February 10, 2020 • 23 mins
Wait, but how did the food get made in World War II?
In this episode of Service, Navy veteran Ray Boutwell shares how he cooked at a training camp in New Jersey toward the latter part of the war: what equipment they had in the kitchen, what dishes they made regularly, and the difference between ingredients the government supplied and those officers of means could get the cooks to purchase on their own. With government experiments coming into the kitchen, we learn a little about innovation of military cuisine, too!
Ray worked in food service throughout his life, and opened a bakery at ninety-three. This episode is extra fun for cooks and bakers, who might hear themselves in this veteran’s story.
Find photos from this episode of Service and lots of nerdy details behind everything shared in this episode at Robert’s page at www.ServicePodcast.org, where you can also share your Service stories and leave messages for all of the veterans you hear on Service. And we’re always sharing extra audio and nerdy food history on social media - we’re @servicepodcast on Instagram and Facebook.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're tuning into service, Johnny, the strict private first class
that are in stories of hunger and war. They joined
the service. Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember Pearl Harbor, a production
from My Heart Radio. We used to just give these
people the food from our mis kits. You ain't what
you could get, and be thankful well what you will
(00:23):
get in I'm your host. Jacqueline Raposo tracking World War
Two service stories from men across branches. We've heard intimate
descriptions of how military food traveled and how much they
loved or hated this stuff. They used to have something
(00:46):
like brown Hamburger used to call it ship on the
S S O S. And the guys used to you great,
but it was so good on frozen kid dates by
the barrow road, and it's not frozen. We would get
in the good, better or different. So really love the beginning.
Until these guys learned how to cook all the restings.
(01:08):
If they were getting like mutton, that's awful shape, neat,
full of fat, and oh taste terrible. I never want
to eat and I still can't eat this day. Behind
our individual veterans, and they're millions of compatriots where thousands
of officials working to improve combat cuisine across the board,
(01:30):
and the final episode of this season, we're going to
dive deep into the nerdy details of this era's military
food innovation overall. But today we spend time with a
Navy veteran whose story shows us how much the men
working with the food actually cared. Ray about well. Was
a Navy cook stationed in New Jersey towards the latter
(01:51):
part of the war. As we've heard before, and we'll
hear him repeat, the Navy boasted the best food of
all branches, and this was especially true for those docked
state side. Not only were their kitchens not moving from
one place to another, but they were first class. And
by when Ray went in, the military had improved upon
(02:14):
a few elements that had been rocky at the start.
Because before the draft kicked in, the U s. Armed
forces had to only feed around four hundred thousand troops.
Within a few years that number soared to over twelve
million at its peak. It's like asking one friend over
for dinner and then having the entire army football team
(02:34):
showing up. Massive amounts of food are needed quickly and
for a long time, and so that's why we've heard
of farming shortages and ration restrictions for civilians, and repeated
complaints about certain food stuffs that Mutton lost in Hirosaki mentions. Evidently,
mutton meat from a sheep at least two years old
(02:56):
was found on hundreds of menus in the United States
in the early part of the twentieth century, but the
military wasn't a discerning purchaser of the meat needed defeat
at mass, and so the canned stuff that came in
from Australia that was then cooked stateside were repurposed for
sea rations and shipped overseas. Let's just say anecdotes from
both military and food historians put Mutton's fall from grace
(03:18):
in the same blame camp as spam. Neither regained Stateside
popularity post war because g i s had been flooded
with the subpar stuff as a regular food for months
on end, and that orange marmalade Harold bud Long mentioned.
With so many training base camps built in sunny Florida,
the citrus industry boomed there, overtaking California, which we've also
(03:42):
heard was suffering from the lack of interre Japanese workers.
Gallon tins of the stuff were sent to Europe, but
that doesn't mean it was good. So how did needing
to make massive amounts of food shaped the service experience
of one individual wartime cook. Let's slow down and here
(04:02):
a little about this as we spend some time with
Ray Boutwell. My name is Ray Stanley Boutwell. In the Navy,
I became a third class quote. I grew up on
a farm in dang My father's people came here in
(04:27):
sixteen six seveled in Massachusetts. My mother's people came in
sixty They settled in Rhode Island. But the White Ones,
which was my mother's world loyalists, they migrated to Canada
during the revolution. She was born Canadian, came down here
and met my father and I was from a family
(04:50):
of nine boys, so I had eight siblings, no sisters.
