1. The Only Barley and Lentil Porridge You’ll Need for a Long Voyage (One Pot, Feeds Eight, Almost No Fuel)
Before I get to the porridge I want to tell you about the ox. If you’re just here for quantities there’s a jump link, honestly no hard feelings, I scroll past these too.
We had seven days. That was the notice: seven days, and then the rain. I spent nearly all of it on stores, because the instruction I was actually given was take of all food that is eaten, and gather it to thee, which sounds like the greatest shopping list ever handed to a man right up until you read the back half of the sentence: and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.
For them. All of them.
So I was not provisioning a household of eight. I was provisioning a floor plan. Three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, thirty high, three decks, one window, one door in the side. You can put a genuinely absurd quantity of barley into a space like that and it will still look half empty, right up until the animals walk in, at which point it looks like the worst-planned pantry in the history of the world.
The ox came up the ramp on the fourth day of loading. Not led. He walked up by himself, the way you walk into a room somebody has told you about, and he stood in the second-deck stall I had built for something considerably smaller, and he made it clear that it would do.
He will not eat from a trough when the floor is moving. I have tried this every way there is. He puts his nose down, feels the grain slide away from him, lifts his head, and waits (and he will wait longer than I will). So twice a day I sit on the rail with a basket in my lap and feed him a fistful at a time, and he takes it with that ridiculous careful lip they have, and there’s a wet sound and a pause, and then he leans on me. Full weight. Just leans.
He is enormous. He is warm. He is in the finest condition of any animal I have ever kept, and I feed him considerably better than I feed myself.
Which brings me to the porridge, because the porridge is what I actually eat.
Ingredients (feeds eight, generously)
600 g pot barley
300 g small brown lentils
2.4–2.6 litres water
4 tbsp olive oil
1½ tbsp salt
1 tbsp cumin seed
2 tbsp dried onion, crumbled fine
Method
Soak the barley overnight in cold water. Drain. This is not optional at sea; unsoaked barley costs you an hour of fire you do not have.
Toast the cumin dry in the pot until it smells like the whole deck. Tip it out. Add the oil, return the cumin, add the dried onion, one minute.
Barley, lentils, water, salt. Bring to a hard boil for fifteen minutes.
Lid on tight, off the heat, and bury the whole pot in the wool. Two and a half hours.
5. Uncover, beat it hard with a spoon until it goes creamy, correct the salt, more oil on top than you think.
Notes
The wool is the whole recipe. Fuel is the scarcest thing aboard after patience, so I bring things to the boil and then let a wrapped pot do the rest of the work for free. I burn dried dung, and I want to be honest with you: I will never run out. Not once, not in a year. It is the one part of this arrangement that has genuinely over-delivered.