18th Century Naval Food - Time to get salty!

[Music] well naval food it's always a fun thing to think about if not necessarily a fun thing to eat but when i was asked to make this particular video i thought well we could look at naval food through the ages but to be perfectly honest naval food in the 20th century and to be honest much of the 19th century is not that exciting the advent of steam power in ships meant that refrigeration was possible canned goods were also possible and various other kinds of preservation technology which means that whilst the naval food available on a world war one or world war ii or ironclad warship might be somewhat at variance from what your typical diet is these days it's not going to be an entirely foreign concept to most people and so rather than sort of give a brief history of all of that i thought it would be better to look at a period of naval history for which food is actually fairly well documented but also quite different from what you and i might eat today and that of course is the 18th century the classic age of sale and so we're going to focus on royal navy food there would of course be differences in other navies depending on what they had to hand in terms of their supplies and of course the officers would generally eat much better than the men but since the royal navy was the largest navy roughly of speaking of this period and obviously the rank and vile were the ones who were eating the majority of the food it's fair to say that the single largest type of diet at sea in the 18th century was that of the common royal navy sailor so that's the one we'll be looking at if people would like me later on to look at perhaps what the diet of a french sailor or a spanish sailor etc would be like and how that varied from the british diet then i'm quite happy to do that if you let me know in the comments below thanks to extensive admiralty documentation what exactly was the diet of royal navy sailors during this period is pretty well documented down to even when the food was rationed on a weekly basis common to pretty much any ship throughout the century was the biscuit or hard tack butter cheese oatmeal and peas were also pretty much a staple and you might be recognizing a theme in that all of these things are very easy to preserve and keep over long periods of time with minimal amounts of intervention from things like refrigeration which whilst it was in partial use on land was not at use at sea because the mechanical refrigerator had not yet been invented and these things had to keep for a long time weevils aside of course experiments with other foodstuffs were tried but they tended to degenerate into massive numbers of insects or a lot of mold drink was a slightly different matter at the start of the 18th century simple beer was the general issue but during the 1700s the 18th century grog a watered-down form of rum became standard issue across the navy and that's what we'll be considering later on of course experiments trying to get rid of scurvy would result in the introduction of lemon juice and the increased levels of british control over sugar production mostly in the west indies would result in sugar also becoming part will be a smaller part of a royal navy seaman's diet the meat issue however was rather interesting early on fish was occasionally used and indeed the sailors would take pretty much whatever fresh meat they could get their hands on at any given time whether that be fish local animals they could trade for etc but the rations that they were given would generally either be salted beef salted pork or a mixture of the two now contrary to some popular historical myths this was not a diet of deprivation granted you could have instances where perhaps the victilas are you the people who supply the food had should we say cut things a little bit short to line their own pockets so you could get cases of rotten meat or extremely hard heart attack or perhaps not heart attack that hadn't been baked enough and this is where the weevils came in if the meat was particularly poorly preserved obviously it might rot if it was fanatically over preserved it might be almost rock hard but these things when they were caught were generally punished by the admiralty and towards the end of the 18th century which is the period from which we're going to be taking our diet there was actually a fairly stringent set of measures in place to control the quality and quantity of food being issued to the royal navy it was also quite a high energy diet the full diet for a royal navy sailor of any given warship would add up to about 5 000 calories now you might think well hang on a minute that's almost double what most people today are advised to eat well yes this is true but then most people these days aren't spending pretty much every waking hour hauling guns weighing multiple tons around running up and down yard arms rigging cleaning the decks and doing all other sorts of physical work and you generally tend to find that those kinds of people who are involved in hard physical activity for considerable periods of time even in the modern day such as builders will often have a diet that is more towards that end of things than the typical normal advised diet as well as that modern clothing has a lot to do with the reduction in calorie intake because sailors of the period they didn't have tremendous amounts of clothes