Bill Coventry describes the Australian prisoners' experience of learning to cook rice, which was the main food supplied by the Japanese.
Transcript
Australia didn't know how to cook rice in the thirties and forties, not like we do today.
So they asked all the fellows to supply their dixies, which is our eating dixie, and we dug a long trench, several long trenches, gathered up burnable material and made long fires and put the rice - I mean, they knew that you boiled rice.
So you put a dixie of rice, and you put some water in it and put it in the fires and, of course, as the water boiled, the rice came over the top of the dixies and put the fire out and then it didn't cook and everything.
Oh. But slowly, as time went by, we learned how to cook rice didn't we?
Read more about food on the Thai-Burma railway.