It's the age-old question, what the
heck do you do with hardtack because [Chomp Chomp] biting into it ain't the cards. Well during the American Civil War they'd make hellfire stew. A big thank you to Wondrium for sponsoring
this video as I test the strength of my teeth and my stomach with hellfire stew from the American Civil War this time on Tasting History. So one of the main ingredients in hellfire stew is
hardtack [Clack Clack] and as it happens last year I made some hard tack and I still have quite a bit left over so that's what I'm going to be using. Now this is actually called a ship's biscuit, they are one in the same. Hardtack was a term that was used later during the American Civil War. There are differences between this version and what would have been used in the Civil War. This one is based off of what would have been made in the British Navy in the 19th century and there are a few differences. First of all the shape. This was meant to be kept in barrels, whereas Civil War hardtack was meant to be kept in boxes so it was square to make it easier to ship. Then there's
also the size mostly in how thick it is because these tended to be four to a pound. These
tended to be between eight and ten to a pound. Then the last difference is all whole wheat,
not as much whole wheat and that's about it. Essentially they're the same dough, especially for our purposes so I'm going to use a little bit of both. But I'm guessing that the year old hardtack
will actually taste better because like a fine wine hardtack gets better with age or if not gets
better than at least develops in taste on account of the worms. "I have often seen hundreds and thousands shaken out of a single biscuit. We in the cabin have, however, an easy remedy
for this, by baking it in an oven not too hot, which makes them all walk off; but this cannot
be allowed to the ship's people who must find the taste of these animals very disagreeable
as they every one taste as strong as mustard." Sadly no worms found their way into my hardtack so I will just have to pretend. Now today's recipe comes from the diary of William Bircher who was a drummer boy in the Second Regiment Minnesota Veterans Volunteers. "When, as was generally the case on a march, our hard-tack was broken into small pieces in our haversacks, we soaked these in water and fried them in pork fat, stirring well and seasoning with salt and pepper, thus making
what was commonly called a 'hell-fired stew'." Pretty darn simple as is most of the food that
they were eating but we will go into that later, but for this recipe what you'll need is: some pork
grease. Now they would have had several options for pork fat. First and most common was salt pork but sometimes they did get cured bacon, so that's what I'm going to be using. One because it's going to taste better and two because then you don't have to get rid of all the salt. A bit of salt and a bit of pepper and of course hardtack, which is just flour, water, sometimes a little
bit of salt that is baked until it's rock hard, and like I said I did this a year ago and I made
a video on it so if you want to learn how to make the hardtack I will put a link to that in the
description, and as it happens last year that video was sponsored by the Great Courses Plus and
this year's video is sponsored by Wondrium which used to be The Great Courses Plus! So big surprise here. I love learning and whether I'm cooking in the kitchen or playing with my LEGO that learning comes in the form of lectures on Wondrium. They have an extensive library of educational
videos taught by experts in their field on every topic from science, self-improvement, art, travel, and of course history. There's this great lecture series called 'The American Civil War' and in one of the lectures on prisoner of war camps I learned that Union and Confederate
soldiers would sometimes end up in the POW camp of their own side and I was like what? Well it all came down to prisoner exchanges. Basically if we had 100 prisoners and you had 100 then you'd swap and no harm no foul, but if one side had more than another then those extra prisoners would
sign a pledge not to return to the battlefield. Sometimes they'd go home but sometimes they would be held in their own side's prison until they had other prisoners that they could exchange. Ain't that a kick in the pants? And for more kicks in the pants or at least interesting tidbits like this you can start your free trial of Wondrium today by clicking the link in the description
or just visit Wondrium.com/tastinghistory. Now let's get pounding up this hardtack. So you're not looking to bust this up into flour per se but you want it fairly fine maybe a few larger pieces but you want it pretty fine so it will thicken. Best thing to do is to stick it in a bag and hit
it a few times with whatever blunt instrument you have on hand. Okay so they both took some pounding
to bust up but the year old ship's biscuit was a heck of a lot harder and I don't know if it's
because of the age or because it is thicker but that took a lot of work. It's kind
of crazy how hard this stuff is but not for long because you're going to put it into
a bowl, and pour some water over it, and in just a couple minutes it'll soak it up and be soft-er. Now the soldiers ate this hard tack so much that they quickly got sick and tired of it and one
of the ways that they would vent their frustration was to write parody lyrics to other popular songs about how much they hated hardtack. One was the Stephen Foster song 'Hardtimes' "Let us close our game of poker, take our tin cups in our hand, while we gather around the cook's tent door where dry mummies of hardtack are given to each man; oh hardtack come again no more tis the song of the soldier weary hungry and faint. Hardtack, hardtack, come again no more." And the author of our recipe the drummer boy lamented "Our hard-tack were very hard. We could scarcely break them with our teeth. Some we could scarcely fracture with our fist." But he said that it did furnish quite a bit
of nourishment once they could figure out how to get to it by doing things like making hellfire
stew. "Thus we saw what truly vast andunsuspected possibilities resided in this innocent-looking, three and a half inch square hard-tack. Three made a meal and nine were a ration, and this was what fought the battles for the Union." Pretty good endorsement as long as it is edible and to do that it's going to take some pig grease. So heat up your grease and then add the soaked hardtack into
the pan, sprinkle a little salt and pepper on it, and stir it around until it browns. It only should take a couple minutes which is plenty of time to hit the Like button, make sure you're subscribed to Tasting History and listen to me talk to you about what
else a Civil War soldier might eat. Now any talk of what a Civil War soldier might
eat comes with a whole barrel of caveats. Were you an officer? Were you Union or Confederate?
