A good pick me after a hard night, best drunk at the crack of noon, especially if you still are.

Take three pint pots, pour about an inch of vodka in each, split a litre of tomato juice between the three add a good shake of Worcester Sauce and grind in some black pepper, give it a stir then float a little fino sherry on the top and drink it.

you are supposed to add somw celery salt and a sprig of the evil veg too to the classic bloody Mary but screw that. If you do have some celery perhaps your local council will recycle it for you.

Today's recipe is a work of culinary archeology and forensics taking all you shipmates back to a time of hardtack, weavils, salt pork and the lash. Arrr.

First things first back in the days of sail an ordinary seaman got issued a gallon of beer a day,(that's eight pints to you metric lubbers) better get started on that then. Glug, glug Arr that's better

Ok this dish should be made with corned pork and corned beef which needs to be boiled in seawater for hours to soften up. Sod that we live in the 20th century so use a packet of chopped panchetta and a tin of corned beef.

Chop the corned beef into quarter inch cubes and chuck it in a pan with the panchetta to cook in their own fat with a bay leaf until browned off. Take the meat out of the pan and set aside. Then add a little oil to the pan and chuck in two chopped onions and two chopped leeks and fry until they go translucent add three spuds chopped into quarter inch squares and stir it about adding about half a teaspoon of all spice and the same of ground cloves, cayenne pepper and nutmeg, a couple of blades of mace, six crushed juniper berries and about three crushed cardoman pods. Sling the meat back in and top up with beef stock (or sling in two pints of water and a stock cube)

Let it all simmer away till the spuds are soft enough to eat, then thicken up the liquid with some ship's biscuit. As this ain't easy to find these days I took six oat cakes, put them in a plastic bag, walloped them with a hammer and then slung them in.

Serve up on a plate with some crusty bread to mop up the sauce. Serves three.

Captain Nick said it reminded him of something his dad cooked when he was in the Navy.

Soundtrack: Kaiser Chiefs, Julie Driscoll, Motorhead, Carl Perkins, REM, New York Dolls, Led Zep, Slade, Gun Club, Edgar Broughton, Captain Beefheart, Robyn Hitchcock, Dream Syndicate, the Damned, The Ethiopians, the Skatellites, the Selector, Siouxsie, the Saints, the specials, Desmond Dekkar, classic period Hawkwind and Willie Nelson