Wot about the Horlicks tablets from the out of date dinghy survival packs?

A sought after perk for Erks in the 50's.

SASless
 

:D :ok: :)

Oh SASless, that was priceless. That is a very funny story - I have tears running down my cheeks - thank you. :)

Roger.

How about Fry's '5 Boys Chocolate' bars in the 1960's

These were later replaced IIRC by Mars bars.

Mars bars then replaced by Rolo as the troops in Norway for cold weather ops started breaking teeth (literally) on frozen Mars Bars!

S206

Were not the MRE's known as Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. :E

From the old style compo and ten man packs, my favourites were: tinned sausages; bacon grill, tinned jam, and I also liked the 'cheese possesed' too:}

I used to always look forward to opening the rolo's, just in case I ever found a packet where the foil was NOT stuck to the rolo's.


The latest packs are really good, and my new favourite (apart from the lovely packs of nuts etc) is the muesli in a pouch, which I find very refreshing.

Boil in the bag favourites are: spicy rigatoni; bacon and beans and steak veg and potatoes.

I have always liked the boiled sweets, and they are even better now that they actually come out of their wrappers without a fight, and the pale green one is just yummy.

Five Boys chocolate could still be found in compo YEARS after it had disappeared from normal circulation:


OK, maybe not quite that old!

Best compo I recall was corned dog hash. Tin of corned dog, tin of instant potato, tin of margarine. Add water to the instant potato, turn into sludge, add corned dog. Then fry in margarine.

Boiled sweets from the Mark V emergency rations were pretty good - especially the red or purple ones!

Those oatmeal biscuits were pretty damn good either dry or mushed up with milk. During brat school week up in the Brecons, a tin of mutton and peas kept the pangs of starvation at bay. Worst of all was that bog paper that was in those packs - had the absorbant qualities of steel and the softness of sandpaper.

Compo oatmeal biscuits. Perfect.

Stewing steak. Fat free. On Strike Force Dispersal, our chef used to make steak pie - it was out of this world. Often called for seconds or thirds!

Oatmeal, oatmeal, what was wrong with hard tack

Hardtack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Loved that stuff, damn pussies these days

4mastacker: youv'e given me an opening for this, sorry about it



Thanks


Damn to mutch beer

Very bored in Kenya in 88, we stole a 10 man ration pack and tipped the contents out onto the table.

We turned all the tins upside down, shuffled them up and everyone chose one.

What ever you picked, you had to eat, all of it.

I got oatmeal blocks, tough going, but not impossible. I didn't need the bathroom for a few days after that, and when it came....:eek:

One lad got two tins of margarine... he was a frequent visitor to the s**tpit.

Hardtack?? Didn't that end up as the secret ingredient in Chobham armour?

Have to say I have always been a fan of biscuits brown. My first introduction to them came on the UAS when we did a week long survival course and I overdosed on them before we left the airfield. Needless to say the guidance we had been given on field hygiene was not needed, although I nearly cracked the bowl when their effects wore off .... something like 4 days AFTER we got back.

But talking of MREs, I have to say I got rather fond of the flat bread and chilli cheese dip. Even though when eaten in 55 degree temperatures having been left in the sun for a few months, the cheese dip had exactly the opposite effect of the biscuits brown all those years before.

That said, the best thing in the MREs had to be the heating element. Just add water to the pack, drop your food in and hey presto 10 mins later a cooked meal. OR, if you're bored during your 5th month of sitting in Corps HQ in Baghdad, get several heating elements, put them in a sealable container, add water and run. They make quite an amusing bang if you put enough elements in a container with a good enough seal.

Not that I would ever encourage anybody to do anything so childish or infantile when on ops ....:E

Still got a can opener, if anyone's got an unopened can they would like to share. ;)

http://alisoncc.com/nwimages/canopener.jpg

It was hard to get a bit "Masterchef"' with the 24 hour packs. But menu A (chicken curry and rice) had some potential to make quite a decent rice pudding. Oatmel blocks could me mashed, heated with milk and crunched up biscuits AB to make passable porridge. (AB stood for Allied Bakeries BTW - I always assumed it meant "Anal Blockage" due to thier effect). And the fruitcake tasted like christmas pudding when hot.

But they were still better than MRE's. Joint Ops with the Yanks usually saw them trying to swap their Meals Rejected by Ethiopians for our compo - which we were fairly reluctant to do until it was pointed out that MREs could be used to make a fairly impressive IED. What you do is take a 1.5 litre bottle of coke and empty out or drink half the contents. Then add the contents of one self heating MRE, put the top back on tightly, shake vigoursly for about 5 seconds and then deploy. Detonation time depended on the temperature of the coke. If it had come straight from the fridge, you had time to retire at leisure before the bang. But if the coke had been sitting out in the desert sun for a while, you had better be able to sprint faster than Usain Bolt!

Beg to differ Dan. AB = Alternative, Bread

I believe the trick was to fold it in four, tear off the resulting corner and retain, unfold, push your finger through the resulting hole, use to "scoop," slide paper down finger to clean, then using retained wedge of paper, clean under ones nail..................:}:}
Remember the white shiny stuff also issued in accomodation with Government property printed on each sheet (as if anyone would steal it), It was the only Government white paper worth a sh**

Ahh the toothpaste tubes of Jam and Margarine with those hard Biccies to put it on, have still got the odd tube left, kept it as a souvenir..

Spangles, with the writing in Arabic....... prophetic that, wrappers were a permanent fixture.

Compo sausage, bacon burger stuff and babies heads...yummy

Garibaldis (fly pie) yuk!


Dan you need to get some menthos sweets, youtube menthos and coke, you will have some laughs as to what it does............

A slight side note for Dan Winterland

Meals ready to eat and their self heaters in action.... LOL

Meals; Readt To Explode Pt. 2

http://johnglennmbci.com/090720-MREs.jpg

http://www.cargolaw.com/images/disaster2001.mre.10.GIF

BTW a fantastic site to browse, and see how the boaty people get it wrong....see

The Gallery of Transport Loss

Tubes of condensed milk. You could hear peoples teeth falling out afterwards.

Bisciuts AB = Biscuits 'ard b**tards.

Crumbled oatmeal blocks mixed with the reconstituted powdered milk and bilberry flakes, plus one sachet of sugar, from a ten-man rat-pack made superb field porridge. The compo we had on the Falklands just after the landings in '82 had been boxed up in 1958! It also contained the giant Rollos we used to buy as kids. Those Dextrasol "go-faster" tablets kept most of us going on the yomp. The worst was "Bacon Grill". It consisted of bacon-flavoured grease hard-packed in even more grease. Handy for helping to waterproof boots, though.;)

No, for me it was Bacon Burger/Grill, fry it until crispy, slice and re-fry soft bit. Repeat until full.

Not bad on AB but 'no way' to AB brown or the ones with rabbit Po*h