MEALS SERVED PIPING HOT

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28987, 31 August 1959, Page 10 (Supplement)

MEALS SERVED PIPING HOT

A GOOD meal is ruined if it is served half-cold. At Princess Margaret Hospital, meals, as they are prepared, will be placed in warming ovens, then transferred to heated food trolleys. These trolleys will be sent by lifts and corridors to the wards, where they will be plugged in again in the ward kitchen. Here the meals will be served and taken to the patients, who will eat them piping hot.

The main hospital kitchen—a vast, arch-roofed, green-tiled hall, 80ft long by 36ft wide, with its own air-conditioning plant-stands apart in a singlestorey building at the rear of the main hospital blocks. The main stoves and warming ovens stand in the centre of the kitchen, while around the perimeter are various foodpreparation bays.

There are vegetable, meat, fish, and cold food preparation bays, a bread room and a buttery, and a bay for the preparation of pastries and cakes.

There are also controlledtemperature storage rooms for meat, fish, butter, and eggs, a vegetable store for holding green foods used from day to day, and even a room for refrigerating kitchen “leftovers.” Diet Kitchen At one end of the big room is the special diet kitchen. This is for the preparation of unsweetened, unsalted, and homogenised foods, and for special milk mixtures—diets which cannot be prepared in the main kitchen. Off the kitchen, there is a huge wash room for pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils. Another room will be used for washing the electric-heated food trolleys. A third will be specially used for washing milk cans.

General “washing up” will be a sizeable task—for the patients alone, there are 350 soup bowls, 404 cups and 744 saucers, 368 tea plates, 402 dinner plates, and 370 coupe plates, as well as pile upon pile of cutlery. Bulk Groceries Bulk groceries, meat, and vegetables will be delivered daily and unloaded on a service dock. From here they will be placed in the cool storage rooms and refrigerators, and in the hospital store nearby, where the groceries will be made up. Steam, electricity, and gas Will be used for cooking general meals in the main kitchen. The modern American and Swedish cooking equipment makes the kitchen something of a housewife’s dream. A Swedish electric shallow frier, for bacon, sausages, and hamburger-type foods, has a pan 24in by 30in, big enough to fry enough sausages for 50 people at once. The pan can be tilted to drain off the fat simply by rotating a control wheel. New Equipment A gleaming, stainless-steel Swedish steam boiler is almost as big as a housewife’s copper. About 22 gallons of soup can be prepared in it, and it is also used for cooking vegetables and milk puddings. An American steam oven, designed on streamlined lines and made in stainless steel, is

used for cooking potatoes, root vegetables, and fish. It has an automatic timer, which can be set for the required period of cooking, and then rings a bell to warn the cook when the food is ready. Another interesting item of equipment is an American 50-

gallon steam-jacketed roasting pan, which cooks meat on the pot-roasting principle. Selective ’menus will be a inew feature of meals at the hospital.' Appearing on a patient’s breakfast tray each morning will be a typewritten menu list covering the next day’s meals, on 'which the patient will tick off the dishes of his choice, and indicate such details as whether he takes milk in his tea or likes his coffee iced or hot. Menus Tallied The menu lists, after being marked for choice by the patients, are collected from the ward kitchens when meal trays are returned, and tallied up by a clerical worker. By midday, the patients’ choice of meals for the next day is known, and from this record food is ordered, prepared, and cooked.

Patients in hospital naturally look forward to good food well cooked each day, and the selective menus should prove a popular innovation. It will be something quite new in New Zealand hospital routine, and is an idea introduced from American hospitals by Miss M. R. Till, the head dietitian, who studied hospital dietetics at Ohio State University while on a Fulbright scholarship.

“I’m sure that with our selective menus, we are going to have happy patients,” says Miss Till. Such a system ensures a controlled flow of food from the “production line,” and also cuts down considerably on wastage.