available to them unless they'd been specially equipped for going into particularly hazardous areas like the arctic and that would mean that on a typical day you'd be burning off a fair bit of energy just staying warm especially obviously once sea spray and such got involved whereas even the hardest working person in the first world today can at least have a guarantee that if it is absolutely freezing they've probably got a coat or something to wear until their natural exertions build up enough body heat that they might not need it now of course fresh meat vegetables bread rice fresh fruit etc would also be part of the diet if they were close enough to port to get their hands on them or perhaps if they were far enough away from port that they had to be substituted since for example a ship cruising off the indian coast would find plentiful rice in most ports but not a tremendous amount of oatmeal as other foods became available due to worldwide exploration and colonialization these also would begin to see introduction in different navies at different times and to varying degrees so potatoes for example becoming quite widespread at some point towards the latter part of the century and to be honest more so into the 19th but of course one of the attractions of this particular video hopefully at least is the fact that it's a very different diet to most people's these days with that being said this also means that you can't just go out and buy half the stuff that's involved here especially stuff like hard tack and naval grade salted beef so we're going to have to make some of these things and thus at the beginning of the month it was time to start preparing the beef since of course this would take a considerable amount of time to actually prepare okay so welcome to the mess deck of hms drac so we're going to be looking at some of the staples of the 18th century sailors diet hardtack will be one of them obviously because what else was there going to be a couple of other interesting bits but the thing that's going to take us the longest to prepare is actually the beef or pork you can do salt beef or salt pork they're the two main staples but i have beef and i prefer beef so we're doing beef so we have our beef joint now interestingly enough this is all from a book called feeding nelson's navy and this actually points out that stuff like offal and skin and bones were actually according to the admiralty rules at least forbidden from being included so we're going to switch over to pounds here work out how much beef we actually have so five pounds four ounces so we're gonna have to cut a little bit off of this thing so that's not a terrible tragedy because that means that hey i have more beef that won't be salted because knowing me and my cooking skills this could go horribly wrong right so let's prepare ourselves some beef i'm gonna go and get this packaging off there we go a beef now we are going to have to make a few changes to this because as you might recognize this is actually a roasting joint because that's what they had at the supermarket in this weight class so that netting which is very not 18th century is going to have to come off just using the tissue here to try and absorb some of the uh moisture already because that is ultimately what we are going to be doing by salting it and this thing has as you might guess been in a freezer so there's a lot of condensation right beef now previously this was weighing in about five and a half pounds so i mean it is lessening so one two three four one four in a bit so minus a bit for that so if we take off this much this is tracker saving the end for me to purchases i don't know what you mean i'm off to eat it right now in a cupboard raw in the dark come on okay well we're gonna have to wash this scale out anyway so let's see how much beef we've got left four pounds two ounces that's not a bit of estimation on my part i'd say um well we're going to leave that extra two ounces of beef on there because i really can't be bothered to cut more of it off now this is obviously a roasting joint in that time they would have cut it in fairly large slabs so because getting access to the liquid or the moisture at the middle of this joint is going to be rather difficult in this case for our salting and drying process i am going to see if i can cut this into two or three sections two or three nice just slabs rather than one big one um mrs track can you secure that please oh it's just gonna get away from me i think that's probably good enough at least for salt purposes right so with that all done it's now time to go for the salting process now according to the instructions that are provided in the book this salting process would take about a week to six days and it involves putting the salt into a barrel then putting the beef on the salt then putting more salt over the beef and then putting more beef over the salt and so on and so forth until the barrel is full and then you drain off the brine and re-salt twice a day for six days so i suspect lovely as this wonderful looking joint is it's probably not going to be this big by the time we finished with it nevertheless unfortunately well i do have a barrel it's my knead barrel and i'm not cutting the top off my meat barrel just to do some salt beef so we're going to use the slow cooker bowl instead and we're going to use a lot of cooking salt um now again according