Food in the Air and Space Read online

  Food in the Air and Space

  The Food on the Go Series

  as part of the Rowman & Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy

  General Editor: Ken Albala, Professor of History, University of the Pacific ([email protected])

  Rowman & Littlefield Executive Editor: Suzanne Staszak-Silva ([email protected])

  The volumes in the Food on the Go series explore the fascinating ways people eat while getting from one place to another and the adaptations they make in terms of food choices, cutlery and even manners. Whether it be crossing the Atlantic in grand style on a luxury steamship, wedged into an airplane seat with a tiny tray, or driving in your car with a Big Mac in hand and soda in the cup holder, food has adapted in remarkable ways to accommodate our peripatetic habits. Eating on the go may be elegant or fast, but it differs significantly from everyday eating and these books explain why in various cultures across the globe and through history. This is the first series to systematically examine how and why mobility influences our eating habits, for better and worse.

  Food on the Rails: The Golden Era of Railroad Dining, by Jeri Quinzio (2014)

  Food in the Air and Space

  The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies

  Richard Foss

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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  Food on the Go, Series Foreword

  How familiar is the lament? “No one sits down to eat any more! People just grab something on the street or at the drive through. That’s not a proper meal, it’s just noshing on the way from one place to another.” Food on the move is nothing new. There has always been street food and fast food. People have always eaten in transit. Our tendency to dismiss such meals as quick and convenient but never of any real gastronomic distinction does injustice to the wide variety of foods available to people traveling, and sometimes these meals could be quite elegant indeed. Think of the great caravans trekking across the steppes of Western Asia, parking their camels and setting up tents for a sumptuous feast of dried fruits, nuts, flatbreads, and freshly roasted kebabs. Or think of the great age of early air travel when airlines had their own specially designed dishware and served elegant, if seat-tray-sized, meals prepared by trained chefs. Meals served on trains in the nineteenth century were among the most celebrated of their day and of course luxury cruises pride themselves on fine dining as an indispensable feature of the entire experience. Food truck fare, offered to pedestrians, has now become the cutting edge in hip cuisine.

  Traveling food need not be grand though. Sometimes it merely supplies sustenance—the hikers’ trail mix or high protein pemmican to sustain the intrepid hunter on the great plains. It can also be pretty rough if we think of the wartime C-Rations or hard tack and rum given to sailors in the colonial era. It seems as if some modes of transport have their own repertoire of foods, without which the trip would not be complete. What’s a road trip without chips and junk food? Is there anyone who doesn’t miss the little packs of salty peanuts on domestic flights? Traveling food also poses its own unique set of challenges, both for food preparation and consumption. Imagine stoking a fire on a wooden ship! Or flipping an omelet while the train rumbles violently over the tracks. Handheld food, perhaps the way of the future, is the quintessential traveling format, but so too are special Styrofoam containers and sporks, not to mention the leather bota, aluminum canteen, or plastic water bottle. Traveling food has its own etiquette as well, looser than the dining table, but interestingly quite private, perhaps intentionally in considering the public setting.

  When I first thought of this series, I don’t think I had ever thought through how many foods are specially designed for travel, or how complex and very culturally bound food eaten on trains, planes, cars, bikes, horseback can be. I will never forget a long train ride I took from Rome to the Tyrolean Alps. A young family sat across from me and they were well stocked with goods. Out came a salami, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, a bottle of wine. They were making a mess, gesticulating wildly, chattering in Italian. It all looked delicious, and they savored every morsel. By the time we approached the German-speaking region, they had neatened themselves up, tidied the area, switched languages, and every trace of their Italian repast was gone, and would have been completely unseemly, I think, that far north. That is, people do have explicit gastronomic traditions for travel that are as bound up with nationhood, class, gender, and self as any other eating habit. So it is about time we thought of these kinds of meals as a separate genre, and this series I hope will fill the gap in our understanding of why we eat what we do on the move.

  Ken Albala

  University of the Pacific

  Acknowledgments

  The long evolution of dining in the skies has received little scrutiny from historians; this is the first book to chart the worldwide development of skills, technologies, and organizations that took aerial dining to great heights before an obsession with cost cutting brought it low, and to show how many of the same elements were taken into the space age. It is a fascinating story, and collecting and assembling over a hundred years of data has only been possible with the assistance of many people. Some stories are untold despite my best efforts: the chronicles of airlines that went bankrupt long ago, that did not maintain their archives, or that simply refused to cooperate with any project that did not guarantee them a financial return. A few carriers may not have wanted to chart the decline of their service from prior standards, and one major catering service refused to answer any questions about the past or present logistics of their operation, citing national security. The deficit has been at least partly remedied by retired airline personnel who reminisced about the old days, collectors who saved old menus and other data from obscurity, and air museums that kept original or digital copies of fragile menus and other ephemera.

