Morgane

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific Silent Service

Silent Service: Submariner Recipes

by Morgane 2017年8月7日

Hello everyone! Tautog here. Since we just released that Navy Foods book (which, according to Zero, has a readership of like 90% female), I thought I’d write something on the subject too.

See, the Navy Foods book isn’t just a collection of U.S. Navy Cookbook recipes. It’s a way for our friends from across the ocean to understand America. Military food do tend to use the very same dishes in which you and I are familiar with, but what’s familiar to us is oftentimes alien and exotic to the folks over in Asia.

So, let’s begin, shall we?

Okay. I thought really hard about how to start this up and I think it’s best that we start from the beginning. Let’s be honest. In the K-boat and S-boat days, submarine food was universally bad. This is for a few reasons, but all of them can be boiled down to one thing.

Space.

The earliest submarines had no galley to cook from like the more modern fleet-types or even the (real) modern SSBNs. Adding something like a fridge (chillbox to you old-timey folks!) was considered to be a luxury. This was because at the time the Navy didn’t think the submarine should stay out for extended periods of time anyways. As such, there was no dedicated eating area (you ate where you slept), the food was bad, and there was virtually no variation in the menu. Hope you like hardtack and beef stew because that’s all you’re going to see for days on end!

If you’re lucky enough to have either!

Then as the Navy realized that they needed the submarine to stay out longer, things changed. Even in the early designs, food preparation became an important factor. Now there are proper galleys and storerooms and even a place for submariners to eat.

Food is important. We all like to eat. In a tough environment like the submarine, food becomes very important. Probably no other thing can help boost morale if you make something good for everyone to eat. And, doing research on this particular matter, I find it very illuminating that the things crew remember the most aren’t necessarily the adrenaline-rushed combat or the thrill of danger, but rather camaraderie, fellowship, and yup, you guessed it, the banter that happens during mealtime.

So, here are three recipes, straight from my head. I know I’m a fictional character and all, but these are based on actual recipes from veterans in Morgane’s family or other verified sources. A primary reference is of course, the U.S. Navy Cookbook. All of these have been produced in one way or another by Morgane herself, and I think they’re pretty good!

Tautog’s Tomato Sauce

You’re going to need:

About half a pound of tomatos. You can get this pre-pureed, or you can cut it up yourself and squish it into small chunks for use later.

1/2 cup of hot water

1 ounce of butter or other shortening.
half an onion
1 clove of garlic
A small amount of ordinary white flour (just enough to make the initial blend a little thick)

Salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, black pepper, cloves and cinnamon, all ground up and in a pinch. Season to your tastes.

Okay. This one’s a simple one. It’s tomato sauce. You can use tomato sauce for everything from pizza to pasta to stews to meats. It’s super versatile and easy.

This recipe is easy too. What you’re gonna do is first, add all the salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, black pepper, cloves and cinnamon in water and mix it up.

Start off on medium heat (setting 5-7) and add your butter to the stove. Wait for it to melt. When it does, add onions and garlic. Turn to high heat (8+) and quickly saute for 2-5 minutes or whenever the onions are browned and you can smell the onion.

Now, take the flour, and add it in to thicken the greasy mix you see in the pot. This is where you add the tomatoes and water. Keep on stirring (you’re still on high heat) until the mixture starts to bubble (boiling), then reduce the heat to something like a 3-5, and stir constantly for 10-15 minutes. You’ll know it’s ready when the sauce reaches an even consistency.

You want a meaty version? Add ground beef to it and stew. You can’t really go wrong with good lean beef.

Now, beef tends to be the favorite meat of submariners. We’ve already covered the roast beef in the book, and that is the most popular form of cooking beef, bar none, on a submarine. It even beats out steak for a good reason – the steaks on a submarine is generally different from steaks on shore.

See, what makes steak delicious is the fat and the bone. When you cook it, the fat melts into the meat. It looks good and tastes good. In order to save space, when submariners get their steaks it is frequently trimmed of everything. Bones, fat, you name it. Badly frozen, spoiled, or freezer-burnt steaks are all part of life on a submarine, but the cooks quickly learned to adjust accordingly.

What else do submariners eat? Pork is very popular. Pork chops are always welcome, pork roasts are popular, and glazed or cured hams are a popular alternatives. Chicken is generally well-received. Turkey, too. Shrimp tends to be the only seafood due to (again) space, but it’s generally found in Egg Foo Youngs or pastas and not a main meal.

Now, what wasn’t common in a World War 2 submarine was fish. The U.S. supply system didn’t really carry it. It was hard to store properly. If cooked badly it had a fishy taste. That, and people just liked red meats a whole lot better.

