Eating on a German U-Boat in WW1

Last week we looked at what it was like to  dine aboard The Lusitania the ocean liner  

that was sunk by a German torpedo during  World War I.

Well this week I'm going to look at what the men in the U-boat that actually fired that torpedo were eating  

perhaps something like this 1915 German recipe for sauerkraut soup.

So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as we dive and dine in a World War I U-boat

this time on Tasting History.

There are numerous cookbooks from Germany written during World War I that are filled with recipes specifically for wartime.

Many were written for those on the homefront others for those in the trenches,

and while I couldn't find one specifically written for the Imperial Navy

I thought that this cookbook 'Kriegs Kochbuch' or War Cookbook would fit the brief,  

especially because it was published in 1915  which was the year that Lusitania was sunk  

and since it was published fairly early on in  the war, the war started in 1914,  

it's before the really terrible food shortages hit Germany.

That said the recipes in it are still rather basic,  

and so many of them would only include ingredients  that you could find on a German U-boat

like this recipe for sauerkrautsuppe which actually just says to follow the previous recipe for pickle soup but use sauerkraut.

So subbing sauerkraut for pickles the recipe says

"The fat and flour are whisked and the water is slowly added.

When the soup has simmered, the sauerkraut is added. Salt and vinegar are added to the soup and seasoned." 

Very basic. Now what's a little frustrating is while the recipe gives exact amounts for the water,

for the the fat or we're going to use butter and the flour,

it doesn't tell you exactly how much sauerkraut to use

so we're going to just kind of have to guess at that and that's kind of an issue with a lot of old recipes,

they tend to leave out some very important- important things.

Not an issue with the well-written recipes from today's sponsor Hellofresh.

Hellofresh delivers fresh ingredients right to your door so you can easily follow their chef-crafted recipes.  

And with 45 weekly recipes there is something for everyone

and I love that all of the ingredients arrive pre-portioned so you don't have to worry about a lot of prep work,

and there's no question about how much of an ingredient to actually use.

Also it makes it so there are no leftover ingredients  that are just going to go bad sitting in your fridge.

I particularly enjoy their line of quick and easy meals for the chef who doesn't have a lot of time in their hands,

like this recipe for pork sausage rigatoni rosa. Easy to prepare  

and absolutely delicious especially when you  follow it up with dessert.

Though I actually ate my lemon berry bundt cake this morning for breakfast and I am not going to apologize for that.  

And right now when you sign up for Hellofresh using  my link in the description and use code TASTINGHISTORYSWEET  

you will get free dessert for life. That is one free dessert in every box while your subscription is active.

So TASTINGHISTORYSWEET at hellofresh.com for free dessert for life.

I definitely recommend that lemon berry bundt cake, it  really was quite good.

Now unfortunately they did not have lemon berry bundt cake aboard a German U-boat during World War I

so if you want to eat like they did then what you're going to need is 2 tablespoons of butter or other fat,

4 tablespoons or 30 grams of flour, 1 and 1/2 liters of water, 1 to 2 tablespoons of vinegar, some salt, and 2 to 3 cups of sauerkraut.

Like I said they didn't tell you how much sauerkraut to use  so I'm using quite a bit

because otherwise it's really just thickened water um but it's kind of up to you,

and probably depending on what period of the war you're in.

Now they would have had all of these ingredients aboard a U-boat, at least at the beginning of of any mission

because over time many of the perishable ingredients would would go bad and so

they wouldn't have those for much of the mission but let's pretend we're at the beginning of a voyage and we still have butter. 

So the first thing you want to do is melt that butter the recipe actually doesn't specify butter it just says fat

but they did often have butter aboard the ship so that's what I'm using.

So once it's melted add the flour and whisk it together you're essentially making a roux here,

though typically a roux is a 1:1 ratio this is a a 1:2 ratio

basically half the fat as usual and the only thing I can think is that even at the beginning of the war

they were rationing things like butter so maybe that's what makes this a wartime cookbook.  

Either way keep whisking it together for 3 or  4 minutes or until it turns a golden brown.  

Then slowly add add the water whisking to get the roux to dissolve.

Once it's all dissolved into the water let it come to a simmer and once simmering add in the sauerkraut.

Stir it all together and then let it return to a simmer, and let it simmer for about 15 minutes which should be

plenty of time to go back to 1915 and see what other kind of provisions they would have on a German U-boat. 