to the original instructions this would have been done using a thing called saltpeter and salt a mixture of the two which according again according to the period sources this was not strictly speaking the salt pizza now the air tastes of salt yeah this is not strictly speaking the salt heater that you'd find as another term for some rather interesting components that make up gunpowder but actually it seems to be what we would call rock salt but i'm not going to go radiant council bins for rock salt so we're just going to use salt um okay we you probably lose some of the earthy flavors but come on we're making navy issue salted beef do we really think flavor is a massive concern so one bit of beef and a lot of salt don't worry i've got more and another it almost is heartbreaking to do this to good beef but see the sacrifices i make and the air really tastes of salt um arcane symbology has now been drawn in the salt so i think that protects us from minions mine oh yes it's a mine okay oh now seriously the air tastes of salt it's disgusting it's delicious um so that's our four pounds of beef in a fairly considerable amount of salt and i need better camera work for this kind of thing now that is part of day one well it is day one so now we are going to have to leave this and draw as i said draw off the brine result twice a day for the next six days okay welcome to our list of ingredients for breakfast on an 18th century naval warship these are the things you need for burgoo the spoon is obvious you need that for mixing but burgu is a very simple recipe it's two parts water two cups of water to one cup of oatmeal and apparently that's enough for four people we'll see how that goes there's our cup measure and well we need a bowl to eat it in um and apparently you can taste it season it to taste with butter and salt it also says sugar and cream but i think butter and salt are probably more likely to be found on a ship on a long-term voyage unless you're of course the officers so that's our basic ingredients and let's begin the cooking process so here's our pot sitting stylishly on the cooker and according to the recipe we need to put in the two cups of water first thank you very much glamorous assistant and i am immediately terrible at pouring water it turns out well that's one cup of water two cups of water and a distinctly northern 18th century cloth to absorb some of the water i managed to spill into the stove because i am a [ __ ] well that's most of it anyway it's not going to interfere with the rest of the process so we have our two cups of water and now we need our cup measure of oats turns out i'm just as bad at pouring oats on camera as i am pouring water so i'm going to do it off camera where i can actually use both hands to control the flow of oats which is not a sentence i ever thought i'd have to say so there's our cup of oats plus a few random strays that got into the water and now i'm going to need an equally non-18th century paper towel to try and get some of those oats out of the way before they start soaking in and clear up the rest later right well then says to bring slowly to a boil so with the miracle of the gas cooker we shall do this well as you can see the mixture is beginning to do something of course all of this would have been done traditionally in a ship's galley with very large amounts of this stuff but we have neither a shep's galley nor a massive cauldron nor do i particularly fancy making an entire cauldron's worth of oats so i'm going with the just two two cups to one cup which as i said is apparently enough for four people um i mean given the size of this pot this is what i would normally classify as my portion of porridge or oats i guess so um i guess we'll see how much this all swells up to once it's all done and dusted leaving that in there well it's got to a texture where i could probably put up wallpaper with it if nothing else on the advice of mrs track who apparently is an expert in these things we've moved it over to the low temperature burner to let it simmer for a bit well whilst we're doing that we're going to introduce you to the other element of potentially at least 18th century naval breakfasts and that is called scotch coffee so here's the first ingredient in scotch coffee no we're not eating a toaster that's for the leptus mechanicus we are in fact burning bread intentionally so bread up to what toaster up to six and why are we doing this well apparently the main ingredient for scotch coffee other than boiled water is burnt bread so we'll come back to the burnt bread a little bit later and so it is ready okay so here's our first dish of the um day i've got to say that is a truly unimpressive amount of i mean dividing it up into i mean you pretty much can divide it up into four but really um okay i guess that's why the scotch coffee is there as well um let's have a taste i mean i've tasted things that are plainer sandwich bags sand um i can see why they might use this stuff so this is um we're doing a butter day so they didn't have exactly the same rations every day some days they'd have peas other days they'd have butter and so on and so forth and cheese since i hate all almost all vegetables with the exception of potatoes which are an honorary meat of course with the power of a thousand burning suns i am not going to eat peas so i very conveniently decided that we are having a non-peas day