Hardtack. Ship biscuits. Molar breakers. Seabiscuit. Galette or worm castles. They were all one and the same thing. Whether
during the Civil War or beneath the Jolly Roger, these little pieces of overly dry dense bread were
essential to the diet of any soldier or soldier, and it's that latter one that we'll be
talking about today. So thank you to the Great Courses Plus for sponsoring this
video as we make ships biscuits and grog, and sail into the world of sailors and pirates this time on Tasting History. So I'm often asked where the ideas for these
episodes come from and I thought this was actually a good one to kind of explain because
it's a really circuitous route. Circuitous, yes. So I was talking to one of my Patreon patrons
who goes by the name of Etrigan about Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, and the Lembas bread and cram
that he has in those books and how they were probably based on the hard tack that he had eaten
during World War one, so there you go episode on hardtack, but we decided to kind of narrow in
on ships biscuits which were the earlier form of hard tack that was served on sailing ships.
Though Townsends has actually done kind of the quintessential video on ship's biscuits so I
will put a link to that in the description, but we do cover some of the same history as he did
just for context but I was really looking to cover new history that he didn't cover in his video
that took us to pirates so thank you to Etrigan for inspiring and helping me with this episode
via your love of Lord of the Rings. Now Tolkien's bread was probably a lot better than actual
historical hardtack which was often crawling with maggots once by the time it got eaten and
was so hard that even Benjamin Franklin said, "The ship biscuit is too
hard for some sets of teeth." Now I looked all over for a period recipe for
hardtack and I just could not find anything maybe it was so simple that nobody
ever bothered to write it down, maybe it's out there I just couldn't find
it but I did find a wonderfully detailed description of how it was made in 1815 by
William Falconer for his majesty's royal navy. "Sea Biscuit is a sort of bread much dried,
to make it keep for the use of the navy, and is good for a whole year after it is baked.
The process of biscuit-baking for the navy is simple and ingenious, and is nearly as follows.
A large lump of dough consisting merely of flour and water, is mixed up together and placed
exactly in the center of a raised platform, where a man sits upon a machine,
called a horse, and literally rides up and down till the dough is sufficiently
kneaded- one man molds the dough, till it has the appearance of muffins. [Another]
stamps them on both sides with a mark. The business is to deposit in the oven 70
biscuits in a minute- the biscuits thus baked are kept in repositories, which receive warmth
from being placed in drying lofts over the ovens till they are sufficiently dry to be packed
into bags without danger of getting mouldy." And that last part is essentially
why ships biscuits even exist because keeping bread from getting moldy on a ship
is darn near impossible but if it's sufficiently dried it can last up to a year and later on when
it was used on land like during the Civil War it could last indefinitely there's actually
still some hardtack left from the Civil War and, there's a guy on the internet who eats
it. I would not suggest doing that but it's kind of an interesting video to watch.
Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is: 4 cups or 450 grams of flour, and 1 cup or 235 milliliters or less of water, and that should make either four large
biscuits or about eight small ones. They change in shape and size throughout history
so it's really up to you. Now for the flour used they used all sorts it could either be really
nice flour, or the worst flour kind of depending on who is making it at what time and for whom,
but I'm going to be using a stone ground whole wheat flour which is rather coarse because
in Jonas Hanway esquire's amazingly titled, "Abuses in bread one of the most
injurious practices of our times, and the importance of removing the evil." He says, "The flour which biscuit
and gingerbread bakers use, should be called coarse flour." Now I'm not adding
any salt to this recipe because as Falconer says it's merely flour and water and that makes sense
because if you've ever spent any time on a ship as I have, you know that everything is salty. The
deck is salty. The food is salty. You're salty. You don't need to add salt, and frankly if you're
looking for flavor this is not the bread to go with. There are a lot better breads out there
and I'm actually taking a course on The Great Courses Plus that is teaching me all about making
some of those breads. The Great Courses Plus is a fantastic subscription service with thousands
of on-demand videos taught by top lecturers. This one on bread thatIi'm taking
deep dives into all the processes like kneading and proofing and shaping. Really,
really interesting, and it shows you how to make things like baguette, and naan,
and focaccia which is one of my favorites, and if baking isn't your thing that's okay
because The Great Courses Plus has lectures on everything from history to travel,
to learning how to play an instrument. They even have one that is on how
to use the fundamentals of a DSLR camera which I really should take because one
of my 2021 goals is to make the video quality of Tasting History a little bit better. So for a free trial please visit
thegreatcoursesplus.com/tastinghistory, or just follow the link in the description for your free trial today. Now let's
get back to them biscuits shall we? So take the flour and start
adding in the water. I'd start with about half of a
cup and begin mixing it in. You want the dough to just come together. The drier the better. Don't feel like
you need to use all of the water. Once the dough does come together get to kneading. Now Falconer describes a man
on a machine called a horse, riding up and down on the dough to knead
it. I don't have that kind of space so I just used my hands. Knead
for about 15 minutes or so. You can't over knead this bread and kneading
will help it so it doesn't crack in the oven. Next he says that they are molded into the shape
of muffins, and that would be an English muffin. So round with a flat top and flat bottom.
Also, you want to make sure that they're no thicker than about a half inch because
they're not going to dry properly. Then it says they were stamped presumably
with a royal insignia or something. I don't have that so instead Im just going to
poke holes which is called docking, and that makes it so it doesn't puff up in the
oven. Then set them on a baking sheet, and bake at 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius for
three or four hours, or until they're dry enough that they easily come off of the baking sheet.
Now at this point they should be pretty dry but we are looking for biscuits drier than the
humor of an English baker after two g and t's for "...nothing is more injurious to bread
than moisture." Now the term biscuit comes from the French word meaning twice cooked, and
that's often what they would do they would let it cool and then put it back in the oven and let
it bake again or three times or even four times, but in the description that we're using instead
they put them in these lofts above the ovens they would get hot and dry but not as hot as the oven.
So to approximate that we're going to put it back in the oven at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit
or 95 degrees Celsius for a few more hours. Now while we want our biscuits dry we do
not need to hold that standard to ourselves. So let's make some grog. For this all you'll need is four
parts water and one part rum. That was the standard set by vice Admiral Edward
Vernon who they called old grog on account of the old grogram coat that he used to wear. See at
this time sailors especially in the Caribbean would get a half pint of rum each day for their
ration, but Vernon noticed that they were saving that ration up for a few days, and then getting
plastered so to stop that he watered down the rum, and had it doled out twice a day. Now if you think
that rum and water sound just a little boring, don't worry because the vice
Admiral says that crew members who "Are good husband men may from the saving of
their salt provisions and bread purchase sugar and limes to make it more palatable to them." And I think I'm a good husband men so
I'm going to add a little bit of sugar and squeeze in a little bit of lime, and yeah. Swirl it around, bottoms up. That's actually really good. Quite refreshing.
Yeah I like that. Also how cool is this mug? It's perfect for grog. I'll put a link in the
description below if you want your own pirate mug, because that's what i'm calling it.
Anyway now that we have our grog in hand make sure to bedight this video with
a hit of the Like button as we take a gander what dem salty sea dogs might
have been enjoying for them vittles. Now to find out what pirates ate in the 17th and
18th centuries you gotta kind of look at what the Navy was eating because a lot of pirates
came directly from the Navy. Luckily for us the head of vittles and provisions for the
Navy was that prolific diarist Samuel Pepys, "By the morning we were come close to the
land, and everybody made ready to get on shore. The king and the two dukes did ear
their breakfast before they went... only to show them the manner of the ship's diet, they eat nothing else but peas
and pork and boiled beef." Now that entry was from 1660 and he must have
been so appalled at the limited provisions that a few years later when it was in his
power to actually do something about it, he did expand the diet and kind
of standardize the rations. "Englishmen and more especially seamen, love their bellies above everything else
and therefore it must always be remembered, in the management of the victualling of the Navy, that to make any abatement in the quantity
or agreeableness of the victuals, is to discourage and provoke
them in the tenderest point and will soon render them disgusted with
the King's service than any one other hardship that can be put upon them."
