In all situations, food must be prepared for cooking and serving. It does not matter if cooking was happening over an improvised fire, or a  field kitchen was being used,  or cooking was done in a well-stocked mess hall kitchen the cooks did a lot of hard work to feed the troops. Cooks were in charge of doing the actual cooking but many additional soldiers would have been employed as supports for the grunt work of running a kitchen. The American stereotype of KP duty peeling potatoes would have been very familiar to the German soldier of WWII. The meat (if any was being served) needed to be cut up into proper serving sizes to ensure each soldier could get an equitable serving. Similarly, vegetables would also be prepared in uniform sizes both for even cooking and fair portioning.

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These photographs were taken from a number of online sources and auction sites.  They are presented here for educational purposes.