Dad was an international cook
听
No one would ever mistake my late father’s culinary aptitude with that of a master chef. In fact, I can remember only one time dad cooked dinner.
Yet, he was once in charge of a staff of 18 people all assigned to the work of making sure hundreds of men gobbled down their daily nutritional needs. He was a mess sergeant in the 1,949th Engineer Aviation Utilities Co. on the Japanese Island of Okinawa.
I always knew he was a mess sergeant, but not until recently was I aware of the extent of his role while overseas.
Looking over his Army Air Corps (the forerunner to the U.S. Air Force) discharge papers, I learned that he procured rations, prepared menus and supervised the preparation of meals for hundreds of soldiers stationed in that faraway land.
In addition, he directed the work of eight enlisted cooks and, according to the military document, “10 native kitchen police.”
The native kitchen police were residents of Okinawa and in some cases I think may have been prisoners of war.
Dad never spoke much about his experience. He said once he was issued a truckload of bad meat, which he promptly ordered dumped. Another time he left his rifle hanging in a food locker, which his commanding officer discovered during an inspection. That didn’t go over too well.
And, upon returning home, he baked his mother a cake from scratch to prove that he could cook. (He also dropped some of the ash from the cigar he was smoking into the batter. I don’t think grandma ever knew). It was just about the last thing he ever prepared.
Until one night when mother was so sick she had to take to her bed. That was a rare occurrence. I could count the number of times on one hand that mother was so sick she couldn’t prepare dinner. That night, however, it was up to dad to prepare dinner for his two growing teenage sons.
Harkening back to his military days, dad met the challenge head on. He dragged out a large cast iron skillet, heated it on the stove and made what had to be most of a dozen eggs, scrambling them, which was the easiest and fastest way to cook them.
He told my brother and me to get a fork and sit at the kitchen table. Then he laid the cast iron skillet full of scrambled eggs in the middle of the table.
“I’m not washing plates, so eat up,” he said as he sat and joined us.
We didn’t care. In fact, we thought it was neat for all of us to eat out of the same pan since dad had never before prepared a meal for us.
Later in life, dad prepared some of his own meals, usually consisting of making a sandwich and heating a can of soup. But he never again, to my knowledge, prepared anything from the raw ingredients.
So, between that meal and the cooking for the troops he did overseas, I call him an international cook. Maybe that’s a stretch. But I think dad deserves the title.
Today, there’s a lot of hubbub about the longevity of the people living on Okinawa. It’s recorded that the island’s population is known as the longest-lived people in the world; there are 34 centenarians per 100,000 people, which is more than three times the rate in the United States.
Well, I suppose my dad might have had something to do with that.
After all, he left Okinawa in 1946, almost 70 years ago, which means most of those centenarians never faced eating his cooking.
Just kidding dad. Those scrambled eggs were the best I ever ate.
Have a good day.
James Pletcher Jr. is retired 蘑菇视频 business editor and can be reached by email at J.Pletcherjr@att.net or jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.