Baked salmon was the exception to the norm. This one was well-liked by the crew, though it is generally served on shore or in port rather than underway. Here’s mine, again.

Tautog’s Baked Salmon Almondine

Two decently sized salmon (about as thick as two of your thumb nails, um… size of your hand from tip of middle finger to wrist?)

A handful of coriander or 1/4 teaspoon dried coriander.

At least 2 teaspoons of lemon juice.

1/2 cup of flour.

1/4 cup of almonds (we’ll explain what this is for later!)

1 egg, beaten.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Cooking spray or butter

Okay. This one’s actually going to be really easy. First of all, I don’t know how you get your salmon. If it’s with skin, just bake with the skin on the bottom. If it’s without skin (you don’t have to de-skin it if you don’t want to!) then read on.

Chop up the almonds into as small pieces as you’d like. What you’re going to do is first, lightly flour your salmon. Just the one side is going to be good enough if you have salmon with skin.

Then, take your salt/pepper mixture and sprinkle it all over the salmon.

Take a brush or pour the egg mixture onto your salmon. Generously add almonds. The almonds should “stick” to the fish and forming something like a coated layer. This is what we want.

Now, drizzle with lemon juice. Add coriander.

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Bake until crust hardens (depending the size of your oven).

If you don’t have an oven at home, no problems. Take a pan. Add butter or your favorite cooking oil. Put on high heat and toss the salmon in. It takes maybe 3-4 minutes for one side, and 2-3 minutes for the other. You’ll know when it’s cooked when it’s golden brown.

Now, I know you’re thinking. “Tautog! What about the Tautog! Could you bake a Tautog?”

The answer is no.

Tautog should be grilled. It is probably the best grilling fish you can get this side of the Pacific. Baking Tautog is kind of a waste of the fish, if you ask me.

So, how should you do it? Well. Here’s another one of mine. This isn’t a submarine recipe. More like a submarine base recipe. But, it’s delicious and it’s also pretty lazy!

Tautog’s Grilled Tautog

Tautog filet. IMPORTANT: LEAVE THE SKIN ON.

I repeat, leave the skin and the scale on. You’ll see why.

Tautog Marinade:

Olive oil, lemon, crushed garlic, crushed black pepper. You’re going to want enough olive oil to cover your tog (I sometimes just get a ziplock bag and fill it up and stick the fish in).

Okay. This is super easy and super simple. Notice there’s no salt in the marinade. That’s because you salt the fish after it comes out.

Toss your Tautog in the marinade. Let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. Then what you want to do in the meantime is to heat up a skillet or a wok. Use high heat.

(Yes, you don’t even need a grill for this one. Handy, isn’t it?)

Wait until your skillet is super hot. Add a tiny bit of oil to the bottom. Then, toss the Tautog in, scale-side down.

That’s it. Put the lid back on. Wait and watch the fish. The reason why we keep the scale and the skin is that the scale and skin will take the brunt of the heat, meaning that you don’t have to flip the fish or anything and you can just let the Tautog cook. If your fish is a whole fish, you probably want to flip it once. Other than that it’s exactly the same.

This doesn’t take too long. You’ll know it’s ready when the Tautog starts to “chip” as it “falls apart.” The exact time will depend on the thickness of your fish. Generally from my experience it takes anywhere from 3 to 15 minutes (Tautog are big fish!)

…You know, I’m hungry now. I’m gonna go look for food. See you next time!

出席展会·Events, 前线来信·Mail call

CD20 Adventures: US Navy Foods

by Morgane 2017年8月5日

I’ll have more pictures from Zero soon enough. This, though, is adorable.

Yeah. That’s Baicai’s art. He said he’s gotten rusty since he hasn’t drawn anything in a long while. I think it’s still adorable.

(The sign says “Doujinshi is 30 RMB. Ice cream is free. Zero reserves all rights for actual explanations.”)

(Yes. We’re giving out ice cream for the Navy Foods book. It’s uh, just like the loot we typically give out at conventions. And yes, Zero tried the actual recipe I gave him for hand-made ice cream. His feedback to me was apparently “not enough details” and “my arms are stiff.” xD)

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific Lore

[Lore] Timeline changes: the USA

by Morgane 2017年8月4日

I’ve been mulling over the timeline and something doesn’t quite measure up. Care to clarify for me how this came about?

As you mention repeatedly, most countries appear to be “doing better” comparatively to where they are in real life. The Soviet Union is, in your own words, hale and hearty and provides an ideological balance to the West. My personal distaste for communism aside, how did this come about?

In real life, as you are aware, a wave of communist uprisings occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, even if the Soviet Union did not care for intervention, the United States certainly did. I name, in historical chronological order, the US interfered in places such as the Korean peninsula, Syria, Iran, Guatemala, Tibet, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, various parts of Africa, Guyana, so and so forth, eventually resulting in Vietnam in the 1970s.

