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How Many cooks?

Sucal

Sucal

The Devil’s Cut
Location
Bottom of the barrel
Out of curiosity (and because I may be looking at background merits for an exalted character) how many cooks/supply stuff did a army have historically? Or even just in modern times, how many Mess Staff would be required for the average company/group of 100 men?
 
Sucal said:
Out of curiosity (and because I may be looking at background merits for an exalted character) how many cooks/supply stuff did a army have historically? Or even just in modern times, how many Mess Staff would be required for the average company/group of 100 men?
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AFAIAC a company in a modern/industrialized army might be served by kitchen section topping out at about a dozen people, many of which would be regular members of the company tapped for KP duty. Though they won't actually cook the food they're serving, just keep it warm and oversee distribution. Kitchen would probably be at least at battalion level - say about a platoon bolstered up to company strength by KP, with most of the KP handling distribution and the cooks focusing on large scale cooking, with the aim of achieving economies of scale.

For less advanced armies... For one hundred men, say one quartermaster, one cook, one field kitchen, a three or four cooks/quartermasters aides (Corporals, prolly), possibly some teamsters to handle the draft animals, and a handful of soldiers on KP whose job is either (in the field) to get the food from where the Kitchen is to where their comrades are, or (in garrison) maintenance, cleaning, filling up stores, miscellaneous make-work.
Also foraging - for foraging, imagine the Quartermaster and cook coordinates (or stays available to handle large orders and disputes), and the aides split up and take the KP to go out to ransack the local area for good forage.

EDIT: Of course, for the approximate techlevel of Exalted (which is iffy), you're probably looking at an army which still uses camp followers to handle any form of more complex cooking than heating the daily gruel (or rice, whatever) which the soldier can do himself (or, favorably, together with a few comrades). In which case you're probably looking at a handful of women (possibly wives, mothers, sisters or daughters of some of the soldiers, NCOs or officers, or other camp followers).
In such a case, the military portion would be a Quartmasters aide at the company (QM at the Regiment) whose most important task is writing down what is foraged from who and when, paying for it and making receipts etc etc. Scribeswork.
KP to get hot food from the mess to the men (if the men can't get to the mess) would still be a thing, and possibly a punishment detail unless it involves foraging, which might involve opporunities to get first pick (or maybe a bit of looting, if discipline is lax or attitudes permissive) - the regular NCO's would normally handle most of that, under the direction of the company scribe.
 
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Admiral Skippy said:
You wouldn't class a sudler as a cook?
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No more than I would call a corner store a restaurant.

Some sutlers here and there may have cooked meals but by and large they were in the business of luxuries separate from normal rations or forage, and dealing in the pillage an army tends to acquire.

Prior to the idea of the field kitchen in the 19th century the cooking in armies, including the baking of biscuits, was largely done by the combatants themselves.

Camp followers and private attendants may have done this work when and where they were allowed to parasitically attach themselves to armies, but their attention was split between a myriad of other tasks unrelated to minding a pot boil. Just as often, the work of would have been impressed as a corvee on the population of the region an army was passing through or being quartered in. No one was simply a cook minding a field kitchen as became the norm for 19th century armies.

Also, yes, at any given moment you can assume Osprey publishing is lieing to you.
 
100thlurker said:
No more than I would call a corner store a restaurant.
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I can see what you mean, but I think looking at the role of a cook as only preparing food might be too narrow a view. A proper cook has to know where they're getting their ingredients from, at what price, and how the hell they're going to be turned into food, and how long this will all take; long before a single knife is taken in hand or fire is kindled beneath a pot. Scaled to large spans of time or numbers of bellies, this becomes a task of organization and planning much like that of planning a military campaign. Which should hardly be surprising, given that an army marches on its stomach.

In the modern context for example, a high end restaurant's head chef will know what's in season, where they can source it from, at what price, and will design their menu for that week only when they know these things. They'll then run that through with their section chefs and other immediate subordinates (that number will vary depending on the size of restaurant and how classically structured it is), who will actually take charge of the cooking. The head chef will spend their time pacing the kitchen supervising (though in a well running kitchen, they shouldn't need to do too much of this)*, badgering suppliers over the phone, redesigning the menu, and designing new recipes. I make this digression only in an attempt to impress on you just how much of being a cook isn't actually about cookery, as counter-intuitive as that may be.

I haven't got my Landsknechts book on this laptop, but from what I recall, the sudler owned a bunch of ladles, minded the stockpots, and sourced stuff to go in them, right? They were essentially a quartermaster specifically tasked with food (broth, more specifically), which is what any cook actually managing a kitchen has to be. So even though they didn't actually cook meals for people, I think there's a valid sense in which you can call them at least similar to a head cook, because of the multiplicity of logistical roles that are heavily associated with stocking and managing a kitchen in the real world. I probably should have said so in my first post...

Meandering back to the point... @Sucal was asking this for the purposes of making an RPG character, right? I think a big burly fellow who carries a cast iron pot on his back, has a brace of ladels at his waist, and knows where the onions will be in any village he walks into strikes a pretty dashing (if unconventionally so) image.
 
