[Sca-cooks] 15th C. Ottoman Bulghur w/Chestnuts

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Thu Sep 20 16:58:46 PDT 2007


On Sep 20, 2007, at 6:57 PM, K C Francis wrote:

> Sometimes the simplest thing gets the most incredible praise.  I  
> fixed plain scrambled eggs and had someone ask me what I had done  
> to make the best scrambled eggs she had ever tasted.  The secret  
> was just a little water to lighten them up, just like my mom used  
> to do.  I also sometimes use milk or cream or sour cream but plain  
> water does the job too.

My father was assigned the task by the US Army of babysitting some  
POWs in a camp above the beach in Normandy in 1944. Most of the  
actual work was done by prisoners, including the cooking.

Now, my father was familiar with the US Army issue powdered eggs --  
the American cooks he had seen were accustomed to placing the powder  
in a large, galvanized tub, adding water, and stirring them with a  
large, oar-like wooden paddle. Of course, they were awful.

One morning Dad inspected the camp while the prisoners were in the  
middle of breakfast, and he was deeply confused. It seemed they had  
gotten hold of some fresh eggs somehow, and he was completely at a  
loss to explain how this might have happened. He asked, in his broken  
childhood German. The prisoners assured him the eggs were US Army  
issue powdered eggs. But they were good! How??? It seems the cooks  
had found some text written in English on the packaging material. Not  
knowing what to make of this, especially the first word,  
"INSTRUCTIONS", which sounded pretty threatening. So, eventually they  
found a prisoner who had spent some time in England and who could  
read English and translate the text into German. They discovered that  
these dire warnings were in fact a detailed description of how to  
turn this mysterious powder into something edible...

Adamantius



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