Researchers Recreate 17th-Century Shipboard Recipes to Explore Culinary History

According to ship logs and sailors' journals, the food situation during early transatlantic voyages was nothing short of dismal.

In his 1573 letter, famously known as “The Landlubber’s Lament,” Spanish explorer Eugenio de Salazar lamented, “The sea refuses to preserve any meat or fish unless it’s heavily salted.” He criticized the strict water rations, measured “like medicine,” and described meals served on wooden plates as “tough beef joints with half-cooked tendons.” He even claimed some food was so “putrid and foul” that losing your sense of taste and smell might make it easier to stomach.

While most chefs would prefer to forget this bleak chapter of culinary history, a team of archaeologists in Texas is embarking on a unique project to replicate the diet of 17th-century sailors. Their goal is to uncover insights into the nutritional challenges faced by seafarers of the time.

“We rely on modern methods to assess health from historical contexts,” explains Grace Tsai, the project lead and a doctoral candidate in Texas A&M University’s nautical archaeology program. “However, you can’t determine the nutritional content of historical food without recreating it using authentic recipes and conducting lab tests.”

In recent months, Tsai and her team have been refining 17th-century recipes for staples like ship’s biscuit (a durable, dry cracker) and salted meat. On August 19, they loaded their supplies into the cargo hold of Elissa, a 19th-century tall ship docked in Galveston. Over the next three months, they’ll conduct nutritional and microbial analyses on the food every 10 days.

In the absence of canning or refrigeration, salting was the go-to method for preserving food during long voyages. When sailors arrived in new territories, they preserved any animals they could hunt. Richard Wilk, an anthropologist at Indiana University not involved in the project, notes that there are records of sailors in the Southern Hemisphere preserving penguins in salt. “Essentially, if it was meat and could be salted and dried, they carried it with them,” Wilk tells Mytour.

Accounts from European ships between the 16th and 18th centuries frequently mention salted beef, akin to corned beef, as a staple provision, Tsai explained. Her team prepared salted beef and pork by butchering a steer and a hog. They modeled their meat cuts on bones recovered from the wreck of the Warwick, an English galleon that sank near Bermuda in 1619 while en route to Jamestown, Virginia. Using a 1682 English text on food preservation, they sourced salt from France and collaborated with Texas environmental officials to obtain the purest river water for their brine.

Beer, though likely warm and flat, was crucial for voyages. Beyond its role as a social drink, it was often safer than water and provided calories, nutrients, and probiotics, Tsai noted. A popular American legend suggests beer influenced the Mayflower pilgrims’ choice to settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As Governor William Bradford wrote in his diary, “We could not now take time for further search or consideration, our victuals being much spent, especially our Beere.”

In November, Tsai intends to add barrels of 17th-century-style English beer to the Elissa. To enhance authenticity, her team is attempting to obtain yeast from 220-year-old beer bottles discovered in an Australian shipwreck. (Karbach Brewing Company, a project sponsor, plans to produce a commercial version of this historical beer.)

Fluctuating temperatures, humidity, and the motion of the waves likely impacted food on early transatlantic journeys. To replicate these conditions, the researchers are storing their provisions aboard the Elissa rather than in a lab. They anticipate finding not only microbial colonies but also insects. “Ship’s biscuit almost always attracted weevils,” Tsai said. English sailors, adhering to tradition, stored the crackers in canvas bags rather than airtight containers, leaving them vulnerable to mold and moisture.

In some respects, the Texas project isn’t entirely groundbreaking. Recently, brewers have revived ancient Egyptian ales and Iron Age meads, while experimental archaeologists have recreated Stone Age cooking and butchering methods. Food historian Ken Albala from the University of the Pacific noted that places like Hampton Court Palace, Colonial Williamsburg, and Plimoth Plantation regularly serve historical meals, though they often avoid risky preservation techniques. “Modern people are very cautious about food poisoning, so such experiments are usually outside their comfort zone,” Albala, who isn’t involved in the Texas project, told Mytour.

Tsai experienced these limitations firsthand during her research at Colonial Williamsburg. Dressed as a colonial boy (adult attire was too large for her), she spent two weeks behind the scenes at the living history museum, learning to handle the oak barrels she’ll use for the project. She observed that the museum’s cooks used a brine recipe requiring 35 pounds of salt for 8 gallons of water, while her 17th-century recipes specify that the brine is ready when it can float an egg. “That’s significantly less salt,” Tsai noted. While reenactors often adjust recipes for safety, the Texas team is committed to historical accuracy.

When the barrels are opened, the team will analyze the food for caloric content, water content, sodium, vitamins, and minerals. Tsai is especially curious about the bacteria present—not just harmful pathogens but also beneficial probiotics.

“We rarely consume foods with probiotics today, and when we do, they’re limited to specific types,” Tsai said. She believes sailors consumed a wider variety of microbes than we do now, and studying these organisms could reveal how the human gut microbiome has evolved with modern dietary and hygiene practices.

“If done correctly, the food should remain edible, but whether it meets modern scientific standards of being 'safe to eat' is hard to predict,” Albala said. “Historically, food often spoiled on ships, and sailors had no choice but to eat it. Throwing it away would have been a rare luxury.”

Due to safety regulations (and institutional review board restrictions), Tsai and her team won’t sample the meat stored on the Elissa. However, after preparing salted beef from Colonial Williamsburg, Tsai described its flavor: “It had a metallic taste, similar to the sensation of a bloody nose.”