Food and Drink

Pirate drinks were hearty and spicy. Popular bombo or bumboo, for instance, was a concoction of rum, water, sugar, and nutmeg. Another favorite was a blend of raw eggs, sugar, sherry, gin, and beer called Rumfustian, although it contained no rum. The rovers also greatly appreciated brandy, sherry, and port, which they looted from prizes. Alcoholism was an occupational hazard and led to many untimely deaths.

Pirates liked their victuals hearty and spicy too. The shanty taverns of New Providence offered palate-pleasing dishes of “Solomon Grundy” or salamagundi, a sort of spicy chef’s salad that included whatever was handy. Bits of meat, fish, turtle, and shellfish were marinated in a mixture of herbs, palm hearts, garlic, spiced wine, and oil, and then served with hard-boiled eggs and pickled onions, cabbage, grapes, and olives. (Cordingly 109)

Sometimes a ship of that era would carry a “petty tally,” or small store of creature comforts, consisting of such things as sides of bacon and dried beef tongues, marmalade, currants and almonds. “For when a man is ill, or at the point of death,” wrote Captain John Smith in his A Sea Grammar, “I would know whether a dish of buttered rice, with a little Cynamon [sic], Ginger and Sugar be not better than Salt Fish or Salt Beef. And after a Storme [sic], when poor men are all wet, and some of them have not so much as a cloth to shift them, shaking with cold, few of those but will tell you a little sherry or aqua-vitae is much better to keep them in health, than a little small Beer, or cold water.”

The ordinary food was universally atrocious. The water stank, the meat and fish were rotten, the biscuits were infested with large black-headed weevil maggots. The men could bring themselves to eat only in the dark. But at least seamen and merchantment had a reasonable expectation of something to eat, no matter how objectionable. For pirates, thirst and starvation were constant companions.

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The turtle was a perfect staple for pirates: immobilized on its back, it would stay put until its captor returned to reclaim it; in a ship’s hold it could be kept alive until the cook slaughtered it.

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By their very nature, the pirates could not keep to rules about provisions like those of the British Navy requiring “vittaulles well seasoned, both fleshe [sic] and fishe [sic].” For the pirates it was feast or famine – often the latter. But when the pirates went ashore or captured a merchantman with a well-stocked larder, they displayed a penchant for a hearty concoction called salmagundi.

The name is thought to be a corruption of the medieval French salemine, meaning salted or highly seasoned, and to have evolved to salmagonde by the gourmandizing Rabelais in the 16th century. In any case, salmagundi was a dish of great versatility.

A cook might include as the basis of his salmagundi any or all of the following: turtle meat, fish, pork, chicken, corned beef, ham, duck and pigeon. The meats would be roasted, chopped into chunks and marinated in spiced wine, then combined with cabbage, anchovies, pickled herring, mangoes, hard-boiled eggs, palm hearts, onions, olives, grapes and any other pickled vegetables that were available. The whole would then be highly seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper and mustard seed and doused with oil and vinegar – and served with drafts of beer and rum. (Botting 44-5)