Eating aboard a US Submarine during World War 2

With a fatality rate of over 20%, being a crew member aboard a U.S. submarine during World War II was one of the most dangerous jobs in the military, but they were also some of the best fed. They got to enjoy meals like these Swiss steaks and mashed potatoes which I'm making using the cookbook of the U.S. Navy. So thank you to Babbel for sponsoring this video as we dive into submarine cuisine, this time on Tasting History. Ever since World War II the submarines of the U.S. Navy have so much so that the officers actually eat the same food as the enlisted men. Going back and looking at the menus from several subs during the war, we can see that they ate three full meals a day with breakfasts often including fresh fruit, eggs, cereal, bacon, and cinnamon buns. Lunch might be chicken fricassee, lamb with mint sauce or pork chops, with ice cream and a pie to round it off, and then supper of beef stew, meatloaf, salmon salad, fresh corn, and apple pie to finish off the day. Not a bad spread at all especially when compared with the food that was being served to most of the military at the time. What's really cool is that almost all of the dishes on those menus can be found in this, the cookbook of the United States Navy, and this is the actual cookbook from 1945. And looking at a midday meal from the USS Ronquil in March of 1945, the men ate Swiss steak and boiled potatoes, both of which are in this book but instead of the boiled potatoes because they are just literally boiled potatoes, I'm going to make the mashed potato recipe but it is one using dehydrated shredded potatoes which would have been available later in a submarine's patrol after all the fresh potatoes had run out. But first let us start with the Swiss steak. Now these recipes make enough for 100 men which would have been a good amount for the crew of a submarine which was usually about 80 men but is way too much for the crew of Tasting History which is me so I am going to cut this recipe way down. So instead of 42 pounds of boneless beef I'm going to use three and a half pounds or 1.5 kilograms of boneless beef. Chuck roast is a good cut. Then two-thirds cup or 80 grams of flour, one tablespoon of salt, a half teaspoon of pepper, a third cup or 75 milliliters of cooking oil, one pound or 450 grams of canned chopped tomatoes, and a half pound or 225 grams of sliced onions. Then another half teaspoon of salt and another third cup or 40 grams of flour. The recipe starts by saying to cut the meat into six ounce steaks one to one and a half inches thick and I think mine were about six ounces but they were definitely not uniform. Then you whisk together the flour, salt, and the pepper and give a generous dusting of that to each steak coating them front and back and on all the sides pressing the flour mixture into the meat. Then heat the cooking oil in a heavy skillet over high heat. Frankly I think that the amount of cooking oil that the recipe calls for is probably too much at least in my kitchen so if you want to cut it in like half that'd be good. However much you use though once it's very hot set several of the steaks in and cook them on both sides until they are well browned. Like I said with this much oil you really have to be careful of hot sputtering oil flying everywhere when you flip them but once they are well browned it says to place the steaks in a roasting pan and then add the tomatoes over them and cover the whole thing with the sliced onions. Then sprinkle the last half teaspoon of salt over them then cover the pan and set it in the oven at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, 150 Celsius for three hours or until the steaks are nice and tender. That's why chuck roast or shank or brisket would all be good cuts for this because they will benefit from that long cook time. You don't want to use something like a ribeye or filet because it'll just be tough. When the meat is nice and tender though take it out of the oven and then drain as much of the cooking liquid as you can and put it into a small saucepan. Then in another bowl mix together the one-third cup of flour with about as much water. The recipe just says to make a paste. It doesn't actually say how much water to use so I made a thick paste but you can always make it thinner when you are preparing the sauce. So add the paste to the drippings and mix it in and then cook it over a medium-high heat for three to four minutes until you have a well-thickened gravy. Again you can add more water if you want. Then pour that over the meat. Now I gotta say while this was cooking the whole house smelled absolutely wonderful. A lot better than the pungent aroma of the sauerkraut soup that I made last year when I did a video on World War I German submarines. The infamous U-Boot or Unterseeboot which literally means undersea boat. A simple translation that you can do when you learn some German from today's sponsor Babbel. Babbel is one of the top language learning apps in the world and the lessons are created by real language teachers and I love that in addition to the lessons they also have things