Cooking on a boat is just like cooking at home… except it is not.

Space is very limited. Storage space for dry goods, Cold storage, Stove top, and Oven space are all at a premium. If you are cruising to remote places, or for long distances you need to plan your provisioning carefully. You might be many weeks between visits to anything resembling the kind of supermarket you are used to. When in remote places ingredients might be very different that you are used to. When traveling new and interesting foods should always be part of the fun.

Don’t learn everything the hard way, but rather invest in some of the best books out there to learn what you need to know.

Here are the ones we use all the time. These are books that have dog eared pages and broken bindings, stained with cooking juices.

Cruising Chef Cookbook is my favorite.

It’s not a new book, but this edition has been in print since 2010 and the recipes do not change. I bought my copy when this was the new in print, and it shows its love. It is presented as a “cook book” but it is more than that. There is a lot of information about processes and procedures. Fun stories make browsing the book a delight even without looking for a recipe. If I only could bring one cookbook aboard, this would be it.

Cruising Chef Cookbook is available as a Kindle edition, so you don’t need to reserve shelf space for it. But somehow, I just think this book, more than most, deserves a tangible copy. The only downside of this book is that the editing is a bit rough, and not all the recipes have been proofread as carefully as they should have, but it’s still my favorite!

The Care and Feeding of Sailing Crew is a true classic.

Larry and Lynn Pardy have true pioneers and heroes to several generations of cruisers. This is another book that is way more than just a collection of recipes. The smaller, and the simpler your boat, the more important the advice in this book is to you. Want to know who to stock a boat without a refrigerator for a 3 week long passage? How to keep a cabbage edible for a month? Lynn has the answer!

The Boat Galley is a collection from Carolyn Shearlock’s highly successful blog of the same name.

In this book Carolyn has assembled a collection of simple and straight forward recipes and tis that will be invaluable to anyone new to managing a boat galley. If you do not know her blog, it is also a great resource.

I am sure we missed some great other resources, but these are the ones we keep coming back to.

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