Where in the country were you fighting? What time of year was it, and how far into the
war was it. And of course were you wounded or captured? Last year I did a video on what you might eat in a Union hospital and frankly it was not too bad food compared to what everybody else was getting. On the other end of the spectrum if you were in Andersonville you'd be lucky to be getting anything. So with that in mind I'm going to be focusing
on what your average Union soldier would get if they got what was due to them. In his memoir aptly named 'Hardtack and Coffee' John Billings of the Army of the Potomac claimed that they rarely went without any kind of rations, they were pretty well fed. As to the quality of
those rations that was a little bit more variable. So much so that when they got salt beef they
questioned where it actually came from, and would call it salt horse. He goes so far as to claim that the food inspectors of the army were actually in cahoots and taking bribes from the contractors
who were giving them the poor quality rations, and "No language can be too strong to express
the contempt every patriotic man, woman and child must feel for such small souled creatures
many of whom are today rolling in the riches acquired in this way." But provided everything was on the up and up the soldier in camp should expect to get some variation of "Salt pork, fresh beef, salt beef, rarely ham or bacon, hard bread, soft bread, potatoes, an occasional onion,
flour, beans, split peas, rice, dried apples, dried peaches, desiccated vegetables, coffee,
tea, sugar, molasses, vinegar, candles, soap, pepper, and salt." Mind you they didn't get all of that every day. It was always some variation, kind of came piecemeal, and that was only if they were encamped. If they were marching they got "One pound of hard bread, three-fourths of a pound of salt pork, or one and one-fourth pounds of fresh meat; sugar, coffee, and salt." So it was important that when you were in camp you saved a little bit of that ration back for those days that you were out marching, and there are a few reasons why those two rations were so different. First was that the supply train was often well behind the majority of the marching army. Another was that while they often brought herds of cows with them they needed to set up camp in order to slaughter
and butcher them for meat. Now to break down some of these rations and discuss what the men made of them we should start with the staple hardtack. [Clack Clack] According to John Billings there were actually
three kinds. The first was the kind that was so hard that you really couldn't eat it. This
was the best kind. The drummer boy who wrote our recipe claims that the hardness came from its age. "For there was a common belief among the boys that our heart attack had been baked long before the beginning of the christian era. This opinion was based on the fact that the letters 'BC' were stamped on the cracker-boxes." BC likely stood for brigade commissary or else the company that provided them. The other two types of hardtack were soggy and moldy usually because of bad storage and ones infested with worms, maggots, and weevils. And if a man got either of these types they
were supposed to be able to take them back and swap them out for some good hardtack,
provided there was any good hardtack left, and provided that they knew that it was bad
because in the dark it could be hard to tell. And "It was no uncommon occurrence for a man to find the surface of his pot of coffee swimming with weevils, after breaking up hardtack into it which had come out of the fragments only to drown." Though he says that once skimmed off they left
no discernible taste. But even if you had the best kind of hardtack you had to do something to it to make it edible, and the drummer boy says that there were 15 distinct ways of doing this. One of course was our stew today the hellfire stew. Another was called skillygalee and they're actually very very similar. Though it was described as a dish "to make the hair curl and certainly was indigestible enough to satisfy the cravings of the most ambitious dyspeptic." Another dish was lobscouse which was basically like a stew depending on what you had laying around that was then thickened
with the hardtack. And it actually doesn't sound that bad according to John Townsend who made it on his wonderful show Townsends and seemed to like it. But as palatable as lobscouse sounds there's
another concoction that sounds a little bit less so and that was if you were out marching and didn't have time to make a fire but were really really hungry and willing to risk your teeth then "they would eat hard tack in the raw state. In order, however to make them somewhat more palatable, a thin slice of nice fat pork was cut down and laid on the cracker, and a spoonful of good brown sugar put on top of the pork, and we had a dish fit for a soldier. Of course the pork was raw and had just come out of the pickle." Sugar, yay. Raw salted pork... nay. Now if they didn't want to eat it like that or if they didn't want to soften it by mixing it up with some grease or some coffee. Then they "pounded them to a powder, mixed this with boiled rice, and made griddle-cakes and honey, minus the honey." But perhaps the most impressive dish that they would make with hardtack was called hardtack pudding and they would pound it until it did become a flour and then they would mix that with a little bit of wheat flour and water "and made a stiff dough, which we next rolled out on a cracker box lid, like a pie crust; then we covered this all over with a preparation of stewed dried apples, dropping in here and there a raisin or two just for Auld Lang Syne's sake." Then they'd wrap this in a cloth and boil it like any other pudding and it would be served with wine sauce. "Though the wine was usually omitted and hunger inserted in its stead." Now as versatile as hardtack was they
