The Issue of Refrigeration

 

Credit: Janette Watson

Before you say, ‘I can’t do without it’, I have to tell you that refrigeration is essentially a luxury for luxuries. It takes a lot of energy – both nervous and electrical – to keep it running satisfactorily, and if your major reason for installing it is to enjoy cold beers, you’d probably save money drinking your beer in bars!

However, as this is a cookery blog, so I’ll tackle the issue from the standpoint of preserving food. For most people, the major advantage of refrigeration is that it keeps meat safe to eat. However, once cooked, meat can be kept for a day or two in several ways, so even carnivores could manage without a fridge,while coastal sailing. Indeed, when I first crossed the Atlantic in 1975, refrigeration was rare, managing without it was taken for granted and most people were unabashed carnivores in those days. The real issue about a fridge on a voyaging boat (and again, gentle reader, we are talking about modest boats for people with modest incomes), is that it’s unlikely to be large enough to store the food for passage making. It’s far more likely that the one you have, will keep a few items fresh for a few days. Thus, if you are far from any shops, your fridge will be of little use due to its lack of capacity – it will soon be emptied – and if you are close to shops, it will be little more than a convenience to keep food fresh between shopping trips. It will permit you to be less organized, but in the larger scheme of things, maybe three or four times a year it will let you have one of two food items for a few days longer than you might otherwise have.

For vegetarians in the Tropics, fridges are very useful for yoghurt and milk, fairly useful for some ultra-perishable fruit and vegetables, bought very ripe, and convenient for a larger variety of fresh produce and cheese. Vegans however are in a much happier situation, because they are likely to make their own ‛milk’ and ‛cheese’, once away from Western culture, and indeed, I have found that my own gradual drift in that direction has made a refrigerator even less of a temptation that it was.

I’ve never lived on a boat with refrigeration, apart from that provided by Mother Nature, and have always had fresh fruit and vegetables on passage, have had salads for the first few days, when I could afford them, have carried cheese across the Atlantic from Europe to the Caribbean, and have managed to have butter on most occasions, once I could afford to buy it and until I stopped eating it.

Because of the ubiquity of fridges ashore, and today’s rather fanatical standards of food hygiene, most people are unaware of the robustness of a great deal of food that is normally kept refrigerated. Even in warm places, eggs will easily last four weeks and many fruit and vegetables will keep for well over a week with a little care. A few, such as onions, oranges, potatoes, garlic and green peppers can be kept for a month or more.   

I’ll go into specific details in future postings, but let me give you some examples that I believe would surprise most people used to having refrigeration. In the Tropics, with proper care: an iceberg lettuce will keep over a week; butter will keep for several months; open cheese will keep without mould for a fortnight; tomatoes will keep for at least two weeks; commercially produced mayonnaise will keep at least two months, once opened.  The point is that if you don’t want a lot of bother and expense, you can live very happily without refrigeration. It’s really quite easy to get used to warm beer and the cold ones that you drink from the fridges of your wealthier and more harassed neighbours, will be extra enjoyable for their novelty. For long passages, you’ll have to use other methods of preserving your fresh food, but that’s much easier to do when you’re already looking after it this way on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the people who have a real problem with ensuring that they have fresh food for the duration of an ocean crossing, are those who are used to having a fridge and realise that it’s not going to hold everything they need. Suddenly, they have to think about new ways of caring for their fresh provisions.

Cruising, as a way of life, is an alternative to living ashore – not a transference from a fixed house to a floating one. Part of its appeal lies in its being a more simple, basic way of living and, for many of us, keeping our carbon footprint to a minimum is important. Refrigeration is a complication you can do without and the satisfaction of eating good meals, made with fresh food that you have carefully nurtured, is a bonus for the cook. You may need to shop a little more often, but I suspect that unless you actually enjoy a trip to buy fresh produce, you’ll simply learn to be more careful and discriminating. Once you discover what keeps in what way and for how long, you’ll be able to stock up for a couple of weeks’ cruise away from shops, at a few moments’ notice and find the task of provisioning for a long passage that much simpler.