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
