Food and the Mountaineer

By E. Creighton.

May I say at the outset that I have two reasons for perpetrating this article. The first is that I am strongly in favour of an annual Journal and secondly because, though we may be loth to admit it, food, or the lack of it, is very often the preponderating thought on many of our longer climbs.

I say longer, because on our British climbs the question is largely met by the sandwiches supplied by the hotel. Not entirely though. There is one blot on Lakeland climbing, and that is the mutton sandwich. I cannot claim to have done a tithe of the climbs in the Lakes that some of our members have done, and yet the climbing part of the Lake District is studded with little cairns which, if carefully dissected, will be be found to contain at the heart a packet of my mutton sandwiches. There is a firmly established convention against the use of mustard with mutton, and without mustard a sandwich is a mockery. (I wrote all this before the trade invented the Mustard Club).

I do appeal for united action on the part of British climbers to secure the suppression of mutton sandwiches. Therefore see that your sandwiches are of ham, beef, or tongue, liberally buttered and mustarded, and it only remains to remember the stirring words of one of our climbing poets, whose name for the moment escapes me, and,

“Put them in the rucksack
And eat them while it’s early.
For when they’re fresh they’re nice and flat
But when they’re stale they’re curly.”

When climbing guideless in the Alps provisioning is a very serious question if you are in a district of non-provided huts.

The whole question of Alpine provisions is an enormous one and only the fringe of the subject can be touched on in an article like this.

The long and bitter controversy which shook the climbing world to its foundations in Mr. Whymper’s day, as to whether the meat served in climbing huts is, or is not, mule, is one I should be sorry to reopen. I can only say that where the first course is soup made of macaroni and water flavoured with grated cheese, the second, macaroni, and the last one, cheese, I personally would welcome a steak from an alligator.

Wasn’t it Napoleon who said an army marched on its stomach ? Before anyone else says it let me put it forth as my considered opinion that a climber climbs on his. I am not alluding to the various stomach traverses, where I need only say a concavity rather than a convexity is more conducive to a graceful style. The question arises when an Alpine party reaches its base, though I have known useful work put in earlier.

One member of a party of five having travelled via Brussels was to meet the rest of us in Paris at the Gare de Lyon restaurant. As he spoke French with a strong Yorkshire Ramblers’ accent his taxi-man took him to the Gare d’Orleans. There he ordered and ate his dinner, discovered his mistake, joined us, and ate a second one. That man was one dinner up on us all the trip and we never drew level.

We generally get to our jumping-off place in time for lunch, and after a hot greasy hotel meal we go out to buy provisions for the next three days. The greatest possible mistake. Provisions for the next trip should always be bought fasting.

I usually climb with two splendid fellows, but stern ascetic souls, who, if they get a lump of bread and an odd sardine think the world is being too good to them. They come shopping with me and frown sternly at each added ounce of weight. They tell me out of their accumulated store of experience that I shall feel an ungovernable craving at high altitudes for sugar, and insist on my loading up with numerous tins of jam and packets of mint cake. So far I have always been able to hold this craving in check. The one thing I long for on the mountains is a steak and a bottle of Bass.

But jam comes in very handily in the manufacture of jam snows. You empty half a jam tin into your mug, add snow, whip it up with your knife, and it amalgamates into a highly delectable ice. That is if the snow is of the right consistency. I have had many disappointments lately. Snow doesn’t seem to be what it was when I was a young man.

Mint cake can easily be got rid of. Give one piece to one village child and the word is passed round.   I could, on occasions, have deported the entire juvenile population of Alpine villages like another Pied Piper.

Bread is of course the most important thing to take, if you can get it. In the towns you get the most delightful crescent rolls with your petit dejeuner, but in the villages there is only one pattern.

It is a cigar-shaped loaf half a yard long with a straw tempered nickel steel crust. Inside the crust it consists largely of holes. Boiled in soup it is eatable. Otherwise— did we not lose two days last season while our leader went down to Aosta to get his teeth straightened ? True, one member of the party said he bent them gnashing them in his disappointment at having to turn back for weather half an hour from the top of the Dent d’Herens. But I don’t believe it.   It was the bread.

Sardines can always be bought in the smallest villages, but there is very little to be said about sardines. The residual oil is most useful for greasing climbing boots, but as a rule I spill most of it over my breeches. The advice I would give to any aspiring alpinist is to get really to like sardines, for the alternative is sausage.

It is quite impossible to do more than indicate a few of the pitfalls which beset the purchaser. The whole subject is a dark mystery and pending the issue of an authoritative pamphlet by some Alpine Club, the beginner would be well advised to stick to sardines.

Some saucissons are cooked, others are not, and there is a particularly offensive variety called Landjdger which should be avoided. It is issued to the anti-smuggling troops who patrol the frontier, as an emergency ration.

One was issued to me as such in my first season. Whenever I felt particularly hungry I sniffed at it and my appetite disappeared. I preserved it intact, years have passed, and I now use it as an office paperweight. Ham might be a useful standby but it again as often as not is issued raw. And I do feel very strongly that this continental habit of eating raw meat is a reversion to barbarism,—except in the case of the raw smoked salmon you get in Norway with preserved cherries. In fact I should like to exempt Norway entirely from all gastronomical complaints.   Norway is essentially the country for the climber who considers his physical welfare, particularly if he stays (as of course he will do) with Ole Berge at Turtegro.

