KEY POINTS:
Tinned mutton cutlets, tinned Irish brawn, tinned curried rabbit. Boiled fowl, just for a change (tinned).
It is warmer inside these wooden huts than outside, but only just. Today, there is only bleary sunlight to illuminate the bunks, the teacups, the kettle on the stove ready to boil
a cuppa, perfect for thawing frozen fingers.
On Scott's table, a mummified penguin lies, ready to be cut up. Woollen socks lie folded on a mattress, boots hang by their laces from a nail, and the walls are lined with wooden packing crates, turned into shelves.
"Day" reads a scrawled inscription above the bunk of one of Shackleton's men - marking out his tiny piece of territory.
In Scott's hut, we can peer into the bunk where young Lawrence Oates slept, warm and safe in his sleeping bag, through the winter. It was Oates, starving and desperately ill, who walked out into the blizzard one morning in 1912, on the way back from Scott's mission to the Pole.
"I'm just going outside," he said, "and may be some time," leaving the tent in the vain hope that by freeing his teammates of the burden of helping him they might survive a few more days.
The cruellest thing is that they starved to death just a few kilometres from where I stand, looking at the shelves crammed with food. You get the feeling, as everyone says, that the men have only just walked out and might come back any moment, stamping the snow from their feet.
It's clear, looking around these places, why Shackleton is the hero of people like Ed Hillary, and of most of the New Zealanders who work on the frozen continent. Shackleton was, famously, an egalitarian - in his single-room hut, all the bunks are equally comfortable (or not).
But around the cape at Scott's hut, hierarchy ruled. Scott was a Royal Navy man to the end - in his hut, even the latrines are segregated for officers and ordinary men. Only the "gentlemen" were allowed to dine at the broad wooden table, and they slept at separate ends of the building.
These places seem impossibly bleak - outside Scott's hut lies the skeleton of a husky, still wearing its Christchurch Town Council collar - but at the same time it's easy to conjure up the snug feeling that must have reigned a hundred years ago.
Even in the perpetual dark of winter, gas-powered lights dangled from the ceilings and with the stove blazing it would have been warm enough, say the conservators, to shrug off a few wet layers of wool and fur, snuggle into a caribou-skin sleeping bag and dry out overnight.
Most of all, they are eerie places.
Hillary says he's seen Shackleton's ghost, shuffling around the stove, and the word among the restoration experts is that sometimes, late at night, a strange swishing emanates from the Shackleton hut - like someone sweeping the floor.