Farm life was quite configurating. It talked to respond possibilities.
One of my job was to brand the livestock every
day to be melt, who brought the horses at the
same time each bed. We had a shepherd, so he
(05:11):
heard of the cows. All I had to do is
open the gates. He closed the gates. That was my
main job, and carrying in would the hook still make
sure that my mother had enough wood in the kitchen
the last or all day. My mother baked leven loaves
of bread every other day because she had to pack
(05:31):
seven lunches the average when I was going to school
count my father's lunch, so she had to bake eleven
loads every other day to take care of the lunches.
And what we consumed. We consumed a lot of bread,
We ate a lot of potatoes, and meat was expensive
in those days. We got bacon, we got salt pork.
My dad was about bread from my mother so that
(05:53):
she didn't have to bake on Sunday, Monday school lunch
we had commercial bread. All rest of the time it
was home baked bread. My mother was a fascinated person.
Her mother died when she was only two, and her
grandmother took care of her and taught her cooked on
the time she could stand up and put an apron on.
(06:16):
She cooked on open fire oil stoves. There wasn't any
pipe of hooking utensil that she wasn't familiar with. I
was always interested in what she did in the kitchen
and what she did in the pantry. And I was
probably the only boy that went in and worked with
her probably got in her way. And summertimes she made
(06:39):
ice cream. She would do cupcakes. You do shea cakes
ice and tiamat. We have a treat that way. She
fascinated me because it was the way she produced the
food and the quality of food she produced. It was
a quiet sunday. We had a quiet dinner. We didn't
(07:01):
even turn on a radio. I saw a friend of mine,
he said, did you know that the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?
I said, where's Pearl Harbor? I was a freshman in
high school, old enough to realize what's going to happen,
(07:23):
and it was quite upsetting for my mother and father.
Seven older brothers they all served with two. One was
four f he had a bad leg. The other one
was studying to be a minister and he became a
conscientious objector. But he served as country who worked in
forestry all during the war, so he did his part.
(07:48):
Rationing was something else. Sugar was one of the big things.
Most of us didn't consume that much sugar, so my
dad was able to get enough sugar from whether to
do her baking. There was a lot of things you
could not buy. They didn't ration coiling, but we just
had to find places that were producing going woolf was
(08:09):
taken out pretty much by the government and their heavy
coats and then their stocks at plants. Is because they
stopped manufacturing for the war effort. I enlisted while I
was still in high school because if I waited to
be drafted, I'd have to take what they gave me.
And I wanted to be in a navy. I heard
(08:30):
that the Navy's food was better. I didn't want to
live in a trench. I just thought maybe my living
quartos would be more comfortable. So I was stationed on
a facility station, the Woodbine Naval Air Stations to the
Pomona Air Base in the southern part of New Jersey.
(08:52):
It's about twenty five miles from Cape May. We trained pilots.
We usually had about five squadrons we were training. I
went in late into the war. I was going to
be a toolmaker, but there would be no opening, so
they stuck me in the kitchen and I worked in
the Chief Petty Officers mess. They paid just ten dollars
(09:15):
extra amounts for working in a I was a server.
I took the Chief Petty Officers order of what he
wanted to dinner, called it in the window to the
cook and then to the food to the officers. And
I had time off after breakfast meal after the dinner,
Neil and I didn't waste my time going to the
(09:36):
pool room. I went into the kitchen and helped the
cook and tried to learn something. They had sufficient equipment
to handle whatever the job we needed to complete. We
had reaching freezes, walkings, steam kettle's, We had grills, we
had ovens, the rehearsed class. We had mixed in machines.
(09:57):
We had go dividers. Some of the officers preferred our
food over the food in the officers mess at the
main station. They ate an our mess because they liked
our food better. We were proud of that fact. We
took a lot of pride and how we did the food,
how we presented the food. Most of the stuff that
(10:20):
came in from the general mess would be whatever the
government sent in. I ate in the general mess at
times they had an officer. He was quite innovative. The
food was really exceptional. Te made sure that the men
had met at least once a day. I don't know
how he did it. Sometimes we had fresh vegetables. Most
(10:43):
of the time it was canned, but the chief petty
officers and the commissioned officers, they used their own money.
