All products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.recently, well, in the only way that’s ever going to happen for me: with a book. I started readingJulian Sancton’s account of a dark and doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1897, and I couldn’t stop. I skipped all my weekend chores.
The first time they cooked up a slab of penguin meat, the only game in town , “it tasted somehow like both fish and fowl, with a gamey tang.” They decided never to eat it again. Until, that is, a few weeks go by, and the men’s health begins to deteriorate. Their heartbeats were speeding up and slowing down, some had droopy bags of liquid gathering under their eyes, lethargy was rampant. The ship’s first mate, Roald Amundsen, was getting especially sick.
Cook recognizes their symptoms as scurvy, and without fresh fruit, vegetables, or meat, they could die of it. He convinces theboys to give penguin another try, along with seal meat. Cook preferred his penguin steaks lightly seared, but recommended everyone eat them rare if possible. “Remarkably, after just a few days of guzzling down the cutlets, which had the consistency of fatty, uncooked chicken, Amundsen was almost back to normal,” Sancton writes. They didn’t know then what we know now, that the meat contains vitamin C, which is crucial to creating collagen in the body.
Scurvy is one of a laundry list of nightmares encountered by the men on this big rat-infested ship in the middle of the Antarctic ice. But the rest are outside the purview of this food publication, so you’ll just have to read the book to find out.
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