Vietnam Veteran Keeps Vow, Eats 40-Year-Old Cake
 

With all the other stories out there here is a nice one:

Vietnam Veteran Keeps Vow, Eats 40-Year-Old Cake

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,534776,00.html

"Moak got the drab olive can as a Marine helicopter pilot off the Vietnamese coast in 1973. He vowed to hang on to it until the day he retired, storing it in a box with other mementos."

A grunt would have kept a can of peaches to go with it.

Wonder if he used a P-38 to opent that can? Ive got a case of C Rats from that same time period. Dont think I'd be bold enough to try them.

Hard to tell what kind of fellow he is, but you have to admire the man's sense of style. Hope he has a good and long retirement. Wonder if he saved the can.

An incomplete meal
 

But without a can of peaches whats the point?:D

P-38
 

The story on CNN.com shows a pic of him opening it, with the P-38. :)

My dad always talks about how what he misses from his time in service is the local food from the Philippines. The real nasty sounding stuff...Balut, fermented fish(he never could think of the name), but his favorite was monkey.

My ex has a taste for 'fish sauce'...once I told him where to find it in DC/Balt..his effing boat smells like fish sauce now.. ewwww..
What can I say, he was once one of 'Uncle Sam's Misguided Children"...
Putting helos into impossible places and getting it out in one piece was his speicalty..

It is truly amazing what people will eat when they are hungry... btw... cans are good as long as they don't have rust or bulge. Open it up, IF the prior criteria is met.. smell if it, smells off... be carefu.. otoh... stuff that smells funny can be due to age or how it was packed.. can still be good..I am not that adventurous though.

I recall reading, back in the 1980's, in the Rocky Mtn News about a cache of canned goods found in what appeared to be a winter camp had canned peaches that were still good..I believe they were dated to the late 1800's.

What a coincidence!

I recently opened some 70s vintage C-Rats and 80s era MREs and offered to share them with my kids.

We tossed anything that had swelled or that seemed off.

The crackers in the B-2 units were stale, but edible. The gum was okay. The John Wayne bar was in pretty bad shape.

The chocolate cookie from the MREs was still edible and not too bad, as was the freeze dried fruit. The Beef Hash was deemed inedible, but it came that way when it was new.

TR

Same way with C-Rats. Four things will last forever: Pound Cake, Beef Hash, Beans and M/F and Cockroaches.

Down here we call it tinabal. Good stuff. :)

He also talks about how he loved a "tomato based SOS". Sound familiar to anyone? If I were to somehow come up with a rough recipe I think I would officially be my dad's favorite son! :D

I bet that cake was a little crunchy after four decades.

I ate quite a few C Rations and remember that they used to constipate me something terrible. They were better than MREs though. At least you felt full after eating them. Being that they were in metal cans they were much easier to heat than MREs.

Does anybody remember peanut butter claymores? He-he!

Good old C rations.....:rolleyes: In the mid 50's we would wrap the cans that had "grease" in them with como wire around the manifold of a jeep to heat them up.....You'd be surprised how much better they tasted,more like gravy and nice and hot.......... ;) I never had MREs until Katrina,then I survived about 5 weeks on them,both Maggie and I, since that was the only food available at that time.......:)

Big Teddy :munchin

Fruit Cake
 

I notice everyone "forgot" to mention Fruit Cake.

You know, that brown looking chunk with bits of rocks in it.

Not as bad as the Chocolate Nut Roll.

You could drop one of those into a five-gallon can of water, and 60 seconds later, it would be empty.

I really learned to hate Eunice King.:D

TR

TR - the Chocolate Nut roll was great for one reason (besides the taste, yummy) you were full for 2 days after eating it....

At my Grandparent's 50th Anniversary party in 1951, we ate some of their original wedding cake. I believe it had been wrapped in waxed paper and stored in a tin box. It was rum cake/fruit and still tasted good....a heck of a lot better than the C-Rat variety!!

All this talk is making me REALLY hungry!!! Hmmm...give me warmed up Ham & Limas or Ham & Eggs Chopped, with some Tabasco and a can of hot Carling Black Label...can't you just taste it?

I still carry one of the P-38s that I got at Camp Mackall in '69!!

No, but I can smell it!!! Beer and egg farts. :eek:

The only use I ever had for the Ham & Limas was to string antenna wire over tree limbs!

Out side of two meals, I liked Cs a lot. BTW, there is a better term of endearment for Ham and ______ (a bean). It was rumor that even Charlie did not like them.

The down side was heat tabs, never saw one in country. The abstinence of heat tabs was the cause for Claymore inspections. The best meal were Long Rats (Marine name) for LURRPS(?) Freeze dried. They were consider a delicacy.

