Laskier, Frank "Alfred and the Staff of Life."

Laskier's comic World War 2 tale of a ship's cook who couldn't even boil water has an unexpected post-War denouement. Told mostly in flashback aboard the freighter TARELA during a voyage from the East Coast to the Persian Gulf, Laskier's cook is young, inexperienced first-timer Alfred Gilhooley. Never having cooked before, Gilhooley proceeds to botch just about everything he tries to prepare for the TARELA's famished crew. Only bread finally comes out O.K., and that's because a savvy A.B. teaches Gilhooley the trick of simply using seawater for the bread recipe's required water ingredient. Gilhooley gets his seawater from one of the TARELA's seawater intake pumps, which is fine when the ship is far out to sea but disastrous when he uses the oily, smelly, dirty (and dog-carcass infected) waters of the Persian Gulf! A fast forward to present day 1947. Laskier's narrator, a seaman returning to his Boston docked ship, stops in at an inviting diner and, to his surprise, finds Alfred Gillhooley at its counter. "Everything's on the house," cries Alfred, happy to see an old sea mate. Remembering Alfred's "unskill" as a chef, our narrator reluctantly tastes a little of this, then a lot of that. The food is wonderful! What happened? A culinary miracle? Well, no, Alfred reluctantly admits - he didn't cook a morsel of the diner's fare: his wife did. Seems he married after the War and along with wifey acquired the diner. Since said wife has had her own first hand experience with his horrific cooking, Alfred was quickly relegated to taking orders at the counter - while his wife does all the diner's (delicious) cooking!