Arrrrhh

Couple of excerpts from the first draft of the Pirate Food chapter.

1.

Rob - One of the fun things about pirate life is scurvy, a disease caused by low levels of dietary vitamin C. This vitamin is essential to the development and maintenance of connective tissue, which holds our bodies together. When you run out, parts such as teeth tend to come loose and fall out. And your skin and flesh shrivel, and eventually you start to look the way Burt Reynolds started looking ten years ago. To avoid scurvy, pirates ate rob, a revolting gummy substance made by boiling down the juice of nasty little bitter limes. Pirates learned this practice from British sailors, who were called “limeys” because they ate rob. Prior to the existence of rob, British sailors were called by their more proper name, “fat syphilitic toothless illiterate sodomites.”

2.

Rum - Every pirate got a ration of rum, which makes a certain amount of sense, since rum is the cheapest, most vile distilled spirit other than antifreeze. Latin Americans are fond of rum, and except for the pina colada, they make the worst mixed drinks in the universe. That’s why every drink contains half a pound of sugar to help you choke it down. Many people don’t realize this, but Latin American bartenders inadvertently invented cough syrup.

Pirates had a mixed drink of their own. It was called “grog.” I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been to cheesy seaside restaurants that served drinks called grog, and they were full of ginger ale and lemon juice and paper umbrellas and fruit slices on little plastic swords and God knows what, so you think you know what grog is. Wrong, fool. Grog was rum mixed with water. Either old water containing tadpoles, or fresh water containing seagull dung. Pretty fancy, eh? But pirates liked it because if you drank enough of it, you forgot how miserable your life was, and with any luck, you would also die.

I baked the hardtack twice, and it's starting to resemble quartz. I'll bake it one more time and then get out the drill.

More

I took the hardtack out and checked it out. It was too hard to bite into, so I laid a knife on it and banged on the knife with a rolling pin. After a lot of banging and see-sawing, I finally managed to break a piece off. You can chew it if you're really careful. It tastes like a brick made out of flour.

After that, I decided to see just how tough it was, so I took it in the garage and nailed it to this piece of scrap lumber. It's on there pretty good. No sign of cracking.

I have a theory. I think they called it "hardtack" because it was so hard you could tack it to things.

I may give some to the birds and see if they know what to make of it.

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