Narrowboat Travel
The first thing anyone says when they step into a narrowboat galley is some variation of: 'How do you cook in here?' The honest answer is that you cook exactly the same way you do at home, just with more swearing and a stricter relationship with your worktop. A typical galley gives you a couple of feet of counter, a hob, a small oven and a fridge that runs on twelve volts and holds roughly one and a half shopping bags. Within a week, you stop noticing.
The trick is to think vertically and to think in one pot. On a boat, every pan you use is a pan you have to wash in a sink the size of a washing-up bowl, and every surface you cover is a surface you can't use for anything else. So the galley cook learns to build meals that go from hob to bowl with minimal ceremony.
Risotto, dal, stews, pilafs, big pasta dishes finished in their own sauce — these are the backbone of boat cooking. They use one ring, one pan and one spoon, and they forgive the fact that your oven is small and slightly unpredictable. A good cast-iron casserole dish earns its keep twice over: it works on the hob, goes in the oven, and stays warm long enough for a second helping while you wash up.
Stock up on ingredients that do a lot of work for their size. A jar of good curry paste, a tin of anchovies, a lump of parmesan, a lemon, a bunch of flat-leaf parsley — these turn a bag of rice and a couple of onions into something you'd happily serve to guests. Fresh herbs are worth the fridge space; wilting salad leaves are not. And if you have a cratch cover or a pram hood, you've got a cool, dark larder for vegetables that would otherwise sweat in the cabin.
Narrowboat ovens tend to run hot at the back and cool at the front, so rotate trays halfway through and don't trust the dial. A cheap oven thermometer clipped to the shelf will change your baking life. Bread, traybakes, roast chicken pieces and whole roasted vegetables all work well once you learn your oven's quirks. Full-size cakes are ambitious; muffins, scones and small loaves are not.
The fridge demands a different discipline. Plan meals for two or three days at a time rather than a week, shop little and often in the villages you pass through, and treat the freezer compartment as a bonus rather than a plan. Many boaters keep a cool box in the well deck in winter and use the fridge for dairy and leftovers only. It sounds restrictive. In practice, it means you eat fresher food than most people ashore, and you learn to cook what's actually in front of you. The galley is small. The cooking doesn't have to be.
