic gear up and running. Once in a blue moon, but only if something broke down, we might run into Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a few hours.
The reason I remember the meals on this ship is that we didn’t have any – unless you consider sandwiches three times a day as meals. Once we got five or six days north of Newport, it was literally too rough to cook in the galley, and cold cuts, kool aide, and jello became the regular bill of fare. Now, someone would probably write their congressman and complain, but in 1962-64, you just knew that things could be a lot worse and “went with the flow.”
THE MEDITERRANEAN OCEAN: The first time I had that English staple, fish and chips, was in Valetta, Malta. Sitting in an old harborside café full of British Navy sailors, in the shadow of Crusader castles on the hills above, I was looking all about for the catsup when my order was delivered (“Catsup,” by the way, is a Chinese word), and a “Limey” helpfully informed me that I was supposed to douse my fish and potatoes with vinegar instead. In case you are wondering, “Limey” is not a pejorative term. It pertains to the British Navy’s groundbreaking incorporation of limes and lemons in 18th century sailor’s diets to prevent scurvy, a serious disease caused by a chronic deficiency of vitamin C.
When you ask the average person if they like Greek food, they might tell you that they love gyros, baklava, or peppers stuffed with grape leaves, but unless you’ve been there and eaten in the “estiatorios” or neighborhood restaurants with the locals, you don’t really know. Not speaking a word of Greek, we used to be invited back into the kitchen and asked to point at what we wanted as it was simmering on the stove. I can remember lima beans as big as my fist, pots full of what we would call bouillabaisse in France, and other unidentifiable bits of seafood, especially in Piraeus, the seaport of Athens.
We finally decided that the best plan was to just sit down, be cool, and let the owner bring out whatever was good to eat that day. Consequently, I’ve eaten some dishes I couldn’t identify, but I knew it was good. I do prefer not to see eyeballs, however. When eating at one of those mom-and-pop cafes on the waterfront, you can count on being served by an older, very reserved lady dressed all in black. After a while, you start to feel like an extra in the movie, “Never on Sunday” (1960), but Greeks are fine people, and I never had a bad meal.
I’ve eaten “street food” all over the world, and the offerings in Singapore used to be the best. Because of urban renewal, however, the old places selling “mystery meat” and such on a stick are long gone. A few good examples in the Med do come to mind, however. The best falafel, with mashed chickpeas standing in for meat, I’ve ever had was in Haifa, Israel. A close second was a little shop on Thayer Street, just down from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. My all-time favorite sandwich dates to the waterfront in Marseille, France, looking out toward the Ile d’if in the harbor. This was the fictional site of the prison in Alexandre Dumas’ book, “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1844). It consisted of a fresh, buttered baguette, topped with a sliced, hard- boiled egg, with salt and pepper. Try it and you will like it.
I’ve read where the average person spends a staggering 32,098 hours of their lifetime eating and drinking. Count me in. I’m taking my family on a Caribbean cruise out of New Orleans over this coming Christmas, on the Norwegian Breakaway. They are going for the sun, the excitement, the adventure, and the five foreign ports. Me, I’m going for the food.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