um which was a thing you get two ounces of butter this is about half an ounce per day to go through your food i'm gonna use this half ounce of butter in this because i'm not eating another bite of this thing until there's more flavor in it and then i'll see if i need some salt i mean this is fairly good butter but melting well at least let's have a bit of a push around and i mean presumably if you're only getting a quarter of this you might not use quite as much butter but let's say i'm being generous because i have some pity for the other three men who are going to be eating this stuff and i don't want them to hate me either so i'm sharing some of my precious butter in an attempt to make this part way too edible good news is it's still so hot enough off the stove that the butter is almost completely melted in i think that's about as melted in as we're going to get with this butter so has that improved the taste of this wallpaper paste i mean kind of i don't hate it it now tastes like wallpaper paste that you've smeared molten butter on so that brings us to the other ingredient salt so they had salt it would be part of their rations as well so let's add a bit apparently apparently let's add half of these salts that i'd rationed out um and see what that does you know it's weird but actually adding that amount of salt has made it halfway to acceptable that's actually not bad it's very strange it's not the kind of orange that or oats i would normally have but then again i smothered mine in sugar and honey so that's not exactly a massive surprise but it definitely is edible certainly a massive improvement on the utter direct that it was at the beginning um let's try a little bit more hmm i could get used to this not a bad breakfast if i do say so myself but before we go on with eating that let's see how our scotch coffee is coming along so here's some basic ingredients for scotch coffee we have burned our bread and well i it says burned bread so i'm presuming they need to vulcanize bits well apparently these this is this is the ingredients for scotch coffee so um let's take our mug and i don't know exactly how much to add because it doesn't actually say but we'll start off with if i was making coffee how much would i add how many much coffee grounds well we'll go with most of it and of course i've made a complete mess as usual but we'll tidy that up later let's go and get some boiled water i made earlier i mean it looks like coffee and waste not want not now off to find some sugar because i think i'm gonna want some so here is our burnt bread scotch coffee i must admit i am not especially ecstatic at trying to drink this especially since i don't particularly like tea or coffee anyway i know i'm british and that may be heresy but i'd rather be able to start my mornings without caffeine i don't think there's any caffeine in this so even if i somehow magically get addicted to it i am not really at risk of that but that is utterly vile it tastes like liquid burnt bread shockingly um i suppose if you ground up a pencil and drank that you might get a similar effect if you'd set the pencil on fire um luckily for everyone concerned it does say in the um in the book that you can add sugar and i can guarantee you only someone with no taste buds whatsoever wouldn't so i have my sugar let's add a bit first i'm still using the knife because yeah why not now it's fractionally less vile in that it doesn't want me it doesn't make me want to rip my own tongue out okay that's approaching acceptable still nasty burnt aftertaste but there's enough sugar in there that i'm not quite getting most of it but still so that's about half a ramekin of sugar i don't know what ramekin measures are but whatever they are that's half half of one in sugar and for those of you who are wondering yes the sugar has in fact stopped dissolving so we have now reached the saturation point of this solution um for those of you who are keeping up with the chemistry of this all now bizarrely enough it actually does taste like coffee with sugar except coffee with milk in it with sugar so i have no idea how vulcanized bread relates to coffee grounds and milk but apparently if you add enough sugar to it it tastes roughly the same that said as i said we have reached the saturation point of this stuff so i may just be drinking carbon flavored caramel which doesn't sound too bad yeah i could drink this i have a feeling that i'd probably run the ship out of sugar in a couple of weeks so i probably wouldn't be allowed to drink this um so i have a feeling that in real life if i was on an napoleonic era warship i would probably be trading my scotch coffee for literally anything else including the burgu in fact i think i would probably rather eat the burgu without the salt and butter before i drank this stuff without enough sugar that said it's weirdly pleasant once you put enough sugar in it which is not a result i expected i must admit scotch coffee the drink of system and here's what we need for ship's biscuit one pound of flour and three quarters of a pint of water now the recipe says that you should add the flour to a bowl and not the mixing bowl because it makes the bowls too fragile and then slowly add the water and mix it till it has a silky smooth texture um the standing mixer does not seem to have dough hooks but it has these very strong beaters so hoping that's going to work out um and