Beef Stew for 2500

One of the many interesting cookbooks my dad has given me was “Beef Stew for 2500: Feeding Our Navy from the Revolutionary War to the Present.” I love history and I love food so this was a great combo. This wonderful book not only contains descriptions of what kind of food the men ate but how they ate it, how it was cooked, how it was stored, and even in some cases, how it was acquired. It also contains recipes. Now for most people, food from the 1700s called “Drowned Baby” and “Dog’s Body” does not get them excited, but to me, it was another grand experiment waiting to be tried. I even bought a piece of canvas so I could boil things in a bag as the sailors would have. While perhaps not the tastiest food I’ve ever eaten, it has provided some of the greatest learning. How do you accomplish a task without modern conveniences? How do you do a seemingly simple task in a terrible environment, like cooking aboard a wooden ship being tossed around in the middle of the ocean? And how many different ways can you combine the same things while achieving different results? This all sounds like good engineering to me.