Paring down the recipe, there was enough for a whole cake.

Cooking onboard large oceangoing vessels is a monumental task. Many would consider the cook’s job to be one of the most important, as food plays a crucial role in upholding crew morale.

Otto Krey’s 1942 cookbook “Ship’s Cook and Baker” outlines the personnel required to feed a 42-person crew, including the chief steward, chief cook, second cook and baker.

The chief steward is responsible for inventorying and ordering the proper provisions and for estimating food costs. Taking stock of what is available, the chief cook prepares all the meats and vegetables, as well as special dinners that arise onboard.

Lastly, the second cook and baker — sometimes split into two roles, but is one individual in this case — is responsible for breakfasts and dessert offerings.

It is essential that each meal is delicious and easily digestible because vessels are often at sea for weeks or months at a time.

Krey describes this in a particularly clinical way: “The (principal) purposes of cooking are: to soften or to change the condition of food so that the digestive fluids can act upon it more freely and more quickly … (and) to make the food more appetizing … food that is attractive in odor and taste quickens the flow of saliva and other digestive fluids.”

“Ship’s Cook and Baker” is filled with dozens of recipes intended to keep a ship’s crew in high spirits. I decided to recreate a recipe for potato puffs, scaled down to a quarter of the original size — given that I wasn’t feeding a battleship.

Here’s the original recipe.

Directions

Heat the milk and add the butter. Pour slowly over the beaten egg yolks, add salt and pepper. Mix with the potatoes, add the cheese, and fold in the beaten egg whites. Pile in greased baking dishes. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit until well-puffed and browned.

The first several steps were simple. I started by making mashed potatoes and then heated the milk and butter on the stove.

I separated the egg whites from the yolks while everything melted together. The potatoes, butter, milk and cheese made a sort of potato porridge that smelled and tasted amazing.

However, even paring down the recipe to 25% of the original, it was a lot of potatoes. I ended up having enough mixture for a Bundt cake pan in addition to the two muffin tins I had already filled.

The recipe didn’t give instructions for when to add the pimientos, so I did one tray with the peppers sprinkled on top and one tray plain.

The muffins took about 25 minutes to bake, and the Bundt cake took 45 minutes. Unfortunately, nothing rose the way it should have. This could be because my ratios were off when I adjusted thesize of the recipe, or because I was overzealous in whipping everything together.

Still, the potato puffs were fluffy, cheesy and delicious. It was like eating a poofy fry. I would absolutely make these again — maybe for a larger group, so I can attempt the recipe at its full scale.