Let us assume for a moment that the Soviet Union is as “good” as they claim to be. Given significant support of the US to the above operations historically, how do you plan on explaining the lack of popular and political support for such interventions in Pacific’s setting?

Good question. As usual, I love it when a question is thoughtful and detailed. It’s also a chance for me to step back from planning and writing and well, flex some muscles once in a while.

The shorter version is that diplomacy and the Korean War.

The short version of this is that from a thematic perspective, it is necessary for Pacific to build a less interventionist America in order to make the entire world work. To create a world with multiple competing great powers, it necessitates “nerfs” to certain historical actions that would have cemented America’s status as a superpower in the world. This basically means that UK and Japan need to be powerful, even major local powers with (some) ability to influence global politics.

Using East Asia as an example. Japan’s strategic independence happened around the 80s, more or less, but it’s currently hemmed in by a very hostile USSR (some of the Lens of History’s already hinted at this – you’ll see) and a growing China, which is (strangely enough) playing something of a role similar to a very aggressively developing yet very non-interventionist Switzerland. It’s not firmly aligned with the USSR despite both countries being communist, and it’s not really courting the US either. In short, it’s just kind of there… doing its own thing.

What caused this to happen are basically two significant events. The loss of the US Pacific fleet – as noted in AR, and the Korean War, where Pacific’s timeline formally diverges from our real life one today. What happened was that the Chinese took and inflicted far more casualties than they did historically, and the USSR was on the verge of direct military intervention. Stalin was also more than happy to freely unload the excessive military build-up onto China, and Soviet Lend-lease, for what it’s worth, made it extremely costly for the UN (but let’s be honest, it’s mostly the US) forces.

Just how bloody? I’ll give you a hint. It’s easily in the six digit casualty (death, not wounded) range. At a minimum that’s 2.5x more (give or take) than the historical Korean War. As you can imagine this war did not sit well with people at home. The US military was a bit like a man half-drunk at the time. It had been disarmed and then hastily rearmed. Most of its veterans have left service, returning to civilian life. Morale is understandably low (The South Koreans didn’t help. They engaged in scorched earth tactics just like the North Koreans did and news coverage of Syngman Rhee really didn’t help things along) both at home and abroad. By 1951, in Pacific’s timeline, support for the war have dipped below 50%. When Soviet lend-lease kicked in and the coffins seriously started to come home at an alarming rate, support dropped even further. Eisenhower’s refusal to declare war on the USSR really didn’t sit well with the anti-communist Republicans (and Democrats), while those concerned for their own re-election in an unpopular war wanted out. It was just a mess.

For the record, Europe is on the verge of unrest. When the Suez canal incident (also ahistorical in Pacific) occurred in 1954, the Korean War is still going on. Faced with the French collapse in Indochina, social upheaval in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, regime change in the Middle East, and political intrigue in Europe. Add the threat of that Abyssal invasion on top of it, and you can probably see just how Eisenhower, at least, finally lost patience trying to play World Police.

With the Korean War finally ending in 1956, the CIA in Pacific’s timeline was not given nearly as much independence or support as it did in real life. Other presidents didn’t really seem to be interested in expanding the scope of its activities either. STEC is also something of a chip that each administration can in theory wield directly – power of the executive branch, indeed. That reduces incentive to fund the CIA as well.

Note that despite STEC not being used politically, it basically allowed for significant off-the-record interactions diplomatically between the US and the USSR (and other countries). While Stalin himself (at least to STEC’s current knowledge) has never disclosed whether or not he’s taking the Abyssal threat seriously, there are many senior members in the USSR that do, chief among them General Secretary and eventually Premier Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Marshalls Rokossovsky and Zhukov.

This tradition of diplomacy basically gave those involved in STEC, at least, huge amounts of bargaining power politically, since they know – without others knowing that they know – generally what the actual opinions are coming from the other powers.

Hope that answers the question somewhat. I got home super late today. x)

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific Historical Inspirations, Silent Service

[Tautog’s Sub Corner] Code Breaking 101

by Morgane 2017年8月3日

Tautog here, again! I’m sorry if you’re tired of seeing my mug, but Morgane’s been busy with the upcoming book releases, and so I’m down here holding the fort instead.

Today I want to talk about something that actually mattered a lot in the early days of the Silent Service. Specifically, the period around 1942 where things were really looking bad. Our story takes place in January of 1942.

The ocean was a pretty big place. How did the US submarines know what to hit, and where?