They would give money to the cook and he would
buy a lot of the stuff local. They had meat
balls in spaghetti. They had lobster once a month, fish,
they had a lot of chicken. The government had experimented
(11:03):
during her thirties and freezing chicken, and we got a
lot of chickens that were frozen as far back as
they just killed the chicken and put it in a
freezing and clean them. We had to do that. It
didn't seem to be freeze and burned. They must have
did flash freezing. But we used chicken that was frozen.
(11:25):
Ten years later, a lot of people were literally about
eating frozen chicken. I took one frozen chicken to my
mother in law. I had extra frozen chicken. We want
to spot. I didn't know it until years later. She
would not cook it. She gave it to her daughter,
and her daughter said it was the listos. Meat is
(11:51):
always the most expensive aspect of any menu item, right,
and this holds true for military foods too, and so
freezing meat was actually a government experiment before the nineteen
thirties feeding troops for the Spanish American War, in meat
was transported dangling whole carcass in refrigerated cars for those serving.
(12:14):
At the start of World War One. In nineteen seventeen,
future spam In mentor and Army Lieutenant J. Hormel worked
with the government to set up the first boxed beef
processing plant. They're hacked up, plumped together, frozen and shipped meat.
Bricks took up sixty less space, removed of their fat,
bones and cartilage, and wage twenty five percent less. But
(12:36):
you know how it goes when you put anything together
in a bag and stick it in your freezer. Right
later you have to hack and ship away. This made
for not pretty meat when it got to military cooks
in France and so yes. By the nineteen thirties we
had figured out how to separate and flash freeze meat,
freezing cuts of meat with extremely low temperatures to make
(12:58):
for smaller ice crystals that when a thought left relatively
fresh seeming need behind. I couldn't find stats about chicken,
but the book Combat Ready Kitchen reports that twenty nine
million cattle were sacrificed for troops between nine and ninety alone.
When we return, we'll hear about Ray transitioning from military
(13:20):
service cooking to hospitality service cooking. Stay with us. You're
(13:47):
listening to service that are in stories of hunger and
war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacqueline Roposo and we're
with Ray Boutwell at a facility station off of the
Pomona Air Base outside of Atlantic City. It's mind boggling
to think of days that shift the weight distribution of
the world. December seven, ninety one snatched over sixteen million
(14:11):
American men from their schools, farms, factories, and families and
plunge them into woolen uniforms and trenches and submarines and
gunnery shacks. August fifteenth n forced the millions of women
who had patriotically flooded the workforce back into their kitchens
and closets because fifteen point seven million men were coming home,
(14:36):
and almost everyone remembered what it was like to have
little in the jobless Great Depression years they barely survived.
A Gallop poll released in July of nineteen forty four
reported that fifty percent of Americans expected unemployment would settle
between fourteen percent and thirty four percent. Post war, the
(14:56):
U S. Labor Department projected twenty five people were afraid
of Hitler and hero Hito, but of hunger too, so
as President Roosevelt, and so in June of that same
year he signed the g I Belt, promising five million
dollars for the creation of veterans facilities, unemployment compensation, job
(15:17):
placement aid, and the education rates and stipends. We heard
our William Walker mentioned in his episode what About Ray,
Let's head back to the summer of and continue along.
(15:40):
Good evening, everybody. This is Lyle ran with a six
o'clock report from the NBC News Roll and presented by
Planters Mixed Nuts. In the headlines, the Allies are discussing
Japan's offer of surrender provided they can keep their emperor.
No indication from official courses on whether Hirohito mcgoll premature
celebrations around the world. They played the station that when
(16:00):
the Japanese surrendered. When I was sent back for air base,
I became a third class cook. As a cook, you
had to be a butcher as well as a cook.
You had to know how to butcher, you had to
know how to bake. Because nineteen six people were being discharged,
and all the experienced cooks that had service time, they
(16:22):
were the ones that got out first, and we were
short of qualified cooks, maybe granted very initient kitchen the
U King. I just studied hard and made up my
mind I was going to learn to do this stuff right.
