A very underappreciated aspect of polar expeditions is the food, the rationing and the Cook himself.
The cook ranked as one of the most important members, although his kitchens had little more than a Primus stove, ingredients either canned or scrounged everyone counted on him.

If ever a place existed where it was better that food be had than talked about, it is Antarctica. The continent has no forests, pastures, prairies, or rivers. Its frigid wastes cover an area larger than India and China combined. It is quite literally like no other place on earth.

To find its an equivalent, one has to look to outer space. Even such an inhospitable place though made for a great deal of inked pages, describing their hardhips and preoccupations, often caused by the lack of food.
“Feel starving for food….Talk of it all day.” wrote Shackleton.

On their way to the Pole, an ice chasm had swallowed their sole remaining pony, and the lost animal’s burden thus became theirs. Each crew member pulled a sledge loaded with some 70 pounds of supplies, straining muscles left cramped by nights spent in ice-rimed sleeping bags.

Yet frostbite and charley horses pained them less than the hunger they felt. Their rations nearly exhausted, they knew starvation loomed.  “Short food and a blizzard wind from the south.” In four months they had enjoyed only one full meal.

“The group’s thin hooshes … could not compensate for the thousands of calories burned daily while hauling their heavy sledge” he wrote. A man pulling a sledge burned more calories a day than does one pedaling a bicycle in the Tour de France.

When hunger pinched, Shackleton and his men joked about food. When hunger gnawed, food became no laughing matter. More treasured than bibles were cookbooks they brought along on the trip. They studied the recipes, annotated them, and argued over the ingredients and preparation.

The annals of Antarctic exploration abound with colorful depictions of beloved cooks. Rozo, the popular cook of Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s 1903 French Antarctic Expedition, offers a fine example. An air of mystery surrounded him. No one knew his true name or age because he...

fraternized little, preferring the company of Toby, the expedition’s pet pig, to that of his fellow crew. He read widely and had a quick wit. Yet he hated to wear socks and would instead pad about in old house shoes that he slipped over his bare feet.

Indeed, his quirks and culinary skills combined to make him seem larger than life. “He was like someone from a novel,” Charcot recalled, “and we almost expected him to arrive one day and announce … that he knew a very easy way to the Pole itself.”

But Rozo knew no way and the French expedition penetrated no further than the Antarctic coast. The Norwegians were the first to reach the South Pole in 1911. Led by Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian expedition featured its own treasured cook, a man by the name of Lindstrøm.

From his tiny hut one could smell his seal stew and stacks of buckwheat pancakes slathered in cloud berries. He would cook in such a way as to preserve as much of the food’s nutritional value as possible. “A better man has never set foot inside the polar regions,” wrote Amundsen.

Any worthy cook knew how to transform the Antarctic’s wildlife into palatable fare. A dish of penguin prepared for the American explorer Frederick Cook tasted to him like “a piece of beef, and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce"

Clissold, cook for R. Scott’s 1910 British exp. brought seal meat within kissing distance of haute cuisine. His seal rissoles sent the crew into raptures.
"It is the first time I have tasted seal without being aware of its particular flavor,” Scott wrote after tasting his cuisine

But nothing could match a tin of peaches when it came to comfort and reassurance. Shackleton understood this. He famously hid away jam, chocolate, anchovies, and other treats to give his men whenever he sensed their spirits sink.