Christmas Dinner

Speaking from a kitchen in Holland, for a Christmas dinner will be cooked for a platoon of Canadian soldiers a few days from now. And one of the coaches with me, Private Frank Bali, of Port Arthur.

This kitchen has no enamel or fancy gadgets. It's in a room of a farmhouse near the front. The stove itself is one of those numbers the Army describes as a number three petrol burner. Frank, some of our listeners probably never saw one of these.

Will you describe it? Well, it's like five small ovens, laid end to end, and at one end there's a burner that shoots out the flame under pressure. It works very well. And you'll be cooking the Christmas dinner on this.

Yes, it won't be any trick this Christmas. No, I'll come. Well, pretty well our whole Christmas dinner will be out of cans this time. Well, we're getting the bird wrapped in tin this year. Yes, it isn't possible to get fresh frozen poultry up to us here.

to us here. We'll get an intense precook. That'll save a lot of cooks, a lot of work. Well, how about the other stuff, the mince pie and Christmas pudding, for instance? Yes, that's in cans too, just like our regular ration issue. Only our actual cooking here will be some celery soup which we make with powdered milk. Then we have cream potatoes and buttered carrots

and a crust for the mince pie. Oh yeah, and some gravy for the turkey meat. I see. Frank, I understand that you get these special Christmas rations on the basis of so much for each man, right? Yes, like its four ounces of Christmas pudding for each man, seven eighths of an ounce of minced meat, four ounces of poultry, three ounces of