  I am indebted to many people who searched through dusty archives at airlines and museums to find material that was used in this book. I do not have room for all of them, but wish to particularly thank Marie Force of the Delta Airlines museum in Atlanta, Bob DuBert and Bruce Kitt of the Northwest Airlines Museum, Jon Little of the Seattle Museum of Flight, Dra. Adelina Arezes of the TAP Museum in Portugal, historian Lennart Andersson for information about Scandinavian airlines, Robin Cookson of the National Archives, Mike Lombardi and Tom Lubbesmeyer of the Boeing Corporation Archives, Julie Takata of the SFO Museum, Graham Simons for sharing information about early British airlines, Doug Miller of the Pan Am Historical Foun
dation, M. Kelly Cusack of Everything Pan Am, Misuzu Ohta of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Chris Sloan of Airchive, Peter Elliott of the Royal Air Force Museum, Margaret O’Shaughnessy of the Foynes Flying Boat Museum, Thore Erik Winderen of the SAS Museum in Oslo, George Banks for permission to quote his book, Rob Mulder for permission to quote his book, Professor Gordon Pirie, Sandra Olson of the Waynoka Historical Society, Caroline Foster-Atkins of the Museum of Travel and Transport in Auckland, David Crotty of the Qantas Heritage Museum, Dan Grossman of airships.net for maintaining a magnificent site, Beth Schuster of Marriott for much assistance, Matthew Exline for help dating old images, and Polina Kurovskaya for help with Aeroflot’s history.

  Jane Levi provided invaluable help with information about the history of food in space; anyone who is interested in the subject should read her writings.

  Most importantly, I would like to thank editor Ken Albala for getting me involved in this project in the first place, the long-suffering staff at Rowman & Littlefield for putting up with endless revisions and questions, Sharon Sheffield for assistance with proofreading, indexing, and points of style, and my beloved wife Jace for her comments, suggestions, critiques, and love.

  There was much material that I found while researching this book that had to be cut due to space limitations, wouldn’t reproduce well, or was in video form, so I created a website to display it. That material can be found at AirFoodHistory.com. You can also send questions and comments to me via the e-mail tab on that site.

  Richard Foss

  April 2014

  Introduction

  The First Toast

  On the morning of December 1, 1783, the weather in Paris was sunny and fair, with a light breeze from the east. A giant crowd stared in fascination at a strange contraption—a hydrogen balloon with a wicker basket beneath it. The upper classes watched from the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, while the king, his courtiers, and guests such as Benjamin Franklin enjoyed better views from the upper floors, and the lower classes thronged nearby rooftops.

  A hot air balloon designed by brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier had made the first manned balloon ascent a week before, but the need to have the brazier under the center of the balloon meant that in order to balance the craft, the scientist and the aristocrat who were the first passengers had to stand at opposite sides of the gondola. They were unable to see each other except through a porthole and had to communicate by shouting. The use of hydrogen on this second flight allowed the pilots to share a space where they could consult the scientific instruments they had brought, and write in their journals about the view. They were able to share natural conversations, and more to the point of this book, a beverage.

  Just before the ropes that held the balloon were released, physicist Jacques Charles handed an empty glass to his fellow aeronaut, Nicholas-Louis Robert. At the moment that the balloon was set free, Charles theatrically popped the cork on a bottle of Champagne, filled both glasses, and toasted the crowd. It was the world’s first inflight beverage, and it celebrated a journey that would last two and a half hours but cover only thirty-six kilometers.

  That Champagne toast set a precedent that continues to this day—it was the first of millions of corks to be popped as balloons ascend. That flight was brief, but to Frenchmen of that era it was inconceivable that it not be celebrated with sparkling wine. Later flights would be longer and require sustenance for more than ceremonial reasons, as long-distance records were set and flights of several days became commonplace. Balloons drifted across Europe and vast expanses of America, and one doomed expedition even tried to use one to reach the North Pole.

  A contemporary engraving of the first hydrogen balloon flight in 1783. It’s hard to tell from this image, but they are drinking Champagne up there.

  Image courtesy of Victoria & Albert Museum

  Once motive power was added to the mix and long trips aboard dirigibles and zeppelins became possible, questions of how meals might be served aloft became more urgent. Technologies were developed for cooking safely in an enclosed cabin, lightweight dinnerware and utensils were invented, and infrastructure was created to deal with the unique logistics of the situation. All of these would be put to more extensive use in the era of heavier-than-air craft, and it is no great extension to see the leap to space as a continuous development of those technologies.

