Today, I put it in my iced coffee (actually this morning’s leftover coffee with a few ice cubes thrown in, but it really can be dolled up to taste like a coffeehouse treat). This was an entirely different proposition than substituting it in baked dishes, where it is masked by a variety of other ingredients. This time with just the milk, and the coffee, that clinging flavor of dried milk came right through.
It immediately made me think of The Boat. When I was eight years old, my family took off from Long Island, New York on a 40-foot sailboat, which we lived aboard for a year: me, my three older sisters and my parents. Yes, it was tight quarters. And there are many things I remember about it – but food, memory trigger that it is, calls forth the culinary details.
There wasn’t a lot of storage room on the boat, and the icebox, as I recall it, was an on-again-off-again hole in the galley counter with a hatch-type lid that lifted up. You had to reach into its depths and re-arrange everything in order to find whatever it was you were looking for. It was also dependent on The Generator which seemed to be a subject of conversation pretty frequently -- I think it must have been broken a lot. At eight years old that sort of thing was not my concern. I only knew that our “frig” was pretty limited. And we often bought ice, in blocks, at the marinas where we stayed. Maybe it wasn’t an electric refrigerator at all, maybe it really was just an ice box? At any rate, we didn’t get fresh milk, but we drank a lot of the dried variety, along with Tang (remember that orange-flavored powder touted to be the drink of astronauts?), and occasionally those tin cans of orange juice with Donald Duck smiling on the front, trying to conceal the fact that the juice tastes like metal. On special occasions, like birthdays, we would have cans of Coke, which we cooled by placing in a net and hanging in the water.
We had a few staples that we made over and over: the ones I remember were molasses sugar cookies, which were my specialty (except the one time I added a cup instead of a teaspoon of salt, and we had to throw the entire batch overboard); and “bathroom cookies,” which were a variation on the recipe from the Bran Flakes box. I’m sure there were other stand-bys my mother used to feed us all, but I only remember that she stowed cans of – what? – tuna? meats? – under the floorboards in the bilge, and we all had to clear out when she was retrieving them to make dinner. I also remember her trying to cook rice in seawater, to conserve our limited water supply – that, too, went overboard.
Along with the staples – which we tried to replenish when we were in port, a good trick when half the dry goods stores in the Caribbean circa 1970 featured bloated, dusty cans and nothing remotely like an expiration dates – we sometimes tried out the produce from the docks. I remember sampling knobby-looking breadfruit, and little tiny bananas called finger bananas, super sweet and delicious. We must have had pineapple and citrus as well, as they’d have been more familiar to my pretty conventional-cook mother.
And we ate the fish we caught, trolling a couple of lines at the stern whenver we were underway. The favorite was dolphin, a rainbow-colored beauty when it’s swimming in its iridescent school, but which fades the minute you pull up your line and expose it to the air. We also caught a lot of Spanish mackerel, a severe, torpedoe-shaped fish that looks like an angry character from a Roald Dahl book, all sharp fins and pointy tail; and albacore tuna, a sweetly round-shaped fish with metallically shiny skin that we once pulled up after it had been attacked by a shark. We got the head of the fish, the rest had already been devoured.
If I lived on a boat again, I think I’d rely most on the fresh fish and the fruits and veggies available in the markets, sampling the tropical fare that any native would make their own staples. Except, of course, for the dried milk I’d have on hand for my afternoon coffee. The photo is of the sort of boat we lived on, a 40-foot Newporter ketch. Ours was called "Glad Tidings." I wonder where she is now.
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