NHS HIGHLAND: We can learn from 70-year-old cookery tips for trawlermen
A few days ago, I was working my way through a collection of old books on the bookshelf of a member of my family and came across a small book that I had never seen before, and I found it fascinating.
It was a book called Trawler Cookery and was produced in 1954 with some help from my grandfather which is why it ended up on the bookshelf. The book was designed to help men, and in those days it was just men, to cook good and nutritious food while away for weeks at sea.
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I did find some of the comments and recipes rather old fashioned, which is no surprise. There were no recipes for pizza, no pasta and the only rice was for things like kedgeree. There was no allowance for dietary preferences and the menus contained a lot of meat with no vegetarian options, let along vegan food.
However, there were a few things that did strike me as excellent and still apply for us today.
First of these is the simple need for good food. The book did not consider gender roles or hierarchy on the trawler but just set out the need to move from the idea of throwing a few ingredients in a pan and hoping for the best to planning to cook good food that people will enjoy eating.
The second thing was the use of basic ingredients, and this is something that I wrote about here quite recently. When the book was written there were no ready meals and no supermarkets and so it was clear by using basic ingredients what went into each meal and the volume of ingredients like sugar and salt consumed.
There was something of a balanced diet with fruit and vegetables, albeit the diet included much more meat overall than we would now advise.
The third thing that struck me was the request in the book to make food look attractive and appetising. Now that may not seem surprising and there is a vast industry today in making food look good, but it is important to appreciate the value of food.
It also reminded me of eating the rainbow. The idea of eating the rainbow is to ensure that the food we eat consists of a range of colours. This is not just to make the food attractive but to ensure that we get the range of different nutrients that are contained in different coloured foods such as red tomatoes, orange carrots, green vegetables and blueberries.
There is not as much evidence of the health benefits of eating the rainbow compared with some other things, but it does give us both variety and attractiveness and I am delighted when I get a good colour mix.
I doubt that I will use Trawler Cookery for my recipes, but it certainly reminded me of the importance of good cooking skills, basic ingredients, a varied diet and the attractiveness of food, whether or not in a rainbow.
Dr Tim Allison is NHS Highland’s director of public health and policy.
