The Centaur's Kitchen
A book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan dishes for ships’ cooks on the Blue Funnel Line written by Patience Gray and illustrated by Miranda Gray
A book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan dishes for ships’ cooks on the Blue Funnel Line written by Patience Gray and illustrated by Miranda Gray
A book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan dishes for ships’ cooks on the Blue Funnel Line written by Patience Gray and illustrated by Miranda Gray
This book was composed in 1964 as a manual of instruction to cooks of the Blue Funnel Line’s latest addition to its fleet, the Centaur.. A cargo liner of handsome lines, equipped with every comfort, it carried 200 passengers and more than 4,000 sheep across the southern seas from Western Australia to Singapore. But the owners. enlightened people, realised that they could do better than reheating dreadful frozen food they appealed to Patience Gray, then a journalist and author of the brilliant cookery book Plats du Jour or Foreign Food (one of the best-sellers of the 50s), to write the a set of recipes that their cooks could execute. Patience Gray died before she could see this long hidden masterpiece in print.
In a few short chapters, Patience Gray lays out a whole repertoire, drawn mainly from the Mediterranean and France, that might be cooked on board ships. Her aim was to wean the cooks off frozen, dried and packeted food and to respond to both the seasons and the supplies available at ports of call. The style of cookery was much as in her earlier, and first, book Plats du Jour (1957): retro to us, bourgeois French in another form of shorthand. The style of writing is eloquent and prescriptive: the author keen to impart good habits as well as good cooking
