The Great Cruising Cookbook by John C. Payne...is as practical an onboard cookbook as you're likely to come across. Easy, simple to follow recipes using ingredients typically found in any galley provide for hearty, satisfying meals at sea. Additionally, chapters on outfitting a galley and choosing provisions start off the book. Payne's book is chock full of recipes that include little or no meat, which certainly will please the vegetarian crew, but serves the more important and immediate purpose of reducing the reliance on refrigerated foods. How nice to have a cookbook that allows us to use what we best like to stow rice, pasta, legumes and hearty fruits and vegetables things that won't go bad the day after leaving port. Flesh eaters, however, need not worry; there are plenty of recipes for cooking meat, including such exotic and savory fare as goat stroganoff and barbequed Thai garlic chicken. And, of course, there are more seafood recipes than you can shake a chum bucket at. Go ahead and buy that fresh octopus in port, Payne will help you turn it into a dish to remember. --Sailing magazine
Written to keep the cruiser away from a life of cans and processed food, with over 350 recipes, a worldwide provisioning guide, rough weather cooking, and a tropical fruit guide, this cookbook is the cookbook to have onboard. It addresses nutrition and provides methods for improvising and provisioning in strange places. --Latitudes & Attitudes
Every boat needs at least one good cookbook, if only as a defense against the sort of experience that befell me on a cruise several years ago. Whenever it was the crew's turn to cook, he served deviled ham and mustard sandwiches, with hot pickled okra and barbeque potato chips on the side. It was actually pretty good the first few times. Here's a book to hurl at the culinary barbarian on your crew, though it's a lot more than a simple defense against indigestion. The subject of provisioning a boat for a cruise is an important one. It's received a great deal of attention over the years, because a hungry crew is a miserable crew. Boats, with their limited or non-existent refrigeration capacities, isolation from supermarkets, and tiny galleys, impose a difficult set of problems on the ambitious meal maker. On the other hand, fresh air and exercise seem to make everything taste better than it does ashore, so there are compensations. I still buy the occasional jar of pickled okra. John Payne, who writes with wit and clarity, makes the business of learning to be a good sea cook much more entertaining than it might otherwise be. Sometimes he goes a little over the top, especially if you can't abide puns. For example, he talks about the advantages of stir-fry cooking with a wok, and then points out that in a seaway you'd have to call it 'wok and roll' cooking. All in all, this is an excellent guide to the task of providing food afloat. Payne includes a lot of basic-but-need-to-know stuff, like: what kind of fruits and vegetables keep and how long, how to (really!) catch fish, galley equipment, safety, a guide to strange tropical fruits for the temperate region sailor, onboard gardening (sprouting), and hundreds of really excellent recipes. I've tried a number of them, and I haven't hit a dud yet. In fact, I'd go so far as to recommend this cookbook to folk who never go cruising at all; it's that good. Payne even includes three recipes for okra. --Living Aboard