I believe most were made by Mountain House in Albany Oregon.

Back then I was a smoker(quit about 30 years ago) and I remember Lucky Strikes in a green circle,instead of the red one they have now. :rolleyes: When we had C's they were only about 10-15 years old after WW2 so the smokes believe it or not weren't stale!!!:p The cocoa (circular hard powdered bars) were chewed on instead of put in hot water to make the drink.:cool: Any one know when MRE's replaced the C's?

Big Teddy :munchin

Chicken Stew
 

Had the Mountain House Chicken Stew a few months back - Yeap, tasted just like I remembered from the LRRPs. IIRC it was Long Range Ration Patrol.

Got a Beef Stew in the Cabinet - need to fire that puppy up and check it out.

Just don't use canteen water with a lot of iodine in it when you mix up a Scalloped Potatoes meal :eek:

Mid-'80s.

We were in the SFQC in '84 and half the class got MREs for RS, the other half (mine) got the C-Rats.

We were envious, as the weight difference (and meals) were substantial.

TR

The funny thing about Long rats/LRRPs (Thanks that is the name) was it was a court martial offense to eat one during the monsoon. One of the other thing we did not have was any kind of purification tablets. Most grunts preferred the taste of L'eau de Bomb crater over what the Doc's in the rear playing with the water.

We were generally short on rations, I went from 165 pounds to 125 pounds in about 5-6 months. One reason some would say, "We had Long rats, short rats and fat rats."

I still love freeze dried.

In the mid-80's I ate a c-rat that was canned in 1943, and lived. :lifter

And most kids just get mac-n-cheese :) This is why it is cool to have an Army dad. My girls are toddlers, and they already know 100 mile-an-hour tape can fix almost anything. I haven't let them venture into the MRE's yet. I want to wait until the youngest is fully potty trained before we go on that adventure!

Congratulations to Colonel Moak on his retirement.

Heat tabs...no, I don't remember any either. However, we seemed to always have enough C-4, quicker heat up anyway.

Good ole Eunice King's Kitchen in Sherman, TX
 

Eunice King's Kitchen is still in business in Sherman, TX. I visited the factory recently and spoke to a company rep that stil remembered that the Fruit Cake, Pound Cake and assorted Nut Rolls were a mainstay of the company in the 60s through the 80s. They lost the contract in 83 when MREs were brought out.

They still manufacture the fruit cake and it is marketed as Texas Yahoo Cake. I used to trade for the fruit cake because it was the only thing a homesick Texan could identify truly as being from home. The fruit cake was fine if you placed it on an exhaust manifold of a running 10 KW generator. Really good if you added the peaches.

You are a rare individual if you can eat the Fruit Cake, much less enjoy it. That thing should have an FDA warning label on the can.

The Orange Nut Cake sucks pretty badly as well, especially with the big chunks of peel.

The Chocolate Nut Roll is edible, but barely, and only if you have planty of liquid to drink.

The Cinnamon Nut roll would have been better with more sugar, or a glaze, as it is tremendously dry to boot.

The most amazing thing is that a company can bake a true gourmet Pound Cake, and also bake and sell the above atrocities.

TR

Amnesty International won't shut up about Gitmo but they won't say a thing about US servicemembers being fed Beef with Mushrooms MREs. Torquemada himself could not have engineered a better meal but where's the outrage from the "waterboarding is torture" crowd?

SFC W

Dry Cakes
 

Now that technique of placing a small hole on the edge of the can, dribbling in a few good size drops of water and then placing on a grasshopper stove until the steam stopped worked pretty well.

Rather hit or miss. I think it came out great about half the time and 1/4 soggy cake bottom and 1/4 burnt cake bottom but with time to kill......

I put some Iodine treated water into my Indig Ration's Rice bag one morning. At lunch, when I pulled it out of my ruck, I thought that I was hallucinating!!!! The rice was so PURPLE, it looked like it was plugged in!!!

Groovy, magic rice! Like totally psychedelic man!:D

TR you mention "glaze". You are very right. Frosting made all the difference! Chocklet frosting was possible with a packet of cocco powder and 22 drops of water (not 21 and definately not 23). One cold rainy fall day at Santa Barbara* Range in ROK we had a FO who was all sad about rain on his birthday (what a lousy liar! he was really bummed that he was at St Barbara's Range* spotting mortar rounds for Buffalos (1-17 I Mech Inf). We frosted a pound cake and stuck a match in it.
* I can't remember which it was, that range, Santa or Saint.

Here's some video of the COL chowing down.

http://www.clipsyndicate.com/video/p..._year_old_cake