Eggs are always useful, but in the valley villages and in huts they are not always too fresh and the people are far too truthful about them. They will tell you frankly they are not fresh enough to boil but they might be all right fried. I remember interviewing the lady of a tiny inn in an Italian valley. (They chased the hens out of our combined bed-dining room).

” Could we have soup ?.”    ” Yes.”    ” An Omelette ? ” She didn’t think the eggs were fresh enough, but if we were prepared to risk it, she was. Nobly I didn’t tell my com­panions. They enjoyed the omelette, I didn’t. It is a fatal thing to cast a doubt on the freshness of an egg.

One year we had a doctor in the party. Everything I wanted to take was deficient in vitamines or too full of carbo-hydrates. I fought him and carried my point over two large onions and two tomatoes whilst buying provisions at Cogne. He said they contained 90% water and were not worth their weight in the sack. We carried them up to the Garde Chasse’s hut at the foot of the Herbetet.

It was twice the size of a railway compartment and included a bunk for two. There were five of us, two slept in the bunk and three on the bunk mattress short way on with our legs on the floor. We had to leave the door open for ventilation and waked up each night at midnight frozen, but as we had to start at 1.30, it didn’t much matter.

But to return to our vegetables. With these, a handful of macaroni and a tin of bully beef, Jack Wright made a stew that would have attracted notice anywhere. The wood smoke went everywhere but up the chimney and I can see him now like the Walrus in Alice, ” holding his pocket handkerchief before his streaming eyes.” There was a big boulder outside the hut and copying Wordsworth’s little maid,—” As the night was fair, I took my little porringer And ate my supper there.” I shall never forget that supper, the weirdly contorted icefall of the Tribulation glacier, and above all the grand mass of the Paradis lit by the summer moon.

Another culinary memory. Four of us, trudging down to Val d’Isere from the Grande Motte, the village in sight far beneath us, came to a rocky gorge. Two of us maintained the path and followed one side, two the other. As it didn’t much matter we parted. Soon after, my companion and I came on a lovely Alpine meadow starred with mushrooms. We had two cookers and all the butter of the party. We cooked and ate mushrooms as long as the butter lasted, then we fried them with sardines. Never again shall I taste mushrooms to compare with them. ” There grow no such Almug trees nor have been seen unto this day.”

But all memories are not so happy. One year we left the Grimsel to traverse the Finsteraarhorn by a rather difficult route, and had cut down weight as much as possible. The first night at the Oberaar hut disaster fell. I had banked heavily on soup, half a dozen packets, Pea, Julienne, Mulligatawny, etc., though I was not sanguine about the flavours. No matter what is printed on the packet the prevailing flavour is cardboard. I stewed the mixture care­fully, stiffened it up with Oxo cubes, and handed a basinful proudly to our second man. He simply shouted ” moth­balls.” And it was so. The shopkeeper had stored the soup packets on the same shelf with some naphthaline.

The next day the difficult route on the Finsteraarhorn proved too icy for us and we went up the ordinary way, descended to the Finsteraar hut and decided it was too late to push on to the Concordia as arranged, so we agreed to stay there and tackle the Fiescherhorn the next day. We had no food to speak of but our leader produced his emergency ration, a packet of rice. We boiled it and reboiled it and tre-boiled it and then it began to swell up. We flavoured it with mint cake, dusty raisins and prunes from pocket corners. Finally we ate it and retired to our bunks, distended but still hungry. Providentially the Fiescherhorn day dawned doubtfully and we fled up to the Jungfraujoch and down to the fleshpots of Wengen.

So far I have said nothing about drink. Tea is a great stand-by but boiling it wastes a lot of time. Don’t forget lemons ; they are a substitute for milk and help to mask the methylated spirit flavour.   And tea is the only thing you can drink on a climb without being sorry for it. Wine and water is not bad, but alcohol as a rule is best kept as a reward at the end of the day.

Asti is a gorgeous drink for a tired and thirsty man, but it leaves a rather sweet and sticky taste and is apt to be as dust and ashes in the mouth at 1.30 next morning when you are starting for a climb.

Beer — English beer — would be ideal, but it is unfortunately unprocurable. The Swiss Dunkel beer is not too bad, the Birra Aosta might be worse, but outside England there is nothing to touch the Norwegian beer. There are two sorts, Bayersk and Pilsener. The Pilsener is not real Pilsener and is merely a waste of time, but the Bayersk is good. It is pronounced By-yarr as near as I can fit it phonetically, but the easiest way to get it is to soak a label off a bottle and present it with your money.

The commonest event in a climbing holiday is to see three or four hungry men sitting round a tin containing one sardine, each protesting that he has already had far too much and couldn’t possibly eat it or drink the last mug of tea in the billy. One imagines the shade of Sir Philip Sidney peering furtively from behind a rock, jealous that his pre-eminence is going to be snatched from him.

As Kipling says :

” Smells are better than sights or sounds
To made your heart strings crack.”

Apparently he never experienced the powerful tug of the combination of smell and taste. Sometimes when dining out in towns I come across my old friend Salami, if that is how it is spelled, the most pungent of the sausage tribe, in the shape of a thin shaving in the hors d’ceuvres. Then the lights of the restaurant fade, the strains of the band fail, and I am sheltering from the wind behind a rock, breakfasting with two or three trusty, unwashed and unshaved comrades at the foot of an Alpine ridge at dawn.

“Magic casements opening on perilous foam
In Faery lands forlorn.”