like guided dialogues which really help with your pronunciation and just getting the language into your ear. So when I'm in Germany this fall should I be invited to a party I can show up with a plate of cookies and say, Wir haben Kekse für die Party. And while I'm practicing my German for my upcoming travels I also like to do it just because it's good for my brain. After leaving school it is just too easy to let your brain atrophy and you should always be learning something and Babbel is a great way to do that. So to start speaking a language in as little as three weeks just click my link in the description or scan this QR code and you'll get 60% off of your Babbel subscription. That is 60% off of your Babbel subscription when you use my link in the description. Now our second dish is a lot simpler than the steaks or at least I thought. Turns out that dehydrated shredded potatoes are a little finicky but we're making them anyway so for this recipe what you'll need is two thirds of a pound or 300 grams of dehydrated potato shreds, one quart or one liter of water, two and a half teaspoons of salt, one and a half cups or 350 milliliters of milk, and four tablespoons or 55 grams of melted butter. So I don't know if the dehydrated potato shreds of today are maybe different than the ones that they had in 1945. It's very, very possible but this is one of those instances where just following the recipe did not work. It says to heat water to vigorous boil. Pour over potatoes. Cover. Let stand in warm place 15 minutes or over low heat 10 minutes. Add salt. Stir vigorously 15 to 20 minutes or until smooth. Add milk and butter. Whip until light. Serve immediately, and I did just that. I heated the water to a boil, poured it over the potatoes, and covered them for 15 minutes, and it was in a warm place but maybe it just wasn't as warm of a place as in a galley of a submarine or a battleship because when I went to stir them vigorously there was no way these things were going to get smooth. I even put them in a stand mixer for 15 minutes only to have them be the exact same consistency as they were before. So I decided to boil them a little bit to hopefully soften them up so I added a little bit more water and put them on a medium heat for 10 minutes, and they were definitely softer but stirring them vigorously was still not going to ever make these things smooth so at this point I said to heck with it. They're mashed potatoes so I'm just going to mash the potatoes, and that did work to a point. They still had a firmer texture than any normal mashed potato but they were good enough to add in the milk and the butter. Then the recipe says to whip them vigorously so I put them back in the stand mixer, and after just a few minutes they actually did end up looking like something that might pass as a mashed potato, but before we try these mashed potatoes and Swiss steaks make sure to like this video. It really does help out the channel, and we can learn a bit more about what it was like to eat and cook aboard a U.S. submarine during World War II. Life aboard a submarine during World War II was tough. The U.S. lost 52 subs, and they had a fatality rate of around 20% which to be fair is a lot better than the nearly 75% fatality rate of German U-boat personnel during the war, but it was still one of the most dangerous positions in the U.S. military which is one reason why they got to eat a lot better than their above water counterparts. Another reason was because spending up to eight weeks in a metal tube beneath the waves can make a person go a little stir crazy, and good food was there to provide a bit of comfort, and it was pretty much the only comfort that they had because life in a sub was cramped. There were different classes of submarine but on average they had 80 men aboard, 70 enlisted crew, and 10 officers, and they were quite a bit smaller than the modern subs in the navy having about a third as much displacement. This means a lot less room per man. An enlisted man in addition to his bunk only got one square foot of personal storage space. On top of that they typically smelled bad. A mingle of body odor, diesel fuel, cooking food, cigarettes, sometimes sewage, not great, and it didn't help that when submerged the engine room could get up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit which would then heat up the entire sub. Now US subs did have air conditioning which none of the other countries had but it didn't work to the effectiveness that it did that it does today so they were quite warm. So between all of that unpleasantness plus the fact that they were constantly worried about depth charges and enemy torpedoes this meant that an outsized portion of the crew's morale was in the hands of the cook on duty, and there was usually a chief cook with two to four other cook petty officers to help, and then there were often several mess cooks who did more of the grunt work of cleaning the galley, the scullery, and the mess area where the enlisted men actually ate, and sometimes they helped with food prep and serving as well. A former mess cook recalled there was an art to mess