COBI Field Kitchen Hf.14 Set 2290

COBI's Field Kitchen Hf.14 is a 1:35 model built from 130 blocks, 18.6 cm long: a German horse-drawn cart with a field kitchen that detaches from the cart and the horse. A cook figure is included with brick accessories — a ladle, a mug, a canteen, a bottle and a bread roll — plus a nameplate. All markings are printed.

Gulaschkanone

German soldiers called the field kitchen the goulash cannon, and the name came from the shape: the chimney folded down for travel and stuck out horizontally, so a kitchen on the move looked exactly like a gun being towed.

What it did was more important than it sounds. A field kitchen could cook for 125 to 225 men, and it cooked while moving — the fire stayed lit on the march, so stew that had been simmering for hours was ready when the column halted. Soldiers who have eaten something hot are a different proposition from soldiers who have not, and every army of the period understood that hot food was a weapon.

It was also horse-drawn, and that is the detail worth sitting with. The German army of 1939 to 1945 used around 2.75 million horses, and an infantry division's supply train was mostly animals. The field kitchen moved at walking pace because the division did.

A good first set

At 130 pieces this is one of the smaller Historical Collection models and a sensible place to start: simple construction, a figure with accessories, and a subject that works in almost any diorama. The cart is also a usable base for building horse-drawn artillery, and near-identical field kitchens were used in the First World War, so it fits a Great War scene as readily as a 1940s one.

In the COBI range

Sets 2272 and 2290 cover the same unglamorous logistics. Set 2259 is the Opel Blitz, the motorised alternative most of the army did not have.

Specifications

Pieces: 130 · Figures: 1 cook with accessories · Scale: 1:35 · Detachable kitchen, cart and horse
Model dimensions: 18.6 × 8 cm (7.3 × 3.1 in)