How was food, china, flatware, and glassware stocked, stored, prepared and served on 19th century passenger ships like the Titanic, the Majestic, the Lusitania, the Olympic, and others? An article from THE WAY OF THE WORLD AT SEA, by W.J. GORDON, in ‘The Leisure Hour’ Volume 42, dated 1893, gives some insight in the text excerpted below or see original link HERE.

“All this catering means work under peculiarly trying circumstances, inasmuch as the workers have to look pleasant at it at all hours. Even an ordinary passenger ship will in the season have ninety or a hundred men in her hotel department — the Majestic out of an average crew of 322 has 114, the Campania out of 415 has 159, consisting of one chief steward, 105 stewards, 8 stewardesses, and 45 cooks, bakers, & etc— and these are at work early and late, cleaning, cooking, and serving, and being the busiest people in the ship. In these post-biscuit days the hot rolls and bread require the bakers to be afoot at four in the morning, and it is seven at night before the last baker’s work is done. The cooks have to be up at half-past five to prepare the coffee and tea which the stewards have to be ready to run round with at six, and thus begin a day which does not end till an hour before midnight.

And behind the scenes in the offices and kitchens are the purser and his clerks and checkers, busy with the tickets and vouchers and forms, and the more or less elaborately columnar bookkeeping, which maintain the whole turnover under control, and bring the results within the grasp of the Company’s accountancy department. In that department the bills of quantities run large, for in a year the provisioning of only one boat will, as a fair average, include five hundred sheep, two hundred lambs, three hundred oxen, three thousand fowls, as many ducks and miscellaneous poultry, besides several thousand head of game and other sundries. Add to these a hundred thousand eggs, ten tons of ham and bacon, five tons of fish, two tons of cheese, one thousand tins of sardines, one hundred tons of potatoes, five thousand loaves and fifty tons of flour and biscuits five tons of jam and marmalade, three tons of oatmeal, two tons each of rice and peas, pearl barley, plums and currants, and twelve tons of sugar, with a ton of tea and three tons of coffee, and you have what may be called the backbone of the daily fare. With it, considering all things, the drink bill will favourably compare, as it averages out per vessel per year at about fifty thousand bottles of beer, twenty thousand mineral waters, three thousand bottles of spirits, and five thousand bottles of wine.

Multiply these quantities by the number of the vessels in the fleet, and if you like big figures you will get them. It is true that they refer to the Atlantic trade, where the boats are large, the fleet small, the passages short, and a considerable percentage of the passengers do not have time to get their feeding powers into full swing; but they are sufficient as a sample, and afford enough indication of what the totals must amount to in a company like the P. & O. which has fifty floating hotels in commission, and spends 25,000 a year on ice alone.

And that reminds us that we have only mentioned the necessaries, and said nothing of the luxuries, which we ought not entirely to omit. Let it be added, then, that each passenger averages three oranges, almost as many apples, and half as many lemons a day; that the ice cream supplied averages a pint a head a week; and that on an Atlantic trip, taken at a venture, the fruit bill included one hundred and sixty melons, one hundred pineapples, ten crates of peaches, ten bunches of bananas, one hundred quarts each of gooseberries, huckleberries, and currants, two hundred and fifty quarts each of raspberries, strawberries, and cherries, and seventy-five pounds of grapes.

It may be wondered how all these things find room on board, but then, as was said before, great are the mysteries of cubic measurement; a ship’s capacity is practically unlimited, aid for generations the seafarer has been studying how to stow. Though the floor space devoted to larders and stores may not seem large, the walls and even the ceilings are so crammed with shelves and pigeon-holes, and hooks and rings, and racks and rails, that the compartment is almost solid with goods.

That on shipboard everything must be in its place and not an inch wasted is nowhere more clearly shown than in these auxiliaries of the kitchen and the kitchen itself, where, at first sight, the stoves and hot-plates look so small and compact that we wonder how so much work can be done with such diminutive accommodation. But this want of space is occasionally more apparent than real owing to the immensity of the surroundings. In the new Cunarders, for instance, the kitchen—without the bakery—is from twenty-five to thirty feet square, and besides an immense grill and other apparatus contains a cooking-range twenty-five feet long, on which 170 stew pans can be worked side by side at the same time.

A ship may now be too long to pitch, but she is always high enough to roll. In some of those afloat the bridge is sixty feet above the water-line, and in spite of all that long curved hour-glass, known as a rolling chamber, can do, the leisurely stagger with the unexpected drop at the end is always marked enough to make a meal a somewhat speculative adventure. A movable feast in the rolling forties—or roaring forties, if you please—may have its pleasures, but even with the fiddles on the tables it is fraught with the unexpected; disappointments are many, and the breakages are simply appalling. During one week not so very long ago the steward’s returns on one well-known liner showed an average breakage list of 900 plates, 280 cups, 438 saucers, 1,213 tumblers, 200 wine glasses, 27 decanters, and 63 water-bottles, all of which had, of course, to be made good on arrival in port.

The vessel has but a week or fortnight in port, and during those few days she must be rendered fit to start again, complete in all points. Of all damages and deficiencies lists have to be made by the chief steward and chef, which are examined and certified by the purser and remitted to the victualing superintendent. As soon as he has passed the “indent,” as it is customary to call it, all the hotel departments of the ship, together with their furniture and fittings, are put into complete repair, and never was there a repair yet which did not necessitate a certain amount of repainting and re-polishing. Not only the saloon, smoking-room, drawing room, and cabins are overhauled, but also the galley and larders and the bars and pantries; and a large detachment of the cook’s battery goes ashore for renewal, with a very miscellaneous assortment of sundries that only housekeepers on a large scale would think of. The tinsmiths and tinkers are crowded up with odds and ends to repair and replace ; the carpenters and joiners and cabinet-makers have their hands full not only in the workshop but in the ship, not only in the saloons but in the deck houses and crew’s quarters ; and the plumbers rejoice as only plumbers can rejoice in the multiplicity and complexity of the baths and other sanitary appliances, which they render still further involved and prepare for future break down in the manner customary to their trade.”