well we'll we'll go with that obviously they didn't have electric beaters back then but the alternative is to spend 30 minutes needing dough and frankly i have better things to do with my time so in goes our one pound of flour down goes our meters in goes the first amount of water and would help if i switched the power on and now we leave it to sit for approximately 10 minutes before putting out on the board okay it is now time to decant the dough somehow and oh flour your hands dry swell your hands morgan freeman's voice he did not in fact flower his hands because he was a [ __ ] all right now with floured hands we suddenly become very needy and we're supposed to roll this out to about three quarters of an inch thickness okay and then we cut it into sections now apparently this is supposed to go into squares but of course i can't roll for toffee therefore it's not actually in squares so we're going to do it in three inches about that so we ended up needing two trays and apparently we're supposed to poke the holes in it so we'll find out i mean it's not exactly like they would have had 100 accuracy every single time anyway so this was the end result of the first set of baking um it looks slightly weird and odd and everything but it's okay and that to be honest is part of the problem it's okay it's tough it's somewhat breakable but as you can see it didn't bake all the way through um in the time spent in the oven and i couldn't i can still kind of eat it um which is a bit disappointing first time is edible is a disappointing result for cooking but we have solved this problem because as you probably realize that mixture was probably far too wet so mixing by hand i've made up a new batch um this is half the size of the other patch i use half a pound of flour but instead of going by a strict ratio according to the recipe book i just added flour so i put the flour in added water until it just about held together as a dough and as soon as it held together as a dough mix knead press roll stab and now biscuits and so these will go in the oven on 160 for several hours and then cool down and then turn them over and bake them in the oven at 160 for another few hours tomorrow and we shall have at last biscuit that we can use to make both our dinner or supper as the case may be depending on how you term it and our lunch because the lunch result needs powdered biscuit so let's see how this all goes okay so for crushing the ship's biscuit it recommends wrapping in a cloth one so you don't lose fragments of chips biscuit and two so that when those fragments go flying you don't end up with razor sharp bits of ships biscuit flying everywhere so there's our bits of ship's biscuit in our cloth we're wrapping it up in the cloth and we're putting the cloth on the board just in case completely end up annihilating the board that sacrificial i don't want to really sacrifice the entire work surface and then we have this my one of my medieval reenactment tools so we are now going to hit it repeatedly they apparently would have used an axe boarding axe or something i mean this is kind of an axe so okay let's check the contents getting there but no cigar yet there you go folks how to use a large medieval semi-pole weapon as a tool for cooking that's probably enough so let's move on to the onion okay so here's our obviously 20th century pan heated with oil and so the frying commences and so this is what we're going to call done on the onions they're going to go off to a plate because we're going to need this later i'm gonna keep most of the oil on there because you know we're gonna be coming back to it and waste not want not right well after a week of sitting in regularly changed salt and drawing off the brine this is what we've managed to turn our beef into this is four pounds of salt beef fairly solid and of course four pounds of beef supposed to be your ration for six out of your seven days i got fish on one other day so that means you're basically looking at about one third of each of these pieces for a given day's food so let's say that and this is a sharp knife cleaver um cleave will go through the table as well right so that's the profile of sorry there's the profile of our salt beef after seven days of curing um looks a little bit red and still red in the middle but it's pretty much fine i think so this is going to be our this is going to be our piece of beef for today i will probably cut that into a few smaller segments to ease the boiling process now going with the gray i think maybe i'm just getting better at this all right there are lumps now the instructions for making this dish which is a lunchtime dish is which is called lobscouse involves beef and then onions plus ship's biscuit which is supposed to be crushed up this is obviously the remnants of actually supper so the ship's biscuit some of it has to be crushed up and put in as well plus some pepper later on they would also add things like potatoes and such like but we're going to go with a fairly basic one which involves boiling up the beef and the crushed chips biscuit until the beef gets somewhat you know not to leather-like and the ship's biscuit becomes somewhat not geological and once that's done you then mix you then fry it apparently with the pre-fried onions and some pepper which relatively common spice by this point okay so for the boiling process i'm going to cheat slightly and create