You Gotta Know the Cook

There were several incidents that prove it’s better to be on the good side of the cooks. The first happened while I was in U.S. Navy boot camp Great Lakes. One week of our training we were assigned kitchen duty. It was night shift and composed of preparing items for the next day’s menu. The old image of a guy peeling potatoes by hand no longer existed. A machine grated away peelings and flushed them down the drain. We also had to haul out fruit to be served. Another task was to crack open eggs; dozens of eggs into a huge cauldron. Those eggs would be scrambled for breakfast. A recruit slipped while retrieving a crate of apples and one of his feet plunged into the eggs. When we asked the cook where we could dump the eggs to start over, he said, “Just add more eggs.” Different cooks were in charge on different nights. They fix meals to feed the night shift crews; each chef would try to outdo the other. So we were treated royally with thick pork chops, eggs fried to perfection, and home fries. When we left the morning of the egg disaster, we whispered to recruits filing past for breakfast, “Don’t eat the eggs.”

While I was stationed in Orlando, Florida at the Naval Hospital, some of my days off I’d go fishing off Cape Canaveral or in Tampa Bay with friends. We’d save our catches until the families who lived off base had their freezers filled. We’d gather for a fantastic fish fry. A huge harvest skillet would cover the entire top of a round charcoal grill. It took 3 cans of Crisco to fill it to fry the fish and the hushpuppies.

One fishing trip I kept three blue mackerel and took them back to the barracks. I had a small fridge that barely held the three fish. In the morning I took the mackerel with me to breakfast at the hospital’s dining hall. I pulled aside one of the cooks and asked, “Do you like fish?” When he said that he did, I said, “If you cook one for me for lunch, you can have the other two.” His eyes went wide and asked, “How do you want them cooked?’ “You’re the cook surprise me.” At lunch, the meal hall menu was ragout with slimy okra in it. When I asked about my fish, the cooks came out with a meat platter. The golden brown fish and fries filled it. A few sliced tomatoes were added for color. Everyone else asked me where did you get that? I said, “It pays to know the cook.”