  This book will examine food in the air in times of war and peace, including some promotional ideas that were brilliant and others that were almost unparalleled for silliness. It will cover the era when zeppelins loaded provisions from gourmet restaurants, when stewards in flying boats cooked steaks in cramped cabins, and when food scientists worked to bring the taste of home to astronauts and cosmonauts who would dine in zero gravity. It’s a long and fascinating story, and it all started with a bag of gas, two brave men, and a cork that flew from the sky to the earth.

  chapter 1

  The Forerunners

  Lessons from the Balloon Era

  The first people to fly were not doing so for transportation—they were aristocrats, thrill-seekers, and scientists whose sole commonality was that they were from the upper classes. They dressed for flights as they might for an afternoon of riding or walking on their estates, and expected to dine as well aloft as they did at a picnic on the ground. In the early days this sometimes had comical results; when the Italian adventurer Vincenzo Lunardi took off for the first balloon flight in England in 1785, he brought with him cold chicken, wine, and a selection of salads and cheeses. He also, for reasons that have never been explained, brought a cat. Unfortunately his cargo had not been well packed, and the sand that was brought for ballast got mixed with the food. He managed to rescue a leg from the chicken, gave the rest of the bird to the cat, and drank several glasses of wine. Thus sated, he sailed for an hour and a half until he noticed that the cat appeared uncomfortably cold, so he went to a very low altitude to toss the cat to the ground, where it landed safely. He also tossed the corkscrew and empty wine bottle, the sand ballast and spoiled food, and the full set of dinnerware he had brought to eat his lunch, then floated away for another serene half-hour of watching the countryside.

  On Lunardi’s next flight he had booked passengers Colonel George Biggin and Mrs. Letitia Sage, but the balloon turned out not to have enough lifting power for everyone. Faced with the embarrassment of denying his important guests a space, Lunardi let the passengers go without him after giving them brief instructions on how to ascend and descend. Colonel Biggin and Mrs. Sage dined on chicken, ham, and several bottles of Florence wine, throwing the empty bottles over the side without looking to see whether they might injure those below. History has not recorded whether anybody was hurt by these missiles from above, but one gets the distinct impression that the aeronauts didn’t care either way.1

  This was an era of gentlemen-adventurers who dabbled in advancing the frontiers of knowledge. The earliest balloon flights were flown by a mix of daredevils and scientists, and manned flight retained that demographic for some time. Standards needed to be maintained, and even high-altitude research flights were lavishly provisioned. The desire for familiar luxuries eventually led to the first device ever invented to facilitate creating hot meals in an aerial environment.

  In 1835, inventor William Maugham demonstrated a remarkable item to an audience at the London Gallery of Science: a method of heating food without open flame. As the Literary Gazette reported in their January edition,

  The most novel matter was a lecture by Mr. Maugham, on an apparatus for cooking without fire. The experiment was shewn with a tin box, in the centre of which was a drawer, where beefsteaks and eggs were deposited. In the compartments, above and below, lime was placed, and slaked with water. The usual process took place, heat was disengaged, and the victuals were perfectly dressed, without receiving any peculiar flavour or taste from the means employed. . . . The operation took about half an hour.
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  Quicklime, otherwise known as calcium oxide, produces heat by a chemical reaction when combined with water, a fact known for centuries. Anglo-Norman travelers developed a method of cooking in clay pots while on religious pilgrimages as early as the 1200s,2 but the idea seemed to be forgotten until Maugham displayed his apparatus. While not without risk because calcium oxide can explode if not correctly handled, the ability to generate heat without flame was the obvious answer to the problem of cooking directly beneath a highly explosive hydrogen balloon.

  Popping a Champagne cork on launching a balloon was such a tradition by 1885 that this ginger ale company tried to suggest that their beverage would work just as well.

  Image from Library of Congress, public domain

  The first recorded usage of a quicklime stove in flight was the next year, when the balloon Royal Vauxhall set sail on September 9, 1836. Captained by Charles Green, the gigantic balloon set records both for nonstop flying and for quality of food aboard when it set off from southeast London and floated across the English Channel. The balloon traveled overnight, and at dinner that evening there were many puns about the high flavor of the food. Nine people dined on forty pounds of ham, beef, and tongue; forty-five pounds of fowls and preserves; forty pounds of sugar, bread, and biscuits; and two gallons each of sherry, port, and brandy. They also had hot coffee, thanks to a quicklime coffeemaker developed just for the purpose.

  Unfortunately this pioneering invention is not in any museum—as the balloon passed over Belgium in the middle of the night, Captain Green accidentally dropped the coffeemaker overboard. (Perhaps he had been indulging in the brandy.) Since the loss of the coffeemaker meant they wouldn’t need the volatile quicklime any more, he tossed that overboard too. He did attach it to a parachute for the consideration of those below. One wonders what might have happened to this—quicklime can be an explosive if suddenly put in contact with water, and this canister was dropped in the dark and could easily have landed in a lake or river. Any sadness at the loss of coffeemaker and fuel was forgotten the next morning; they landed in Weilburg, Germany, having covered 480 miles in eighteen hours.3