what i've pre-boiled the water that's mainly so you don't have to sit here literally watching a pot boiled here goes the salt pea and here is our crushed biscuit okay burner to max and let the boiling process commence we've got quite the healthy boiling going but that biscuit is still solid and i'm pretty sure it's supposed to not go be that way and that is still a very solid bit of beef so with a little bit of a stir [Music] on goes the boiling process okay so this is probably boiled to an acceptable degree so the next step according to the instructions unfortunately they do not build us a spaceship spaceship spaceship but they do allow us to drain off the solution so that's our lobscouse base apparently and then heat up the frying pan and then it will once the frying pan is vaguely hot it will be time to add the scouse and the onions fry it all together with a bit of pepper and game on okay the frying pan is hot enough and continue the frying of the frying check back later and now time to plate up if such a thing can be said but this kind of stuff lobscouse ladies and gentlemen well here's our lob scale so i also have a strip of the salt beef before it got boiled as a comparison so uh i've got a bit there are more appetizing sites but let's try a bit of boiled salt beef you know that's actually really nice it's time in the vat has aged it it's obviously very salty so if you don't like salt well it's fresh out of luck with the royal navy but that's actually really nice i mean obviously if it's rotten or it's gone overly hard or your victuala has supplied you really cheap beef really cheap i mean this isn't exactly what's most expensive beef but it's not like diced beef quality either then potentially it's going to be different but if you like salt flavors and you like beef i think i'm actually going to incorporate this into my normal diet as well actually i'm not so sure about this stuff let's see how this goes i mean there's still that slightly underlying caramelized bread texture or taste to it but a mixture of the frying the oil and the pepper and the onion i mean it wouldn't be my first choice but i could eat it certainly a little bit more of that burnt flavor coming through on that one uh let's find another bit of beef and get some of the biscuit on it as well hmm okay so that the biscuit takes a little bit of the edge off the saltiness of the beef which is probably a good thing overall to be honest and the saltiness and the beef flavor takes a fair bit off the edge of the caramelization of the biscuit which is also a good thing that actually works really well together i'm i mean i did think going into this that this would probably be of the three meals the nicest but i'm pleasantly surprised by the fact that i actually genuinely like this not just could tolerate but not necessarily go through the effort and the expense of making this day today because making those biscuits takes a long time with all the double baking and everything but yeah [Music] um let's take about effort to choose who the beast and for comparison sake i will give in wow hmm um full disclosure i did have a little bit of this beforehand just to see if it even was edible pre-boiling um and it was it was quite nice but it's kind of a soft built on soft jerky um hard jerky soft built-up hard joke it's not built on apparently mrs track but to be perfectly honest as nice as this is it's actually really much much better boiled and boiled and served with um table mats mashed biscuit so i genuinely didn't think i was gonna be enjoying it this much but it's a pleasant surprise so that's dinner or lunch to know that's lunch um runaway success i would say so we are now on the evening meal now when you get issued your cheese and butter ration again according to the records that's issued every other day so you'd get four ounces of cheese two ounces of butter well we've already used half an ounce of our butter in our burgu in the morning so we can only afford an another half ounce of butter here in the evening that's that's one of our two ounces used up each day additionally obviously if you get four ounces of cheese once every two days that means you get two ounces of cheese so here's our two ounces of cheese you also get one pound of biscuit and uh here's half a pound of biscuit um i must admit that is looking somewhat threatening as a as a uh afternoon dash evening meal but the other half pound as you will have seen is used somewhat in both the lunchtime or menu and also in presumably either snacking throughout the day if you happen to have teeth made of diamond or possibly as melee weapons or ways to absorb enemy fire anyway the other thing that's quite fun is that you would have some of your grog rations so you'd have a a pint of grog issued twice a day and that's because the grog itself is made up of a quart of water so for those of you working course you'll know that's about two pints and half a pint of rum all mixed together plus a couple of additions which we're about to come to now of course your two issues of one pint of grog are supposed to last you for the entire day so even though you get your evening ration and it's a full pint don't think that you're probably going to drink that wall at your meal sitting you might want you know something to drink elsewhere so we're going to make ourselves some grog and we're going to make it at around about half the total