Canada's Naval Cooks - The Toronto Star April 2009, Feeding aboard HMCS in the Arabian Gulf
The cooks in Cooking History are from Germany, France, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
Undaunted by the absence of a Canadian, we were inspired by the film to find out what's cooking in Canada's military kitchens today. We reached Master Cpl. Dana Haley, a 38-year-old cook on the HMCS Winnipeg. He is serving 225 crew members on the ship that's fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden.
Haley rises at 3 a.m. and works until 7 or 8 p.m. delivering five meals a day using a menu provided by the military. Dinners include steak, pizza, and turkey. He runs the operation like a restaurant: eggs any way you want for breakfast, heated plates for dinner, and desserts garnished with whipped cream. His kitchen is equipped with deep fryers, steamers, and grills. It's abundance compared to a cook in the film whose food is stolen, leaving him with just porridge to feed soldiers in Chechnya.
For a military cook, however, whether killing pigs or grilling steak in a galley, food retains a psychological power.
"If you don't have good food you don't have a happy soldier or sailor," says Haley who started baking cookies when he was 5. "We are the morale boosters of the ship."
What's challenging is cooking on what he calls a "moving platform." Before he bakes a cake he'll ask if there are "manoeuvres." "No," will come the reply. But something does happen and the ship tilts starboard or port as, alas, do his cakes. "We are always moving....You can't be seasick as a cook in the galley." What buoys spirits? "Fresh bread is the absolute....You can smell it on the ship and they can't wait to get their hands on it." Bread is a recurrent theme in Cooking History: arsenic-laced loaves destined for the SS; Russian bread rations that were hard as stones; golden loaves rising in the oven of a German baker. Why does bread wield such power? "It's the sense of home," Haley suggests.
Home for Haley is Mill Bay, just outside of Victoria, B.C. where he is scheduled to return in August.
Lesley Simpson, The Toronto Star
Undaunted by the absence of a Canadian, we were inspired by the film to find out what's cooking in Canada's military kitchens today. We reached Master Cpl. Dana Haley, a 38-year-old cook on the HMCS Winnipeg. He is serving 225 crew members on the ship that's fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden.
Haley rises at 3 a.m. and works until 7 or 8 p.m. delivering five meals a day using a menu provided by the military. Dinners include steak, pizza, and turkey. He runs the operation like a restaurant: eggs any way you want for breakfast, heated plates for dinner, and desserts garnished with whipped cream. His kitchen is equipped with deep fryers, steamers, and grills. It's abundance compared to a cook in the film whose food is stolen, leaving him with just porridge to feed soldiers in Chechnya.
For a military cook, however, whether killing pigs or grilling steak in a galley, food retains a psychological power.
"If you don't have good food you don't have a happy soldier or sailor," says Haley who started baking cookies when he was 5. "We are the morale boosters of the ship."
What's challenging is cooking on what he calls a "moving platform." Before he bakes a cake he'll ask if there are "manoeuvres." "No," will come the reply. But something does happen and the ship tilts starboard or port as, alas, do his cakes. "We are always moving....You can't be seasick as a cook in the galley." What buoys spirits? "Fresh bread is the absolute....You can smell it on the ship and they can't wait to get their hands on it." Bread is a recurrent theme in Cooking History: arsenic-laced loaves destined for the SS; Russian bread rations that were hard as stones; golden loaves rising in the oven of a German baker. Why does bread wield such power? "It's the sense of home," Haley suggests.
Home for Haley is Mill Bay, just outside of Victoria, B.C. where he is scheduled to return in August.
Lesley Simpson, The Toronto Star