cooking. It was similar to lion taming. Drop your whip and the animals ate you. Now the first job of the chief cook actually started before the patrol even began because they were partly in charge of gathering the provisions for for the submarine, and often the length of a patrol was not dictated by how much fuel they had or the morale of the men but rather from how much food they could cram into this steel tube. In those first days of a patrol every inch of the sub was filled with provisions. Bilges and decks were crammed with boxes of fruits and vegetables. Canned goods were stuffed in every nook and cranny from between torpedo tubes to inside of showers. Lockers were packed with cocoa and condiments, and you might share a bunk with a stack of number 10 cans of peaches or tomatoes. There were areas of the boat that tended to be drier like forward of the motors and so sugar could be kept in that area, and then there were areas that were particularly warm and damp like the torpedo room bilges and so coffee and flour which were sealed in metal containers were kept in there. In short the space was very cramped but not for long because space freed up as they ate through those provisions, and so at the beginning of a patrol the food tended to be better because they had a lot of fresh food aboard. Fresh fruit lasted about a week, and then fresh vegetables about two weeks, milk was gone in three, and then butter in about four. Fresh eggs also lasted about a month when they were kept in a chill box. After that they had to switch to powdered eggs, and there are stories of cooks saving some of the shells of the fresh eggs and when they had switched over to powdered eggs they would take the shells and kind of put them out in the kitchen so that they might trick the enlisted men to thinking that they were actually getting fresh eggs, but as someone who has eaten powdered eggs here on the channel before I can tell you nobody was fooled. They do not taste anything like or really feel anything like actual fresh eggs, and as things like fresh fruit and eggs ran out it put more pressure on the other food that was aboard. Like they usually had frozen meat about a ton and a half that was stored in the freezer, and then there was coffee which was available at all hours and made with 10-gallon drip percolators and was along with cigarettes the lifeblood of a submarine. Now with that much coffee you needed a lot of potable water which for many of the subs that were built during the war wasn't a problem because they had big stills on board that could provide the ship with plenty of distilled water, so much so that they would often get weekly showers and even laundry done, but there were some older boats like the S boat which didn't have that luxury and water was at such a premium that washing and laundry were generally out of the question. According to one sailor on an S boat at the time the only person who really got to wash was the cook and even then he was limited to seven cups of water in a bucket. The wash-up consisted of washing the face, neck, arms, and hands using socks or skivvies as a rag. Next the same water was used for the trunk, legs, and feet. Last came the privates. Then the socks and skivvies themselves were washed. It is said that some cooks then added the used water to the coffee urn after the socks and skivvies had been squeezed back into the bucket. I'm really sure that that is not true but still it does put one off wanting to drink coffee aboard some of those smaller submarines, but if coffee wasn't your thing then maybe you had like me a sweet tooth, and luckily they did have ice cream. Yes most of the submarines were outfitted with the great morale boosting ice cream machine, and I actually did an entire video on ice cream in the navy during World War II. A food that was so important to morale that the navy had a dedicated ice cream barge. Other sweet treats might include pies, or pastries, or cinnamon buns for breakfast. There was actually a lot of baking that was done partly because if the waves were really rolling and they couldn't sit down and have soups, and sauces, and everything at the table then they relied on things like pastries and sandwiches made with fresh bread. Most of the baking was done during the mid-watch between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. Then with a lack of counter space the bread would be put to cool in bread lockers, and the USS Codd Submarine Memorial sent me a video of them opening one of these lockers which was contained in a bench in the crew mess. It had holes in it so that the air could circulate and cool the bread. Of course this did make easy access for cockroaches, and a lot of submarines did have a problem with cockroaches. They say that the USS Codd did not, at least during World War II, but other subs definitely did. Also the USS Codd has a great YouTube channel where they walk you through all the different parts of the ship, and it's really well done so I will put a link to their channel in the description. Now all of this food was being served over three meals throughout the day, and each meal was broken