So I had no problems. We had very good food there.
(16:43):
I was taught with the first entree that you served,
you put everything you can into it, because that sets
the impression of the medal. So I usually started off
with the soup. That was the first thing I served
the offices was my sup and then we made a
role to go along with it. We made chicken needle soup.
(17:04):
We made a six or eight different kinds of soup.
Vegetable soup was one of the popular ones that I
really like to make because it's so diverse, all these
different vegetables. Sometimes we use the chicken stocks, sometimes we
use the stock. Be stop seemed to be the more favorite.
Of course, we try to do the best we could
(17:25):
in every other part of the food, but your first
serving and the dessert, we put all we could into
that because the first impression and the last impression is
what really puts the meal over if you've got a dessert,
they really like. You got a soup that they just
want to eat more of. We've had officers they would
(17:47):
order two bowls of soup, take our dessert, and they
wouldn't order anything out. We really could a lot into
the First force in the last Force. So I take
great pride in what I know. I did not just
cook it and put it out. And I tasted everything
I cooked. I don't let it go out unless this
(18:07):
is going to pass. I tasted it, flavored it. I'm
not a big person on spices. I'm so used to
how my mother bay playing simple food. If you're making
a cake, you want it to taste like a cake,
you will make any doughnut you want it to day
is like a doughnut. When I got done cooking, I
never sat down and an eight a meal because if
(18:29):
I made biscuits. So if I made something, I had
eaten so much of the food by just tasting it
that I was not hunger or did you survived? You
had to go a hundred and ten percent rather than
a hundred percent that just rubbed off under me. I
(18:52):
was discharged on the fifth of July and cooking and
the civilian a short thing for me. I went to
Cookson Baker School. When I got out. When I graduated,
placement officers that I qualified as a freight coach, and
he sent me to a hotel in Atlantic City for
(19:13):
an interview for a job. We discussed different things. Then
it came to hours. He said, you would come in
at ten o'clock in the morning, you work until noon,
and then you have two hours off. You'll come back
at two. So I called my wife and I said
that will work be ten more hours. I'll be away
(19:33):
from home fourteen hours. In no way am I taking
a job like that. From that day on, I was
going to be a baker still in their food business.
I liked it, and that's how come I became a baker.
Ray got married to his wartime sweetheart Rosanna as soon
(19:56):
as the war ended, and they had one child. He
worked in bakeries consistently until they took over their own
bakery on their anniversary in nine two, making miniature pastries, cookies,
and two versions of a beloved local Philadelphia butter cake
that I promised to tell you more about another time.
(20:16):
He closed the bakery after eighteen years to retire, meaning
he soon got bored and helped other bakeries out. Rosanna
passed a few years ago. Ray was painting portraits, but
was a little bored and a little depressed, and so
he did what any ninety three year old would do.
He opened another bakery, Raised Boozy Cupcakes in Vorheese, New Jersey,
(20:38):
currently offers Valentine specials like the Runaway Bride with vodka
Kalua and raspberry liqueur, and the Love Potion, a coconut
cream liqueur cake with amoretto and de Gannash filling his
next project, opening Caroline's Boozy ice Cream next door, as
a tribute to his mother, who started it all. I
(21:00):
just want people to know that I try to give
him the best product that I can produce, will not
let them down. I enjoy all the relationship that I
have with a customer. A man came into the store
and he says, I saw you on television this morning.
His wife came out and he said, we're going to
go for a ride today and she says, where are
(21:22):
we going. He says, We're going to New Jersey. She
says that's six hours away. They lived in Boston. They
came in the store, they took pictures with me. They
bought a dozen Boosy cupcakes and drove back to Boston.
I was really humbled and honored that somebody would do that.
(21:44):
I'm I'm proud of the fact that I was able
to serve. I hope they lived to be a d
ten and I accomplished what I set out to do.
You can find more of race story and links to
raise Boozy cupcakes at Service podcast dot org. In our
next episode, we spend time with sister Melanie Cambick, an
(22:05):
Army nurse turned none who shares how her immigrant childhood
left her with an adversion to cabbage and her work
as one of the Peanut, Butter and Jelly Brigade until then.