So just like me, 17th century sailors would get hangry and up and quit the Navy,
that's why I left. I wasn't in the navy. So a few years later in 1677
Pepys laid out the daily rations which included, "one pound of good, clean,
sweet, sound, well-bolted, with a horse cloth, well-baked and well-conditioned
wheaten biscuit; one gallon, of beer two pounds of beef, killed and made up with salt
in england of a well-fed ox for Sunday, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays." Now if you think
a gallon of beer sounds a little excessive it was a small beer. So it basically had all
the alcohol of like a half a Zima. Do they even make those anymore? I don't know. Now Pepys also
laid out some additional foods that crew members could eat on certain days such as salted English
pork, peas, three inches of northern sea cod, butter, and cheese, and he promised that no
English Navy men should ever be given Irish beef "for the Irish meat is very unwholesome
as well as lean and rots our men." Which explains why my Irish nana always ordered
her corned beef extra lean. Now something you'll note missing from this provision is anything
to stave off scurvy, which was the scourge of sailing ships. Almost 80 years before in
1601 a privateer named Sir James Lancaster, and a privateer was basically a pirate who was in
cahoots with the government, kind of stumbled upon lemon juice being a way to combat scurvy. He had four ships and the crew
of three got sick with scurvy, and one did not and it just so happened that
that one had been drinking three spoonfuls of lemon juice each morning. He reported
his findings to the British Navy who then proceeded to ignore them for 200 years. It
wasn't until 1795 that the admiralty finally against the advice of many physicians
added lemons to the daily ration. Crazy. Interestingly enough those
lemons often came from Spain, and a few years later when Spain got
into bed with monsieur Napoleon Bonaparte against England the lemons dried up, so the English started getting
limes from the west Indies, and became known as limes. Now with such a
limited diet for the majority of the crew the ship's cook really had to get creative if not with
the ingredients than with the names of the dishes. There was dog's body which
was a sort of pease pudding, and burgoo or loblolly which was essentially
oatmeal with either molasses or pig fat in it, and there's actually a really good video again
from Townsend's on making that so i'll put a link in the description to that as well. Skillygallee
was just ground up hardtack with pork, fat, and water, and then lobscouse was basically a
meat stew thickened with ground up hardtack. Then there was my favorite dandyfunk which was
again just ground up hardtack with fat, and molasses. They do sound pretty hearty
if not particularly interesting though there is one interestingly named dish that actually
does sound pretty good and that is salmagundy which was like an early cobb salad. It had fresh
meats and greens, and a little bit of a dressing, hard-boiled egg, sometimes some onions, but that
was going to be reserved for the captain and his mates and it said that salmagundy was
actually what the infamous pirate captain Black Bart Roberts ate the morning
that he went to Davy Jones's locker. Now despite these bland foods being what most
of the crew ate most of the time especially on long voyages when they did get to you know
different ports of call around the world the food got more adventurous and to learn
more about that we again go to a great pirate. William Dampier was originally captain of HMS
Roebuck for the British Navy but then in 1702 he was court-martialed for being cruel to
his own crew and expelled from the navy so he became a pirate, but again
one of those privateers who you know was kind of okay with the British
Navy, because he would only attack the Spanish but it was his writings that made him famous
because he catalogued everything that he did on his journeys especially the foods that he came
across. In the bay of Panama he ate a fruit called "avocado-pear.. the inside is green, or a
little yellowish, and as soft as butter. It is usually mixed with sugar and lime
juice and beaten together in a plate." And there you have the first English
language recipe for guacamole. Also the first English language
use of the word avocado. In fact the dictionary credits him with a lot
of firsts including chopsticks and barbecue, and cashew, and kumquat and supposedly
he came up with the term breadfruit. Some of his other interesting writings find his
captain "... feeding sometimes on land-turtle, sometimes on sea-turtle...