up into three seatings because the the mess was typically not big enough for all the men to sit at. So they would have to cram them in so most of the men were eating in about 10 or 12 minutes at most as long as you were an enlisted man, because if you were an officer there's a totally different situation. Like I said before the officers did eat the same food as the rest of the crew, but they didn't eat it in the crew mess. They ate it in the wardroom. Several stewards would bring the food from the galley to the officer's pantry, and there they would plate it up on nice china decorated with the fouled anchor. In addition they had nice silverware and white linen tablecloths and napkins. They also typically didn't have the same time crunch that enlisted men did so they could often sit there after their meal and enjoy a cigarette or a cigar. And while they were eating the same grub as all the other men there were ways to spruce up the meal provided you had a good steward. Like the steward could use the officer's vacuum percolator to make the coffee rather than the drip coffee percolator that the men had. It was a much better, a much better cup of coffee. Also as one officer James Calvert recalled, I soon learned that having a steward who is liked by the ship's cook can be important. There are good cuts of meat and then there are the other cuts. But even with a finer cut of meat and a better cup of coffee officers still could not escape the fact that they were trapped in a metal tube on the rolling seas especially when those seas were really rolling. The first meal of the big storm was roast pork and mashed potatoes. The stewards had soaked the white linen tablecloth and its soft underpad with water so that the plates and half-filled glasses would not slide. Bracing myself with one hand I did my best to eat with the other. It was slow going but I was making it. He says that then they brought some apple pie but he decided not to stick around because one of the other officers had a rum soaked cigar that he lit up and it made the whole wardroom smell. Now besides stormy seas, occasional seasickness, and an errant cockroach there was one other thing that could really put a damper on the food and that was the red light. I always wondered why in movies in submarines the lights go red at certain times and it turns out there are actually several reasons but one of the most important reasons is that it cuts down on the time and it takes your eyes to adjust from light to dark. So instead of like white light to dark where it takes a while to adjust if it goes red light to dark it adjusts in just a couple seconds. Now from what I understand they usually just use these red lights when they are submerged or when they are going into combat but maybe somebody who actually has spent time on a sub can confirm or deny or shed some more light on that but it seems that during World War II there was on at least one submarine a long period where all they had was red light. The initial novelty of living under red lights with red mashed potatoes, black vegetables, and other unearthly colored foods had worn off even before reaching Pearl Harbor. There it had served as a conversation piece but now three weeks later I believed it was one of the factors affecting Wahoo's morale. But provided your food was the right color and provided the seas were calm it does seem that even as an enlisted man or an officer eating aboard a U.S. submarine in World War II wasn't bad but I am going to reserve judgment until I try this meal from the USS Ronquil from 1945. And here we are Swiss steaks and mashed potatoes from a World War II U.S. submarine. So what I think is really cool is I found on eBay these fouled anchor plates. These are actually the plates. I got one dish and then one other plate that were used on the World War II submarines for the officers. I thought that was pretty cool. Let's start with these mashed potatoes which I'm super curious about. Here we go. Okay so the texture is they are, they're a little lumpy. There was some stuff that just wouldn't mash but the flavor is really good. I mean there's a bunch of butter and milk in there. It actually reminds me of like the mashed potatoes that we had in school as a kid which were probably like flake potatoes. Pretty good. And now for the meat. Let me try to get a bit. Yeah so it kind of just falls apart which is nice. Get some onions, some tomato, the whole, the whole thing. There we go. That's really good. Fantastic. This is a really good meal. I'm not surprised. I mean they were known for having good food. Everything, most everything I've ever made from the U.S. Navy cookbook has been good provided it doesn't use powdered eggs. Really don't like those but this is definitely, definitely one of the best. Also just one curious thing that I, that I saw on the menu from the Ronquil is that they served fresh frozen corn. Is that a thing? It's either fresh corn or it's frozen corn. Let's see how it can be fresh frozen corn. Maybe somebody can explain that to me. Either way this was really good. You should make it and I will see you next time on Tasting History.