This kitchen at Old Fort Henry was used to prepare meals for hundreds of men. Meat, vegetables and water were boiled up in coppers large, round, cast-iron pots. The cooks were completely untrained and they usually boiled all the nutrients and flavour out of the food. After the broth was ready, the coppers were given a cursory cleaning and then used to boil up tea or coffee. During the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth, this diet was not only monotonous but also insufficient. William Cobbett recalled in his autobiography, The Progress of a Ploughboy to a Seat in Parliament (London: Faber and Faber, 1933):
I have seen them lay in their berths, many and many a time, actually crying on account of hunger. The whole week's food was not a bit too much for one day.
During the Crimean War the British army finally became concerned about the quality of the food served to the men and asked a famous cook to prepare recipes for rations. These directions were not universally adopted until several decades later, when cooks were actually trained.