During World War I German U-boats which stands for unterseeboot or unders sea boats were rather varied,

and evolved quite a bit in the four years of conflict. In 1914  they only had 20 working subs most of which were powered by kerosene

but by the end of the war they had made over 350 diesel powered U-boats.

They still had a lot of variation but an average vessel like  U20 the U-boat that sank The Lusitania

was 210 feet long, 20 feet wide and 27 feet tall.

Now with a crew of 36 you would think that that's plenty of room for everyone on the boat but it turns out most of the space is not actually livable,

a fair amount of the space is given over to large tanks that would flood with seawater when diving,

and then the ends of the boat were home to the torpedoes. There were seven torpedoes in all

that would shoot from two tubes at the bow and two at the stern.

Then there was the engine room which had two 850 horsepower diesel engines and tanks for 76 tons of diesel fuel,

and two 600 horsepower electric engines with massive batteries which were used when the U-boat was submerged.

This left precious little room for actual living, there was of course the captain's quarters and then the control room  

and then there was a small area for the wireless  operator and bunks for all of the crew.

And almost as an afterthought there was a rather small kitchen and two mess areas one for the crew and one for the officers.

The question is where does the food that's going to get cooked in that kitchen actually gets stored?

And the answer is everywhere,

before leaving Germany a U-boat was laden down with sausages, fresh meat, potatoes, flour, eggs, butter, milk, coffee, sugar, tea, salted fish,

peas, bacon, and a lot of canned meat, vegetables and  fruits and bread.

It was stuffed under bunks, hung from pipes overhead, stuffed in the latrine, or if it was perishable like the vegetables and milk 

it would actually be kept in the ammunition room  because that room they wisely kept much cooler than the rest of the sub.

Unfortunately while that might work in the North Sea in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic

even that room just was not cool enough so they didn't get to carry around a lot of the prized ingredients.

"In the heat of summer, carrying meat with us was out of the question.  

That made eggs all the more desirable. Once we  had no eggs for a whole month,

and vegetables and macaroni were our most substantial dishes.

Now a crew of fighting men need better food than that."

And even in the cold of the North Sea you would only have those perishable goods for the first 10 days of any mission,

after that they would usually go bad so the vast majority of the food on board

was pickled, or dried, or canned. And even some of those more shelf stable foods  

would not fare very well on a submarine because  in a submarine it was like a tropical jungle.  

The temperature could get up to 100° and it was very  poorly ventilated.

This was especially bad when the boat was submerged which it didn't spend that much time typically underwater

but it didn't take very long to to get all sweaty and gross in there especially

because the heat on the inside of the sub and the cold water on the outside of the sub would kind of hit each other and form condensation

all on the walls of the inside of the sub which they called U-boat sweat.

This created the perfect conditions for mold. Mold was on their clothes, it was on their blankets, in their shoes, 

and of course it would grow on their food. Add to  this the fact that even with the ventilation 

there was always a little bit of diesel fumes inside of  the sub and that would mix with the condensation  

and create little oil slicks on the top of their  soup and their coffee,

and that's gross and I'm not going to be doing that for for today's soup, no oil.

So 10 days into what was typically a month-long patrol and they were starting to run out of of all the good food and

their other food would have like oil and mold on it, you you'd think these people would go mad.

Well in 1928 the author Lowell Thomas interviewed a number of officers from different U-boats

and put their thoughts down in a book called 'Raiders of the Deep' and in there the commander of U64 says

"Food, ah that is always, the great problem in a submarine on a long voyage that interminable diet of canned stuff,

with peas and bacon as the pièce de de resistance, becomes unbearable.

Since then I've never been able to look at a pea in the face. As for the bacon,

on that point I'll be a Mohammedan to the end of my days."  

Though sometimes even if the food was nothing to  write home about the meal itself was worth being remembered

as Lieutenant Rudolph Zentner recalled  of his first Christmas at war aboard U20

which was the U-boat that sunk The Lusitania.  

"The tiny mess room was decorated in style. A green wreath hung at one end as a Christmas tree.

We didn't have any lighted candles on it they would have been too risky in the oil reeking interior of a submarine.

The tables were loaded with food. It all came out of cans, but we didn't mind that.

That one night officers and men had their mess together. It was rather close quarters.

We had a crew of four officers and thirty-two men. We were all in our leather submarine suits.  