Captain Davis... found such plenty of land-turtle that he and his
men ate nothing else for three months." And he mentions that "flamingo's
tongues are large having a large knob of fat at the root which is an excellent bit, a dish of flamingo's tongues is
fit for a prince's table." Which is cool because the ancient Roman food writer Apicius basically writes
the same thing, so checks out. Also Dampier talks about taking aboard foods that
would last long times on voyages like coconuts, rice, "yams, and potatoes which
are good store to eat at sea." but not everything he was eating
agrees with me like penguin meat or the "extraordinarily sweet,
wholesome meat,... of manatee." Don't you dare Mr. Dampier. >:/ They are my favorite animal and I
would sooner turn to cannibalism than eat a manatee, and turning to cannibalism
seems to have been on the table as well. There are actually lots of stories of pirates
and mutineers resorting to cannibalism and even though the writing is full
of levity I am guessing that Dampier was a little worried when his trip to
Guam was taking longer than expected. "It was well for Captain Swan that we got
sight of it before our provision was spent of which we had but enough for three days
more, for as i was afterwards informed, the men had contrived first to kill Captain
Swan and eat him when the victuals was gone and after him me. This made Captain Swan say
to me after our arrival at Guam, 'Ah! Dampier, you would have made them but a poor meal for I
was as lean as the Captain was lusty and fleshy." I sure hope nobody ever refers to me as
lusty and fleshy, it's not a compliment. Dampier also talks about a lot of
excessive drinking which pirates and sailors alike were notorious for, which
is the reason that there are songs like '♪ What do you do with a drunken sailor?
What do you do what a drunken sailor♪' It is the year of the sea shanty
according to TikTok. Though probably by the time this video airs that
will be gone because teenagers are fickle. In Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
double grog was going on the least excuse, and the sailor Edward Barlow was
dissuaded from going to sea by his family "...knowing how many ill husbands
and drunken fellows used to go to sea, and that it was a place where many
ill vices were in practice..." but he went anyway and quickly learned
why that beer and rum ration were so looked forward to in comparison
with whatever else was on the menu. "...A piece of hard biscuit cake, or a piece
of old salt beef or pork, and maybe both stinking and rotten having lain
in a pickle one year or two, and nothing to drink but a little fresh
water, many times both stinking and dirty..." So can you really blame a pirate when in the
pirate haven of Port Royal Jamaica "They used to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street,
and oblige everyone that passed to drink." A pipe of wine being 126 gallons, so I don't feel that bad about needing
another cup of grog with my ship's biscuit. So after a couple hours your ship's biscuit or hardtack is probably ready to go but
if you want to dry it out some more, you can just leave it out for a few hours or
days or weeks or months because it lasts forever. But for today here are our ship's biscuits and
grog, and you can tell they're done because *knocks on door I mean... that's crazy it did break
off a little bit which is which is good because I think that that's
the only way I'm gonna be able to eat these. I worry for my teeth, let's give it a shot. Yeah that is- that is crispy. Crispy and flavorless, a little
flavor it's just not very good. They did use to break them up, and like put
them into stews and stuff like I said, or just dip them into their grog, or water, or wine,
just to soften them. I mean wow! That is like- *Choking intensifies That'll get stuck in your throat. I can see why Polly want a cracker,
and not a ship's biscuit. Smart parrot. So if you're on Discord make sure to join the Tasting History Discord where we talk food,
and history, and Pokemon, Ketchup with Max, and whatever else we want to talk about. And for your free trial of The Great Courses Plus
make sure to follow the link in the description and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
One of my favorite videos of recent weeks.
Did he call out steve1989mreinfo? Or is there some one else eating ancient rations?
I just watched this so good you're so funny Max.
Townsends vibes