Service as a production from My Heart Radio, where Gabrielle
Collins is our supervising producer and Christopher hasciotis our executive producer.
I produced an engineered this episode with Stevebpkin as the
(22:25):
on site engineer, with Ray. Thank you for subscribing to
and rating Service on your favorite platform after you listen,
and don't forget that you can send a message to
all of the veterans you here on this show at
a form at Service podcast dot org. Most of all,
thank you to those serving and those who have served
(23:00):
six
You're tuning into service, Johnny, the strict private first class
that are in stories of hunger and war. They joined
the service. Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember Pearl Harbor, a production
from My Heart Radio. We used to just give these
people the food from our mis kits. You ain't what
you could get, and be thankful well what you will
(00:23):
get in I'm your host. Jacqueline Raposo tracking World War
Two service stories from men across branches. We've heard intimate
descriptions of how military food traveled and how much they
loved or hated this stuff. They used to have something
(00:46):
like brown Hamburger used to call it ship on the
S S O S. And the guys used to you great,
but it was so good on frozen kid dates by
the barrow road, and it's not frozen. We would get
in the good, better or different. So really love the beginning.
Until these guys learned how to cook all the restings.
(01:08):
If they were getting like mutton, that's awful shape, neat,
full of fat, and oh taste terrible. I never want
to eat and I still can't eat this day. Behind
our individual veterans, and they're millions of compatriots where thousands
of officials working to improve combat cuisine across the board,
(01:30):
and the final episode of this season, we're going to
dive deep into the nerdy details of this era's military
food innovation overall. But today we spend time with a
Navy veteran whose story shows us how much the men
working with the food actually cared. Ray about well. Was
a Navy cook stationed in New Jersey towards the latter
(01:51):
part of the war. As we've heard before, and we'll
hear him repeat, the Navy boasted the best food of
all branches, and this was especially true for those docked
state side. Not only were their kitchens not moving from
one place to another, but they were first class. And
by when Ray went in, the military had improved upon
(02:14):
a few elements that had been rocky at the start.
Because before the draft kicked in, the U s. Armed
forces had to only feed around four hundred thousand troops.
Within a few years that number soared to over twelve
million at its peak. It's like asking one friend over
for dinner and then having the entire army football team
(02:34):
showing up. Massive amounts of food are needed quickly and
for a long time, and so that's why we've heard
of farming shortages and ration restrictions for civilians, and repeated
complaints about certain food stuffs that Mutton lost in Hirosaki mentions. Evidently,
mutton meat from a sheep at least two years old
(02:56):
was found on hundreds of menus in the United States
in the early part of the twentieth century, but the
military wasn't a discerning purchaser of the meat needed defeat
at mass, and so the canned stuff that came in
from Australia that was then cooked stateside were repurposed for
sea rations and shipped overseas. Let's just say anecdotes from
both military and food historians put Mutton's fall from grace
(03:18):
in the same blame camp as spam. Neither regained Stateside
popularity post war because g i s had been flooded
with the subpar stuff as a regular food for months
on end, and that orange marmalade Harold bud Long mentioned.
With so many training base camps built in sunny Florida,
the citrus industry boomed there, overtaking California, which we've also
(03:42):
heard was suffering from the lack of interre Japanese workers.
Gallon tins of the stuff were sent to Europe, but
that doesn't mean it was good. So how did needing
to make massive amounts of food shaped the service experience
of one individual wartime cook. Let's slow down and here
(04:02):
a little about this as we spend some time with
Ray Boutwell. My name is Ray Stanley Boutwell. In the Navy,
I became a third class quote. I grew up on
a farm in dang My father's people came here in
(04:27):
sixteen six seveled in Massachusetts. My mother's people came in
sixty They settled in Rhode Island. But the White Ones,
which was my mother's world loyalists, they migrated to Canada
during the revolution. She was born Canadian, came down here
and met my father and I was from a family
(04:50):
of nine boys, so I had eight siblings, no sisters.
Farm life was quite configurating. It talked to respond possibilities.