did have other options. One was a small round white bean that they simply called the army bean. And while the drummer boy admits that it's not as versatile as the hardtack. "The one great dish which might be made of it was so preeminently excellent that it threw 'hell fired stew' and 'hard-tack pudding' quick into the shade." That dish was baked beans and i have to admit baked beans is one of my favorite foods though today it usually does have sugar in it and the way that they made it was simply with beans, water, pork fat that was left to slowly simmer in a pot overnight on hot coals. Now if you were set up in camp for a little while and the supply lines were running as they ought to be then the food did get quite a bit better. First of all you had access to that fresh meat and to a lot of fresh bread. When encamped they would build ovens and a lot of them. When the army was encamped outside of Petersburg, Virginia General Grant ordered the civilian bakers at city point to tend those ovens. And they would bake 123,000 loaves of bread every single day. Now all of these rations whether it's the hardtack, the pork, the beans, or the coffee everything came in really large
quantities usually meant for a hundred or more men in big sacks and big boxes. These would then be
given to the orderly sergeant for a company who was in charge of doling them out evenly to the men. And it seemed the most popular way to do this was to lay out a big blanket and then put all of the rations in little piles for each man. And "to prevent any charge of unfairness or injustice, the Sergeant would turn his back on the rations, and take out his roll of the company. Then someone else would point to a pile and ask 'who shall have this?' and the sergeant, without turning, would call a name from his list. William Bircher our drummer boy gives kind of a sad account of how this
process changed throughout the course of the war. At the beginning it took quite a long time because they had a hundred men in the company and they had a lot of rations coming in. "But after we had been in the field a year or two the call, 'fall in for your hard-tack!' was leisurely responded to by only about a dozen men, lean, sinewy, hungry-looking fellows, each with his haversack in hand." So there is so much more information on this topic that I could cover. I'm not going to because this video I think is already getting quite long, but I am going to cover specifically coffee,
Civil War coffee in an upcoming Drinking History video so be on the lookout for that, but for now it's time to try our hellfire stew. So once it's well browned just take it off
the fire and serve it up, and here we are hellfire stew from the American Civil War. Not gonna lie, looks like dog food... premium dog food but dog food. Smells pretty good though. It smells like bacon grease. Let's give it a chance. That's really weird. So texture is really weird It's gonna get stuck in every crevice of your
mouth. It actually- the flavor is not that bad. It kind of reminds me of chorizo but really much drier and crumblier. If you add even more fat it might it might
adhere a little bit better but even then I think it's going to be crumbly no matter what
I use quite a bit of fat in this. The thing is the hard tack soaks up everything.
It just- it needs liquid. So water grease just add more, but overall it's not that bad, and if i was really, really hungry and hadn't eaten that much and had just gone on a 20-mile
march I'd gladly eat this. So make sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I will see you next time on Tasting History. [Chomp Chomp] [Munch Munch] [Labored crunching]
I enjoy the hard tack *ding, ding* clip but I was delightfully surprised at your restraint in using it every time you said hard tack *ding, ding*.
Hard tack *ding, ding*
The format of this one might be onto something. I was really engaged the entire time when you started interlacing history into the description of the recipe. I know you usually go A-B-A but this was super engaging.
Can we please have a version of this where we get the castanets every single time the word hardtack is mentioned?!
Townsends posted about salt pork today. Good companion piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg4OIFd5-aA
click click
Looks tasty, weirdly. Also, the continued use of smacking the hardtack together when talking about hard food always gets me!
Its like tacobell meat.
I remember the first time I had Dinty Moore I hated it...then after trekking it was like manna from heaven. How much you appreciate certain foods really changes between a kitchen and a 3 miles up a mountain.
If you're ever on the East Coast and want to stretch your skills, I'd happily help haul heaps of ingredients up a mountain for a "Backpacking History" sort of deal.
In Ken Buns' The Civil War it's mentioned that soldiers would soak hard tack in their cup of coffee and skim off the maggots. I'm both disappointed and relieved that Max didn't do this.