Is that lentil soup in your bilge?

July, 2002

By Tom Snyder

I think I have five books on how to cook aboard a boat. They have comforting titles that speak to me in late winter. I tend to purchase a new cookbook in March after two solid winter months of reading nothing but disaster at sea‚ books. For 60 days I will have read intestine-gripping accounts of boats with no righting arm to speak of, or about lifeboats that don’t fully inflate – that sort of thing.

Then, having thoroughly scared the crap out of myself, I flip the calendar to March and switch over to an irrepressibly optimistic mode where I plan to improve something about my cruising skills for the coming season. I often start by considering diesel maintenance, intending that I will become a really good diesel mechanic.

Too hard.

Then, instead, I decide I will learn how to splice woven synthetic line.

Too hard.

I ultimately decide that this will be the year to be a better cook aboard.

Not too hard. And the books are beckoning.

Any boat cookbook worth its salt promises two things right in the introduction. First, it promises that the recipes contained within are simple and won’t require anything like a nitrogen-assisted pressure cooker or a Braun electric bread maker. That is reassuring to my two-pot, one-pan galley. Second, the really big promise: There will only be a few common ingredients required. Bingo. I buy the book. The coming summer will be a marathon of spectacular eating. Guests will marvel at my confidence and joy in the galley.

On June 1, book in hand, I stock up at Food City for a long cruise. Then the following occurs (every year): The first recipe from the book will call for something like coriander and shallots. Slight panic because I can never remember what shallots are, whether I like them, whether one is actually supposed to eat them, or if they are something like a garnish, whatever that is.

And coriander. Is that a spice – an optional flavoring – or is it some vital food catalyst, maybe some kind of rendering or annealing agent without which yeasts fail to propagate, or worse? I know it sounds stupid, but I can imagine the coroner and all of my friends at a memorial service wondering what I was thinking when I substituted for coriander.

So I bail on the summer of great cooking plan (every year) and buy six more cans of lentil soup to add to my growing supply of lentil soup cans, some of which date back to the Iran-Contra hearings. If you ever see me sailing, notice that my boat sits rather low in the bow. That’s the lentil soup. Why? Years ago, something clicked the first time I prepared this soup from a can. I guess I was just so proud and impressed by the results.

A penultimate stage in the process occurs the night before I take off. This is when my wife asks to see my provisioning. I try to disguise the lentil soup with bottles of wine and packages of pre-washed and bagged lettuce (another of my specialties), but somehow she knows. So she quickly runs to our kitchen and loads me up with mountains of frozen meats and casseroles and stews. She also unloads on me all of the bizarre delicate crackers that were even too bizarre to serve to our bizarre Euro-cracker-loving friends in the city. (These special crackers are structurally so ephemeral that they cannot support their own weight – they must be carefully held from three points.)

Once aboard the boat, I notice that all of the frozen foods are quickly thawing in my icebox. Having no idea how long chicken is edible once it is no longer a rock-solid ice mass, I over-react and fully thaw and cook everything – sausage, burger, chicken, stews, English muffins. It is clearly way too much to eat. I don’t know what to do with it now that it is cooked. You can see the appeal of lentil soup in a can.

As I sit in the cockpit, broken cracker in one hand, a leaf of pre-washed lettuce in the other, I want to promise myself that next year I will solve the food aboard problem. But I realize that this will never happen, because sometime in my late teens, I must have decided that I’m simply not interested in getting better at anything.

Plus, I like lentil soup.

Don’t let your children read this article.

Tom Snyder sails out of Peaks Island, Maine.