One of my job was to brand the livestock every
day to be melt, who brought the horses at the
same time each bed. We had a shepherd, so he
(05:11):
heard of the cows. All I had to do is
open the gates. He closed the gates. That was my
main job, and carrying in would the hook still make
sure that my mother had enough wood in the kitchen
the last or all day. My mother baked leven loaves
of bread every other day because she had to pack
(05:31):
seven lunches the average when I was going to school
count my father's lunch, so she had to bake eleven
loads every other day to take care of the lunches.
And what we consumed. We consumed a lot of bread,
We ate a lot of potatoes, and meat was expensive
in those days. We got bacon, we got salt pork.
My dad was about bread from my mother so that
(05:53):
she didn't have to bake on Sunday, Monday school lunch
we had commercial bread. All rest of the time it
was home baked bread. My mother was a fascinated person.
Her mother died when she was only two, and her
grandmother took care of her and taught her cooked on
the time she could stand up and put an apron on.
(06:16):
She cooked on open fire oil stoves. There wasn't any
pipe of hooking utensil that she wasn't familiar with. I
was always interested in what she did in the kitchen
and what she did in the pantry. And I was
probably the only boy that went in and worked with
her probably got in her way. And summertimes she made
(06:39):
ice cream. She would do cupcakes. You do shea cakes
ice and tiamat. We have a treat that way. She
fascinated me because it was the way she produced the
food and the quality of food she produced. It was
a quiet sunday. We had a quiet dinner. We didn't
(07:01):
even turn on a radio. I saw a friend of mine,
he said, did you know that the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?
I said, where's Pearl Harbor? I was a freshman in
high school, old enough to realize what's going to happen,
(07:23):
and it was quite upsetting for my mother and father.
Seven older brothers they all served with two. One was
four f he had a bad leg. The other one
was studying to be a minister and he became a
conscientious objector. But he served as country who worked in
forestry all during the war, so he did his part.
(07:48):
Rationing was something else. Sugar was one of the big things.
Most of us didn't consume that much sugar, so my
dad was able to get enough sugar from whether to
do her baking. There was a lot of things you
could not buy. They didn't ration coiling, but we just
had to find places that were producing going woolf was
(08:09):
taken out pretty much by the government and their heavy
coats and then their stocks at plants. Is because they
stopped manufacturing for the war effort. I enlisted while I
was still in high school because if I waited to
be drafted, I'd have to take what they gave me.
And I wanted to be in a navy. I heard
(08:30):
that the Navy's food was better. I didn't want to
live in a trench. I just thought maybe my living
quartos would be more comfortable. So I was stationed on
a facility station, the Woodbine Naval Air Stations to the
Pomona Air Base in the southern part of New Jersey.
(08:52):
It's about twenty five miles from Cape May. We trained pilots.
We usually had about five squadrons we were training. I
went in late into the war. I was going to
be a toolmaker, but there would be no opening, so
they stuck me in the kitchen and I worked in
the Chief Petty Officers mess. They paid just ten dollars
(09:15):
extra amounts for working in a I was a server.
I took the Chief Petty Officers order of what he
wanted to dinner, called it in the window to the
cook and then to the food to the officers. And
I had time off after breakfast meal after the dinner,
Neil and I didn't waste my time going to the
(09:36):
pool room. I went into the kitchen and helped the
cook and tried to learn something. They had sufficient equipment
to handle whatever the job we needed to complete. We
had reaching freezes, walkings, steam kettle's, We had grills, we
had ovens, the rehearsed class. We had mixed in machines.
(09:57):
We had go dividers. Some of the officers preferred our
food over the food in the officers mess at the
main station. They ate an our mess because they liked
our food better. We were proud of that fact. We
took a lot of pride and how we did the food,
how we presented the food. Most of the stuff that
(10:20):
came in from the general mess would be whatever the
government sent in. I ate in the general mess at
times they had an officer. He was quite innovative. The
food was really exceptional. Te made sure that the men
had met at least once a day. I don't know
how he did it. Sometimes we had fresh vegetables. Most
(10:43):
of the time it was canned, but the chief petty
officers and the commissioned officers, they used their own money.
They would give money to the cook and he would
buy a lot of the stuff local. They had meat
balls in spaghetti. They had lobster once a month, fish,
they had a lot of chicken. The government had experimented
(11:03):
during her thirties and freezing chicken, and we got a
lot of chickens that were frozen as far back as
they just killed the chicken and put it in a
freezing and clean them. We had to do that. It
didn't seem to be freeze and burned. They must have
did flash freezing. But we used chicken that was frozen.
