Ship to Shore: Virgin Islands Charter Yacht Recipes Virgin Islands 1983
The forward outlines how the Virgin Islands are a “true paradise” with “crystal-blue waters” and extoll the virtues of seeing the islands on yachts. These are the recipes of the chefs on those yachts.
No mention of where the profits of the book went to.
I thought this was a fun niche! Boat cooking has some freshness and space concerns that other cooking environments don’t. The recipes contain a lot of notes saying you can use “PET milk” (evaporated milk) instead of cream or light cream or straight up call for evaporated milk, which is shelf stable and very creamy thanks to the evaporation process.
There are quite few illustrations in the book. Each section divider is illustrated and some of the recipes are too. The artist is listed as Celia A. Flock.
There are some helpful hints scattered in the book—on says to apply vanilla to burns as pain relief! Not sure how I feel that. But the suggestion to look for the whitest Belgian endive because the green shows its exposed to sunlight will be more bitter is solid.
Many of the recipes have serving suggestions on how to serve the dish (buttered toast) or to pair it with another dish in the cookbook for a fuller meal. Or little notes like “don’t be too stingy” with the garlic powder or that you can use other leftover meat instead of what is called for in No Peek-E-Eggs from Samantha Lehman of the Lady Sam. Yacht chefs must have to do a lot of thinking on their feet!
All of the contributors are named along with what yacht they were affiliated with.
There was a pretty wide variety of recipes represented. A lot of fancier breakfast dishes which makes sense, a few dishes from the region there were serving like Paula Taylor (Viking Maiden)’s Conch Chowder Caribbean and a few from perhaps places the crew was from or places they have lived in before like Adriane Biggs (Taza Grande)’s Cornish Pastie which helpfully had “rutabaga” in parenthesis after the ingredient “turnip” for clarification. That is a distinction much needed (but that I rarely see) in recipes from the UK for an American audience.
There are a few recipes that are credited to guests or other people and books or have little notes. I love to see it!
There are a few pages in the back that give you the details of all the boats mentioned in the book.