Another nostalgic look at early Deepfreeze years, this time at Wigram RNZAF station near Christchurch.   Thanks to Farrell Whitney...

Remember these receipts for chow we consumed at the mess halls whether we ate in them or not at Wigram Air Force Base in New Zealand?
 
I can smell them now!!!!  You sat at the table with all the white linens and properly laid out table in the Sargeant's Mess and the waiter took your order.  The toast was hand cut and thick as the back of your hand and stacked in a wire rack like sheets of plywood side by side.  The menu all hand written to perfection.  What to order?
This day I will have the eggs 'over easy' with bacon.
"Tea!!"...how many Yanks drink tea for breakfast, bring me coffee, strong and black.  And, that is exactly how it arrived!  New Zealand coffee was not made only of coffee, but had chicory added, and bitter.  Thank God for the great milk of New Zealand with it's thick cream on the top of the bottle.
And now the bacon and eggs have arrived as the waiter places the plate in front of you, the eggs magically slide back and forth on the plate between the bacon (and they are thick slices of what we call Canadian Bacon) before coming to 'parade rest!'  Ah, this looks good...so you carve up a chunk of bacon and dip it into the yolk and to keep the yolk from dripping, you bend over the plate and it is at this time the scent enters your nostrils.  Your stomach churns and you swallow rapidly to retain the 'libation' you enbibed  the night before, with your mind questioning....what is that vile smell??  How can anything look so good and smell so putrid??  I called upon my good friend of the N.Z. Air Force, Phillip "Hoss" Boyd to give me a tour of the galley.  The galley is immaculate as are the chefs.  My main concern was how the eggs were cooked.  I observed this large vat of bubbling fluid into which the cooks would crack open and drop the eggs .  Once the egg was cooked it would float to the surface, where upon the cook would take a skimmer and retrieve the egg and deposit it on a plate where it would swim before dying.  And what was this magical fluid......"Mutton Grease!!"  Now you show me the Yank who had a strong enough stomach to take that lot!!  Our true savior was the 'canteen' which opened for 'morning tea,' and you had best get in line early.  There were trays of fresh cut sandwiches covered with damp tea towels to keep them fresh.  Only this time the bread had been cut so thin they must have used a razor.  The ingredients were put into the sandwiches and then the crusts were removed and then the bread was quartered into mini sandwiches.
So at sixpence to ninepence a sandwich, the Kiwis made a forturne off the Yanks.
It didn't make any difference...we were hungry and the ingredients were not what we were accustomed to either.  The egg salad were the first to disappear and if you were near the end of the line, you had your choice of the following:  Bean, spaghetti, cucumber, or Marmite (a yeast meat paste tasting of pure salt).  For those of you who missed eating in the messhalls of Wigram, you missed a very memorable occassion.
Whitney

Nine quid, seven bob, watta bargain...

 

<BGSOUND loop=infinite src="">'Goodbye yellow brick road'