(11:25):
Ten years later, a lot of people were literally about
eating frozen chicken. I took one frozen chicken to my
mother in law. I had extra frozen chicken. We want
to spot. I didn't know it until years later. She
would not cook it. She gave it to her daughter,
and her daughter said it was the listos. Meat is
(11:51):
always the most expensive aspect of any menu item, right,
and this holds true for military foods too, and so
freezing meat was actually a government experiment before the nineteen
thirties feeding troops for the Spanish American War, in meat
was transported dangling whole carcass in refrigerated cars for those serving.
(12:14):
At the start of World War One. In nineteen seventeen,
future spam In mentor and Army Lieutenant J. Hormel worked
with the government to set up the first boxed beef
processing plant. They're hacked up, plumped together, frozen and shipped meat.
Bricks took up sixty less space, removed of their fat,
bones and cartilage, and wage twenty five percent less. But
(12:36):
you know how it goes when you put anything together
in a bag and stick it in your freezer. Right
later you have to hack and ship away. This made
for not pretty meat when it got to military cooks
in France and so yes. By the nineteen thirties we
had figured out how to separate and flash freeze meat,
freezing cuts of meat with extremely low temperatures to make
(12:58):
for smaller ice crystals that when a thought left relatively
fresh seeming need behind. I couldn't find stats about chicken,
but the book Combat Ready Kitchen reports that twenty nine
million cattle were sacrificed for troops between nine and ninety alone.
When we return, we'll hear about Ray transitioning from military
(13:20):
service cooking to hospitality service cooking. Stay with us. You're
(13:47):
listening to service that are in stories of hunger and
war from my Heart Radio. I'm Jacqueline Roposo and we're
with Ray Boutwell at a facility station off of the
Pomona Air Base outside of Atlantic City. It's mind boggling
to think of days that shift the weight distribution of
the world. December seven, ninety one snatched over sixteen million
(14:11):
American men from their schools, farms, factories, and families and
plunge them into woolen uniforms and trenches and submarines and
gunnery shacks. August fifteenth n forced the millions of women
who had patriotically flooded the workforce back into their kitchens
and closets because fifteen point seven million men were coming home,
(14:36):
and almost everyone remembered what it was like to have
little in the jobless Great Depression years they barely survived.
A Gallop poll released in July of nineteen forty four
reported that fifty percent of Americans expected unemployment would settle
between fourteen percent and thirty four percent. Post war, the
(14:56):
U S. Labor Department projected twenty five people were afraid
of Hitler and hero Hito, but of hunger too, so
as President Roosevelt, and so in June of that same
year he signed the g I Belt, promising five million
dollars for the creation of veterans facilities, unemployment compensation, job
(15:17):
placement aid, and the education rates and stipends. We heard
our William Walker mentioned in his episode what About Ray,
Let's head back to the summer of and continue along.
(15:40):
Good evening, everybody. This is Lyle ran with a six
o'clock report from the NBC News Roll and presented by
Planters Mixed Nuts. In the headlines, the Allies are discussing
Japan's offer of surrender provided they can keep their emperor.
No indication from official courses on whether Hirohito mcgoll premature
celebrations around the world. They played the station that when
(16:00):
the Japanese surrendered. When I was sent back for air base,
I became a third class cook. As a cook, you
had to be a butcher as well as a cook.
You had to know how to butcher, you had to
know how to bake. Because nineteen six people were being discharged,
and all the experienced cooks that had service time, they
(16:22):
were the ones that got out first, and we were
short of qualified cooks, maybe granted very initient kitchen the
U King. I just studied hard and made up my
mind I was going to learn to do this stuff right.
So I had no problems. We had very good food there.
(16:43):
I was taught with the first entree that you served,
you put everything you can into it, because that sets
the impression of the medal. So I usually started off
with the soup. That was the first thing I served
the offices was my sup and then we made a
role to go along with it. We made chicken needle soup.
(17:04):
We made a six or eight different kinds of soup.