It was no dress affair. No stiff bosoms, no coattails. No fish and soup as you call them.

In short, there were many drawbacks, but good spirits were not one of them. In the tight, overcrowded little mess room we ate and talked.

The dinner was washed down with tea mixed with rum, and I lost count of the number of toasts that were drunk."

But sadly every day can't be Christmas so most of the time when the food was crummy

so was the crew, and so it was up to the crew to figure out other ways to get quality food on board their boat.

U19 after a long cruise in the North Sea came upon one of the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland. 

This island was known to be uninhabited by people but chalk full of goats so

"A party went ashore with rifles. The hunt for wild goats was a thing to delight a sportsman's heart.

They accumulated a good buck and returned to the boat.

That day there was a magnificent feast of roast goat aboard a U-boat in the sub-Arctic."  

But there are only so many goat-filled islands to go hunting on so more often the U-boats had to rely on the spoils of war

especially following the sinking of The Lusitania and a promise to allow crews off their ships before they sunk.

U-boats would plunder merchant ships for whatever food they had before sinking the ship.

This would often lead to their pantries full to bursting but that would make it difficult to control the men.

"It used to be no uncommon sight to see sailors of the submarine service going home on leave loaded down 

with parcels of sugar, bacon, ham, and so on, which represented stuff taken from prizes -

very welcome presents for their families, which were bearing the rigors of Germany's wartime shortage."

The men would often get to enjoy the spoils of war but this was only after the officers had had taken their fair share.

Robert Moraht who was the commander of U64

used to usually dine in the officer's mess but when there were special ingredients coming aboard

he would test them out in his room.

"There would be a cloth spread on my desk, while Haupt brought me coffee, hard bread, marmalade, and a pancake baked on the electric stove.  

The marmalade was a luxury. I remember to this day a  heaven-sent ship that I sunk

on which we found enough marmalade to last for six months. No, I shall never forget that ship."

This same commander had a lot to say about the food on the U-boat as well as the cook on the U-boat, a man named Miedtank

and he says that had Miedtank had quality ingredients  he probably would have been a fine cook but as it was

his food was not very good because of the ingredients,  

and the men would make fun of Miedtank for this but Miedtank was very sensitive and would take it to heart, 

and so he was always threatening to to get a transfer to another boat where he would be appreciated,

and so the commander would have to give him all these false compliments just to to calm him down. He'd say,

"Miedtank... you ought to see what I wrote to my wife this morning. I told her that those pancakes you cooked for me were absolutely delicious.

And I told her also that there never was such bacon and peas as you make."  

He says on one occasion the cook was so upset that  the only way to placate him was to promise him the opportunity

to earn an Iron Cross, the medal that the military gave out but that was typically for for combat stuff, not for cooking.

So one day when they were having a firefight on deck he had me tank taking ammunition up and down the stairs,

and he did so for quite some time and with some aplomb

and so he used that as a pretext to put him in for an Iron Cross which he got so

the cook aboard the U-boat got an Iron Cross now while it was always the goal to plunder these ships for  

the choicest ingredients before actually sinking  them it wasn't always practical as Lieutenant Zentner explained

"A U-boat cannot always venture to send a boarding crew on a prize and snatch a bit of fresh meat and vegetables.

We had to content ourselves with canned stuff, dried stuff, and hard tack,

and on long cruises the fare sometimes became intolerable I remember one occasion when we became positively desperate

for a decent bite to eat. We managed to capture a fine hogshead of butter.

For a couple days we piled butter on our hardtack and thought it delicious.

Everybody said that the butter would do well for cooking only we didn't have anything decent to cook with it.  

The sailors positively sang a chorus: 'If only we had something to fry in the butter."

Well as nice nice as it is to spread a bunch of butter on hard keks,

[clack clack]

the German word for hard attack they were definitely on the scout for something to cook in this butter and so they happened upon some French fishing boats,

and they submerged and went in between the boats and then they surfaced and  

Lieutenant Zentner says that- the fishermen  probably thought that they were about to be killed  

but then started laughing and cheering when they found out that the only thing the Germans wanted was some of their fish.

"We crammed our boat with fish, fine big fellows - bonitos - with a pinkish meat...

And now there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sauteed in butter, all that we could eat."