Well, you really have the Japanese to thank for that. In those early days, the IJN got super careless and started to broadcast announcements on a regular base from their big naval base at Truk. For whatever reason, they not only kept to the same route, but the information would come at noon every day.

Naturally, the submariners wanted to jump on this. Command, however, had other ideas. They were a bit hesitant in letting the submarines attack on the grounds that the Japanese might get suspicious and in turn, change up their codes.

Codebreaking is pretty hard business. So I think I should explain the basics real quick. Coding is substituting a letter, word, number, or concept with something else. This everyone get intuitively. For instance, let’s make a new cipher with s = submarine, u = u-boat, and b = buoyancy.

If I say to you SUBMARINE U-BOAT BUOYANCY you’ll immediately get that I’m really telling you “sub.” I can shift the letters around a bit, and say, s = tautog, u = victory, b = carrier. But even this message here – TAUTOG VICTORY CARRIER – would be easily broken because that’s what cryptologists are trained to do. They can recognize these patterns and try to match it to known linguistic patterns through mathematical analysis.

So, to beat this, we do something called encryption. There are many methods for encryption, but the easiest way to do it is to do something to some numbers. In the previous example, let’s say that we made it so that s = 1, u = 2, and b = 3. We can do something to each number, let’s say, multiple everything by itself.

That way, I can send a code that says 1-4-9, and only if you knew my “decrypt” – that is, the proper mathematical answer to the question would you be able to realize that the message I’m really sending is 1-2-3. Even then, you still need to figure out what “1,” “2,” and “3” are. See how this is a lot more secure?

Now, the Japanese naval code was exceptionally difficult to break. JN-25 is what we call a “superenciphered” code. In order to send or receive anything, you needed three books.

The first book had about thirty-three thousand words and letters that had a random five-digit number next to it. The only thing we know is that all these numbers are divisible by three (just in case there’s an error!)

The second book is a “decode” book. It’s pretty simple. It’s like a phone book where you can look up what the corresponding code is.

Now, you might be thinking. That’s a lot of words, but surely the more common words like Tokyo or Battleship or Fleet would pop up regularly. You’d be right. In order to make it more secure, there’s an encryption book. This book had a page number on each page. On each page there would be several tables. On each one of those tables, they had their own identifier, and within the table there are cells with random five-digit numbers in them.

So, here’s how this is actually going to work.

(Photo take from “A Tale of Two Subs”)

Let’s say I want to send a message. “Tautog is happy.” In the normal code situation, it might look something like 00003-00006-00009. To superencrypt this, I go to that table up there, and pick something random.

Let’s just say that this is page 10. I pick column 0, row 1. It’s 24421. Using a Fibonacci subtraction (where the numbers don’t affect the next column), I subtract this number to my first code, 00003. I get 86682. Moving onto the next word, 00006 (is), I move across the table and subtract 43472, getting 67634. So on and so forth.

Then I can make some sort of a code to tell my guy, you need to go to page 10, find the 3rd table, look at column 0, and start on row 1. So it’d be 10301 or something like that.

So now literally I will send you a garbled list of numbers. 88682-67634-91778-10301. Because you also have an encryption book, you can look it up, do the proper math, and then figure out what I’m communicating. Get it now?

(Side note! We’ve got an even better of this thing called ECM-2. It was never broken, too! But we’ll talk about that some other time. Gah, I’m turning into Morgane with this level of off-topic rambling…)

Now, imagine that you didn’t have either of the books on hand. You had neither the decrypt information nor the actual code.

all you had were numbers.

What’s worse, it’s not like the Japanese language is easy, either. Japanese have four alphabets that they could use. They have kanji, in which a single “sound” can mean a full word. Katakana and hiragana are closer to how we would understand an alphabet, and romaji – the Roman alphabet – is used to actually encrypt and decrypt these messages to begin with.

Think about the brain power it takes to find meaning out of thirty plus thousand individual “words” that are used to transcribe a subtle and complicated language.

Remember that Japanese are missing some sounds, too, so it makes reading doubly difficult. “Langley” is very likely actually transcribed as “Rangrey” if a Japanese speaker was pronouncing it.

Then realize that we not only managed to read bits of it, but we managed to figure out just what it is that the Japanese are trying to do.

Realize that if the codebreakers got it wrong, massive loss of life and material could result. After the success that was Pearl Harbor, the IJN was trying to knock us out of the war. Suppose we get it wrong and we lose the last of our bases in the Pacific.

It’s gonna be a much, much longer war then, isn’t it?

Well, guess what? The codebreakers were very good. I’m going to talk about some of the earlier Silent Service battles in a later post – probably right around the time I finish up the early designs section. But just know that the submariners took the information very seriously, and just as they managed to deliver, so did the Silent Service.

See ya next time!