Vegetable soup was one of the popular ones that I
really like to make because it's so diverse, all these
different vegetables. Sometimes we use the chicken stocks, sometimes we
use the stock. Be stop seemed to be the more favorite.
Of course, we try to do the best we could
(17:25):
in every other part of the food, but your first
serving and the dessert, we put all we could into
that because the first impression and the last impression is
what really puts the meal over if you've got a dessert,
they really like. You got a soup that they just
want to eat more of. We've had officers they would
(17:47):
order two bowls of soup, take our dessert, and they
wouldn't order anything out. We really could a lot into
the First force in the last Force. So I take
great pride in what I know. I did not just
cook it and put it out. And I tasted everything
I cooked. I don't let it go out unless this
(18:07):
is going to pass. I tasted it, flavored it. I'm
not a big person on spices. I'm so used to
how my mother bay playing simple food. If you're making
a cake, you want it to taste like a cake,
you will make any doughnut you want it to day
is like a doughnut. When I got done cooking, I
never sat down and an eight a meal because if
(18:29):
I made biscuits. So if I made something, I had
eaten so much of the food by just tasting it
that I was not hunger or did you survived? You
had to go a hundred and ten percent rather than
a hundred percent that just rubbed off under me. I
(18:52):
was discharged on the fifth of July and cooking and
the civilian a short thing for me. I went to
Cookson Baker School. When I got out. When I graduated,
placement officers that I qualified as a freight coach, and
he sent me to a hotel in Atlantic City for
(19:13):
an interview for a job. We discussed different things. Then
it came to hours. He said, you would come in
at ten o'clock in the morning, you work until noon,
and then you have two hours off. You'll come back
at two. So I called my wife and I said
that will work be ten more hours. I'll be away
(19:33):
from home fourteen hours. In no way am I taking
a job like that. From that day on, I was
going to be a baker still in their food business.
I liked it, and that's how come I became a baker.
Ray got married to his wartime sweetheart Rosanna as soon
(19:56):
as the war ended, and they had one child. He
worked in bakeries consistently until they took over their own
bakery on their anniversary in nine two, making miniature pastries, cookies,
and two versions of a beloved local Philadelphia butter cake
that I promised to tell you more about another time.
(20:16):
He closed the bakery after eighteen years to retire, meaning
he soon got bored and helped other bakeries out. Rosanna
passed a few years ago. Ray was painting portraits, but
was a little bored and a little depressed, and so
he did what any ninety three year old would do.
He opened another bakery, Raised Boozy Cupcakes in Vorheese, New Jersey,
(20:38):
currently offers Valentine specials like the Runaway Bride with vodka
Kalua and raspberry liqueur, and the Love Potion, a coconut
cream liqueur cake with amoretto and de Gannash filling his
next project, opening Caroline's Boozy ice Cream next door, as
a tribute to his mother, who started it all. I
(21:00):
just want people to know that I try to give
him the best product that I can produce, will not
let them down. I enjoy all the relationship that I
have with a customer. A man came into the store
and he says, I saw you on television this morning.
His wife came out and he said, we're going to
go for a ride today and she says, where are
(21:22):
we going. He says, We're going to New Jersey. She
says that's six hours away. They lived in Boston. They
came in the store, they took pictures with me. They
bought a dozen Boosy cupcakes and drove back to Boston.
I was really humbled and honored that somebody would do that.
(21:44):
I'm I'm proud of the fact that I was able
to serve. I hope they lived to be a d
ten and I accomplished what I set out to do.
You can find more of race story and links to
raise Boozy cupcakes at Service podcast dot org. In our
next episode, we spend time with sister Melanie Cambick, an
(22:05):
Army nurse turned none who shares how her immigrant childhood
left her with an adversion to cabbage and her work
as one of the Peanut, Butter and Jelly Brigade until then.
Service as a production from My Heart Radio, where Gabrielle
Collins is our supervising producer and Christopher hasciotis our executive producer.
I produced an engineered this episode with Stevebpkin as the
(22:25):
on site engineer, with Ray. Thank you for subscribing to
and rating Service on your favorite platform after you listen,
and don't forget that you can send a message to
all of the veterans you here on this show at
a form at Service podcast dot org. Most of all,
thank you to those serving and those who have served
(23:00):
six
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