Now it wasn't just fish and butter that  they were bringing aboard their U-boats because after  

they made this promise to allow the passengers  and crew of merchant ships to get off into their lifeboats

before blowing up the ship. They would  often have to take some of these passengers and crew

onto the U-boat because if they were out in the middle of the Atlantic they couldn't just leave them out there.

Now I'm sure there was a lot of variation in how these people were were treated usually as prisoners,

but there are some stories of like one German cook on a U-boat made a little girl a cake

with some canned fruit and whipped cream and then

there was an American boat that was sunk and the man who came aboard the U-boat  

ended up writing about his experience.  

"Their food was good. In the morning we had rolls and fresh butter the butter. The butter was fine.

The bread was black and came in loaves about  3 feet long. We had conac nearly all the time...  

The members of the crew were cheerful and joked with  us, especially after indulging in cognac.  

They were apparently young fellows and frequently talked  of their mothers."

And it wasn't just people on these U-boats but animals too. U20 actually saved a black dachshund named Maria

from one of the boats that they sank and and brought her on board.

The issue was that they already had another dog on board who was a male and very soon

dear Maria was pregnant and gave birth to four puppies and that was just too many dogs on on one boat

so they gave three of them to to other U-boats but still three dogs on one U-boat that's a lot of mouths to feed.

And while I'm not sure what the dogs ate, the monkeys ate eggs and bananas.

Yes, there was a monkey on a U-boat.

Her name was Fipps and she was notorious for sneaking into the kitchen, and stealing eggs while the cook's back was turned.  

She was Lothar von Arnauld's monkey aboard U35,  the most successful U-boat in the war.

This U-boat sank 220 merchant vessels during the war and one of those was an Italian steamer that was chock full of bananas.  

"As the vessel went down hundreds of bananas floated on the surface.Tthe dinghy went out and collected a boatload.

We spread the bananas out to ripen a bit in the hot Mediterranean sun...  

We managed to gorge ourselves with bananas. Nothing  like Fipps, though.

The yellow fruit seemed to remind her of her tropical home. She leaped, chattered and shrieked with delight,

and ate more bananas than I thought her small body would contain."

A monkey eating bananas how predictable.

Luckily I don't think monkey eat sauerkraut so the sauerkraut soup would at least be safe aboard a U-boat,  

and it should be ready to finish off here in my  kitchen.

So after the sauerkraut has simmered for 15 minutes add a tablespoon of white wine vinegar, and a teaspoon of salt.

Then stir it in and give it a taste to see if it needs any more  of either and then serve,

and here we are German sauerkraut soup from World War I.

Now I'm going to eat this with some schwarzbrot, or black bread. It's a bread that was very popular on the U-boats.

It's made of dark rye, they would often actually have it canned but sometimes they would have fresh loaves 

especially at the beginning of a voyage

so I'm going to have a little bit of that but first I'm  going to just try the soup as it is.

Smells like sauerkraut.

I don't know what I was expecting,  tastes like sour- sauerkraut soup which is what it is.

I mean the sauerkraut is definitely the flavor that you're getting. There's not a lot else to get.

It's just water and and roux, a little salt and vinegar but if you like sauerkraut  

it's a nice way of of eating it and I'm guessing  if you really hadn't had much else it would be quite delicious.

There's not a lot else there so it's not a very complicated flavor

except that sauerkraut is kind of a complicated flavor in of itself but

try it with some of this black bread, schwarzbrot.

[chomp]

Actually, that's quite good.

That's quite good. That bread is delicious. It's not as dark as pumpernickel which is another rye,

and so it's not quite as rye forward. I really like that bread,

and with the kind of sourness, the acidity from  the soup they kind of balance each other out  

so I think that that would actually be a pretty  good meal, and maybe like they were saying  

you could have it with some some tea- and tea and rum  I believe was what they they drank that one Christmas.

Yeah it's really easy so there's there's not any reason that you shouldn't try it,

if you like sauerkraut. If you don't like sauerkraut just swap out the sauerkraut for a big ole pickle

and then you're making the the pickle soup which they mention,  

everything else stays exactly the same. You could also do  it with a head of cabbage, that's another recipe in there.

Also with beets, that's another recipe in there. They're all pretty much the same just swapping out the vegetables.

So yeah that is food from World War I that might have been served on a German U-boat

and if you want to see more wartime recipes from World War I or World War II

let me know what you want to see in in the comments I've got a few things planned but

I'm always looking for ideas,

and I will see you next time on Tasting History.