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