Title: Gourmet
Author: Lang, Allen Kim
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Gourmet" ***


                                GOURMET

                           By ALLEN KIM LANG

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Galaxy Magazine April 1962.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]



                  This was the endless problem of all
                spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men
                tomorrow on what they had eaten today!


Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,
men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's
true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion
can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a
challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts
that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.

In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing
seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,
celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The
Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into
his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age
only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen
are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the _Chlorella_ and
_Scenedesmus_ algae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the
road to the larger Space without.

Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in
history--whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis
to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with
cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire--he is referred to the
hundred-and-first chapter of _Moby Dick_, a book spooled in the
amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that
no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more
than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of
Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a
man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.

The _Pequod's_ crew ate wormy biscuit and salt beef. Nimitz's men won
their war on canned pork and beans. The _Triton_ made her underwater
periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and
concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the
skies, a decline set in.

The first amenity of groundside existence to be abandoned was decent
food. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings
from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the
groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky
through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting
exordium of _Isaiah_ 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today
what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water.

The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning
offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a
spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.
Slimeheads remember the H. M. S. _Ajax_ fiasco, for example, in which a
galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's
shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from
the _Ajax_ in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think
of the _Benjo Maru_ incident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed
his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing
_Saccharomycodes_ yeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at
Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into
the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent
bite he ate to a superior grade of _sake_. And for a third footnote to
the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,"
Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the _Charles Partlow
Sale_.

The _Sale_ blasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due
in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking
the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the
human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir
seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed--these to be planted
in the _maria_ to squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had
aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's
Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,
the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was
Robert Bailey.

Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating
tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,
dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to
see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of
water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.
This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a
statement of the least fuel a man can run on.

Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo
compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the _C. P. Sale_
no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to
work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons
of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West
and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,
protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the
algae fed us.

All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble
from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route
and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in
essential amino acids.

The algae--dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the
smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a
hundred ways--served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite
wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of
oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the
end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the
glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling
politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a
breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of
squeamishness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife
in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher
extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,
guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.
Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim
is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.

If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties
of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann
was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do
so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have
done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart
was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet
Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as
Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a
Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social
hemorrhoid.

The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.
It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, "Bailey,
Robert," on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate
shipmate "Belly-Robber." It was Winkelmann who discussed _haut
cuisine_ and the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our
algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was
Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any
other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.

Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste
of synthetic methionine--an essential amino acid not synthesized by
Chlorella--by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano
and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,
textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the
slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.
For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of
the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.
"Belly-Robber," he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,
"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun
in my home country: _Mensch ist was er isst._ It means, you are what
you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this
_Schweinerei_ you are feeding me." Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin
with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the
ladder from the dining-cubby.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?" the Cook asked me.

"Not much," I said. "I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can
give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got
to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship."

"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook," Bailey said. "The fat swine!"

"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey," I
said. "He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in
my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none."

Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It
was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. "This
is what I have to work with," he said. He tossed the stuff back into
its bin. "In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,
we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings."

"You'll never make Winkelmann happy," I said. "Even the simultaneous
death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up
the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat."

Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye
from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook
waved my gift aside. "Not now, Doc," he said. "I'm thinking about
tomorrow's menu."

The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the
next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed
with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of
burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only
guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and
drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine
heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The _pièce de
résistance_ was again a "hamburger steak;" but this time the algaeal
mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only
faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had
been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. "It's
so tender," the radioman joked, "that I can hardly believe it's really
steak."

Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently
imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big
man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.
"Belly-Robber," Winkelmann said, "I had almost rather you served me
this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and
cycler-salt."

       *       *       *       *       *

"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain," I said. I
gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.

"Yes, I eat it," the Captain said, taking and talking through another
bite. "But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and
grasshoppers, to stay alive."

"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.

"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised
algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This--the brain that guides
the ship--cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,
Belly-Robber?"

Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really
don't know what I can do to please you."

"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban _Hausfrau_ with the
vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums
or weeping. Only--can you understand this, so simple?--food that will
keep my belly content and my brain alive."

"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British
term Dumb Insolence.

Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I
followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard.
You're asking him to make bricks without straw."

Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor,
that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged
man?"

"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.

"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,"
Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the
Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of
Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the
mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him
uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,
to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn
somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."

"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."

"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we
ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys
many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."

"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.

"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical
path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate
the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned
by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at
mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my
compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of
the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would
cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius
acidly called in question again.

I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go
into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in
brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an _ersatz_ hot
turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella
turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy
a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae
a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a
genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.

"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second
helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but
only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require
a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere
edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will
have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics
student. That will be all, Bailey."

The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of
Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their
Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark
on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last
few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many
memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had
lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,
seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,
and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our
Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice
that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when
Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.

       *       *       *       *       *

Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects
besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As
his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this
ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of
books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help
him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a
fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of
spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,
and a dozen others.

Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards
interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien
to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd
exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance
to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.
To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come
aboard their ship mother-naked.

But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects
baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon
mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet
on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.

"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,
Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.

Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd
had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,"
he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the
texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"

"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess
should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"

"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the
steak-substrate--Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special
seasonings--through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal
oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out. _Voila!_
I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine
meat."

"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.

"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with
our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of
distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I
never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils
the meal."

Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of
the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates.
"Try it," he urged the Captain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The
color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell
of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not
too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed
his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A
kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a
more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something,"
Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.
"Aha! I have it!"

"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.

"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and
ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed
the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's
masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks."
Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth,
Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.

"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.

Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.

"... Sir," Bailey added.

"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said
meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have
sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a
bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."

"But, Sir...." Bailey began.

"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat
to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic
slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of
this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in
no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you
understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.

"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,
slave-driving...."

"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are
insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."

"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was
scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.

"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's
Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.

"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers
and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."

"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said.
"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him
to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my
bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal
bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.

"No, dammit!" he shouted.

"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is
therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat
like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.

After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.

"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to
be ashamed of."

"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel
and sauerkraut and _Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art_ out of an algae
tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out
molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And
he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet
of the Friends of Escoffier!"

"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your
fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not
appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year
from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that
restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."

"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He
reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be
an apt confederate of _vis medicatrix naturae_, the healing power of
nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it
off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.

For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in
horribleness, a pottage or boiled _Chlorella vulgaris_ that looked
and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,
red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as
though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the
disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're
improving a little at last."

Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.

I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were
now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of
irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was
a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann
theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain
had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I
thought.

Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted
of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were
vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for
the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served
the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley
oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.

       *       *       *       *       *

There being only three seats in the _Sale's_ mess compartment, we ate
our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to
supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell
to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,
of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss
of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the
first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"

"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.

"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman
said.

I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric
warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of
us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried
Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched
in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron
skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut
a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are
limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the
galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey,"
I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is
actually _good_."

"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.

I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but
this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;
you couldn't have done it without him."

"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?"
Bailey asked.

"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our
Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum
performance out of his Ship's Cook."

Bailey stood up. "Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?" he asked.

I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.
He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good
of the ship and his crew. "Do I like Captain Winkelmann?" I asked,
spearing another piece of my artificial steak. "Bailey, I'm afraid I'll
have to admit that I do."

Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my
plate. "Then have another piece," he said.





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