amount that would have been rationed out at the time um so basically you get your pint ration and we're making half of that for our our dinner so we've got is obviously in half a pint of water and since the the entire gration is made up using one half pint of rum that means we now need 1 8 a pint of rum or 2.5 fluid ounces so of course i went and got some navy rum so there's our one quarter of our total run and by the time of the napoleonic war era navy particularly the kind of battle trafalgar campaign era they're also issuing lemon juice and in some of the earlier experiments back in the earlier part of the 18th century from the books and records i could find they issued two-thirds of a fluid ounce of lemon juice plus two ounces of sugar to the men with their grog ration so unless i've made some horrible miscalculation we then have to divide that through as well by four so that equates to about one teaspoon of lemon juice and about a quarter of this sugar because this is two ounces of sugar that'll be for the whole thing but before we do that i'm just gonna test the grog i mean it's not awful i hate water there's just enough of the rum in there to make it drinkable for me but there's our lemon juice so we don't get scurvy and our sugar is probably about a quarter of the sugar ramekin so there is our scurvy preventing rum and once again to my eternal joy the sugar has stopped dissolving so let's see how this works that's quite an interesting taste to it still a little bit too much water for my liking but perfectly drinkable now we have if this is the reward for a hard day's labor i'm beginning to understand the idea of mutinies this stuff is obviously the the revised chips biscuit we made it's been baked for something approximating six to eight hours um in two bit batches i've yet to sum up the courage to try and eat it oh but it does disintegrate this version does that's boding well for my teeth a little caramelized okay maybe there was a natural fault line because um ow [Laughter] that was the heart attack actually just giving away i mean i kind of like dwarf bread i guess do i want to sully the um vaguely acceptable um frog with uh some heart attack well i guess that some you're gonna have to find somewhere making this a bit more edible i compared to eating glass if i've ever been dumb enough to eat glass which i haven't i'd imagine it's what eating glasses like not sticking hmm okay i mean there's nothing objectionable to the taste and there is that much of it but um see if butter improves its prospects i'm getting better at this okay a little bit of butter does go a long way to be fair um let's see how a little bit of butter and a little bit of cheese does very crude miniature open sandwich um oh i guess it's baked with flour technically it's a form of bread oh my goodness you know with a good mature cheddar and butter once you've summoned up the molar strength to crush it like an industrial pile driver i've got to say it's not actually terrible it's extra mature cheddar so there is a bit of a bite to the cheddar so that's actually quite nice i can't believe i'm doing this but let's try another fragment hmm you know if nothing else this would give save those incredibly powerful jaw muscles the taste of that rock actually grows on you then again i think the taste of anything will grow on you if it follows up hard attack um okay well we can also see why there are a lot of sea shanty sung and tails spun at the evening meals because this is not something you're eating in a hurry oh boy um the things i go through for you okay well i'm gonna see if i can finish off this this biscuit and then count myself lucky i'm not actually in the 18th century royal navy as an officer so hi and that ladies and gentlemen was about an hour's experimental archaeology i guess in uh figuring out how edible dash tasty the 18th century sailors diet was circa end of the 1700's start of the 1800's basically yeah breakfast can work shockingly enough dinner is actually really nice lunch time and supper maybe not so much probably depending on the quality of the heart attack you get anyway that is this month's top patreon requested video so if you liked it let us know in the comments below um obviously it's a little bit of a departure from the way we normally normally do videos so regular service will recommence next week thanks very much for watching see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 138,786

Rating: 4.9451056 out of 5

Keywords: wows, worldofwarships, Royal Navy, Scurvy, Salt Beef, Burgoo, Lobscouse, Scotch Coffee, Hardtack, Grog, Age of Sail

Id: ChhUFyw4qf8

Length: 65min 59sec (3959 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/vonHindenburg]

In this video, everyone's favorite Youtube Naval Historiographer makes and eats:

1. Salt Beef

2. Burgoo

3. Scotch Coffee

4. Hardtack

5. Lobscouse

6. Grog

[u/skiddleybop]

I'm pretty sure scotch coffee was just a way to get hot liquid into the sailors when they are working in inclement weather in the high latitudes. As in, it's not something they regularly drink with breakfast, it's just a mixture of sugar carbs and hot water to keep them going and warm their hands.

Edit: For the lobscouse, they would traditionally boil the meat separately through 2-3 changes of water before adding the biscuit, in order to avoid the whole thing tasting entirely like salt and being tough as leather.