Cooking Was His Hobby—Now It's His Job

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 214, 30 July 1943, Page 8

Cooking Was His Hobby—Now It's His Job

IRGIL BLANTON, U.S, Navy \/ cook, who will be heard singing from 1YA this Saturday evening (July 31), appears to be one of the lucky ones among the world’s workers-his hobby has become his daily job, and he still likes it. He has been singing since he was 13, cooking since he was 15, and from the way he talks, one would expect him still to be cooking his own meals for pleasure, even if he succeeds in his ambition of becoming a third Nelson Eddy (Richard Tauber is the second, it seems). So we talked about cooking. How did he come to be a cook in the U.S. Navy? "Well, one day my mother was going to town, and she didn’t have time to make the biscuits for supper before she went. So I said I'd make the biscuits. But she told me to lay off the biscuits, because she’d make them when she came home. But I was determined to make them myself, so when she was out of sight, I mixed them up and cooked them, and they were very nice biscuits, though kinda large. When my mother came home, she agreed they were nice biscuits. But my stepfather said they were nice biscuits, too, and he asked her: ‘Did you make the biscuits?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘Virgil made the biscuits.’ I went right on cooking from then on." He quit school, he said, and joined a Civil Conservation Camp as cook, And when he joined the Navy he was soon cooking there, too. Now he cooks for 95 officers, and apparently wouldn’t change jobs with them. "There’s only one thing wrong with your New Zealand cooking," he said. "You don’t decorate it right. Now you take take a piece of meat and put it on a plate: well, it doesn’t look interesting. But you take the same piece of

meat and put it in a lettuce leaf and arrange the vegetables round it just soit’s quite a different matter, A man’s eyes are bigger than his stomach, you know." He told us, free; how to make asparagus soup. It sounded so jolly we reproduce it: "Throw a pound of butter into some boiling water and let it melt, and then empty in six or eight cans of asparagus-crush the asparagus-heat it through, and there’s your soup!" In his language, meat is ground, not minced; and he astonished us with the revolutionary doctrine that it is the cooking and the decoration, not the cut of the meat, that counts (though he almost convinced us about this when he described a dish which he called Creamed Ground Beef on Toast). On the whole, we felt peckish by the time we had finished listening to Virgil Blanton. If his singing is as entertaining as his cooking talk, he can’t be far behind the heels of Messrs, Tauber and Eddy already, we decided.