Sucal said:
Or even just in modern times, how many Mess Staff would be required for the average company/group of 100 men?
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One or two, with maybe a pair of assistants if distribution is more complicated than dudes lining up and serving themselves. It sounds crazy, but cooking for a hundred people isn't actually as difficult as you'd think. You're certainly busier, with less time to really fiddle with the finer points of preparing food, but a lot of the modern stuff comes pre-mixed or pre-measured and you're able to save time that way so it isn't too bad.

Cleaning up after meal times can suck though.
 
Company one cook and assistant and one cook set couple of soldiers help wash up. Can team up with other companies depending how the battalion is working.
 
FWIW I watched a featurette about cooking on board what I think was an Armidale class patrol boat, which normally has a crew of 21. They had two cooks, both of whom had other duties. Food looked decent, too.
 
open_sketchbook said:
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All my hatred, I'd just gotten that song out of my head.

Apocal said:
One or two, with maybe a pair of assistants if distribution is more complicated than dudes lining up and serving themselves. It sounds crazy, but cooking for a hundred people isn't actually as difficult as you'd think. You're certainly busier, with less time to really fiddle with the finer points of preparing food, but a lot of the modern stuff comes pre-mixed or pre-measured and you're able to save time that way so it isn't too bad.

Cleaning up after meal times can suck though.
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Oh interesting, definitely wasn't as bad as I thought it would be then.

Admiral Skippy said:
Meandering back to the point... @Sucal was asking this for the purposes of making an RPG character, right? I think a big burly fellow who carries a cast iron pot on his back, has a brace of ladels at his waist, and knows where the onions will be in any village he walks into strikes a pretty dashing (if unconventionally so) image.
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Well mostly for the purposes of filling out the characters 'staff' since this version will be a general and all that. Mostly because an army marches on its stomach and I find going into silly details at times to be hilarious (and because I'm still half tempted to have a five star style head chef).
Jonen C said:
AFAIAC a company in a modern/industrialized army might be served by kitchen section topping out at about a dozen people, many of which would be regular members of the company tapped for KP duty. Though they won't actually cook the food they're serving, just keep it warm and oversee distribution. Kitchen would probably be at least at battalion level - say about a platoon bolstered up to company strength by KP, with most of the KP handling distribution and the cooks focusing on large scale cooking, with the aim of achieving economies of scale.

For less advanced armies... For one hundred men, say one quartermaster, one cook, one field kitchen, a three or four cooks/quartermasters aides (Corporals, prolly), possibly some teamsters to handle the draft animals, and a handful of soldiers on KP whose job is either (in the field) to get the food from where the Kitchen is to where their comrades are, or (in garrison) maintenance, cleaning, filling up stores, miscellaneous make-work.
Also foraging - for foraging, imagine the Quartermaster and cook coordinates (or stays available to handle large orders and disputes), and the aides split up and take the KP to go out to ransack the local area for good forage.

EDIT: Of course, for the approximate techlevel of Exalted (which is iffy), you're probably looking at an army which still uses camp followers to handle any form of more complex cooking than heating the daily gruel (or rice, whatever) which the soldier can do himself (or, favorably, together with a few comrades). In which case you're probably looking at a handful of women (possibly wives, mothers, sisters or daughters of some of the soldiers, NCOs or officers, or other camp followers).
In such a case, the military portion would be a Quartmasters aide at the company (QM at the Regiment) whose most important task is writing down what is foraged from who and when, paying for it and making receipts etc etc. Scribeswork.
KP to get hot food from the mess to the men (if the men can't get to the mess) would still be a thing, and possibly a punishment detail unless it involves foraging, which might involve opporunities to get first pick (or maybe a bit of looting, if discipline is lax or attitudes permissive) - the regular NCO's would normally handle most of that, under the direction of the company scribe.
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Roughly how many Camp Followers would a company of that size attract then? (Might be easier just to represent them).
 
I was reading this not too long ago. The earliest time period it covers, from the revolution to the Civil War, you mostly had a 'mess' of about 5-6 men, who had a head that collected funds and was in charge of procuring food. There would be a room on a ship constantly boiling water, which they would dip pudding cloths into. After it was cooked, this person would bring it back and divide it for serving amongst their mess. That system mostly went away when minimum nutritional value per day became a thing and refrigeration came soon after.

I'd have to dig out the book to give you the exact size of the mess, the number of people running the kitchen and what they were called though.
 
Given the existance of Chicken Morengo and Beef Wellington, a general's chef must be expected to improvise with whatever forage can be found to make a 5 star meal to go down in history. A general is not just a common soldier-he must entertain and eat well, sleep well, live well enough to do his job and fear not starvation or rotted food like the commoners might have to make do with.

Camp Followers can be any number, but in extreme cases might approach the size of the entire army, and consist of everything from washerwomen and prostitutes to merchants looking to sell luxuries to victorious troops or scrape up the best loot from a defeated army. One middle-ages example, the Tross followers of the Landsknechte, had 500 women and 300 children for every 1000 soldiers.
 
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