Zing
Well-known member
Indeed fresh veg is not easy to keep. Tinned maybe if they had room.Thanks for the calculation. Difficult to increase the vegetables - because this was a cold weather trip the onions, potatoes and hard white cabbage kept quite well in a deck locker, picked over weekly, but they would not have kept in warmer conditions.
The provisions arrived in a Southampton ship chandler’s van.
I suspect that this was a stores list that Tilman had settled on back in the Fifties. I wonder if anyone else has an old stores list, perhaps from a Whitbread leg, to compare it with? I’m sure that the Clipper fleet have a standard list but that’s commercially sensitive.
One thing that you can’t get at all in the UK now is tinned butter. Not sure if you can get dried egg, either.
You can buy tinned butter in the form of clarified butter (ghee) in all Asian food shops. It is butter without the water and milk solids. It can be used as butter, is better for cooking as it doesn't burn and tastes pretty good. Or you can make it yourself very easily and if stored in cool conditions does not go off for many months.
I have bought dried egg in the baking section of the supermarket. It is horrid.
I realise that. My point was about it representing how people ate in general. I don't think people ate too differently when not at sea. We certainly didn't, except for eating much more veg, which if they couldn't store the tins was unavoidable.The items listed were for four months, two of them on passage, two of them in the Arctic, with no expectation of being able to buy anything, in a boat with no refrigeration and no expert cook. Tilman brewed his own beer and baked his own bread when at home.