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Cooking For The Royal Berk’s Wasn’t
Always Fun!
by
Sgt. Bertram King 14254119
Page 5
I was one of the original
battalion cooks, and everybody done their turn at it in the old days; anybody
that was any good got the job good back again. I used to make bread in the
field, when I got yeast and stuff like that, because the likely hood, you couldn’t
come by anything when you really wanted it.
.....But what I used to do, I used to make the pastry up, say you put four
pound of flour and two pound of margarine to make a batch of pastry, I’d
cut the margarine down to a third, so you got four pound of flour and a pound
of margarine, and then you made it up with your water, so that when it was
made up, it came up to like a reasonably tough dough. Then what I used to do,
was fry it in deep fat, same as you would, fish and chips, so you could make
the sausage rolls up with the Soya links, and then make the pastry up, stick
it on the side there and you got your Indian cook there, got a nice big fire
going, with your big frying pan, I had a thirty-inch frying pan there, which
I had shot full of holes once, while I was still holding it. Then that was
fried, and they come out as if they were baked. The chicken and half a dozen
sausage rolls, a bully beef sandwich, and that was the other set rations.
You imagine in the field, when we got the cooks and all that, everybody got
bright ideas of one sort and another, and a couple of instances which you might
find amusing.
.....All of a sudden, one day there, one of my cooks started to produce beautiful
raspberry blamonge’s, we had plenty of cornflower, and milk and everything
like that, so anyway I said to him, ‘what are you doing this with’,
so he give me a wink, and he said, ‘I got a bottle of red ink from the
orderly officers, so he’d got some red ink and was making these raspberry
blamonge’s, with red ink, they were perfect, the blokes couldn’t
get over it, they were bloody marvellous.
Another man there, I’ll tell you he was a comic really, a regular soldier.
He decided it was very, very good, when somebody asked him, if he make a spotted-dick.
So he made these steam puddings with raisin’s in, and he put them in
his army socks, to cook them in; of course that was a must and a first only,
for cheese flavoured spotted dick.
We had a bloke there, he wasn’t not much cop as a cook, so they put him
in-charge of the officers mess catering, he was just a cook, you know, and
I went into his kitchen one day, and his got this Dixie going, boiling away
there, on the cooker. I said, ‘what are you making?’ he said, ‘egg
soup’. So his got all the bloody shells of the eggs, boiling up to make
some bloody soup; nothing else.
A lot of our meat came up to us live, goats and stuff like that, and we had
to kill it; chop there heads off, dress them up, and this was our meat, we
had plenty of that sort of meat. We used to kill whatever was about ourselves.
Of course we had an army bakery with us, everywhere we went, and we were lucky
because they had ovens and I’d worked with them for a time. The oven
was like a little igloo, made of, like, tubular or angle-iron, and that sat
on the ground, it was about six-foot across, and on top of that you had covered
it with flour sacks, and then made up some mud into a cement and plastered
it all over the top, so it was like a little hut.
.....When you wanted to make your bread, you got your bread and everything
prepared, you lit the fire, and then raked the fire out, while it was still
white hot. When you wanted to make your bread, you put it in the oven to bake
in three-quarters of an hour, and you got fresh bread all the time, and that
was the way it was done. These went with us wherever we went, it was even put
into baskets made of bamboo and dropped to us by air. We were there for months,
not five bloody minutes, like the blokes are these days; we were there three
years, that’s a long tome.
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Sgt. Bertram King