The Unbeatable Ships Biscuit

imagine you're in charge of feeding 200 people not only that but you are at sea for 3 months on a wooden vessel only 120 ft long how are you going to do this a 32 gun frig in the 18th century was a medium-sized warship this ship is probably 120 or 140 ft long and maximum 30 ft wide with an array of cannons on board and this is the kind of ship that goes all over the world to take care of small problems this isn't the kind of ship that's in a line of battle with you know giant battleships all lined up but they go on Independent missions now they have a very challenging environment especially the cook the main ships cook has to cook for all the normal Sailors on board as well as the soldiers and he has to get these men fed in a very very short period of time because there is a special cook that does the cooking just for the officers and then probably a cook just for the captain himself moving all these Soldiers and Sailors over the ocean in this rickety wooden vessel calls for a very complex and rigid system of rules a tradition that has to extend for centuries for all this tradition it's amazing how many people wanted to change the Navy and to change things going on in this late 18th century so John Cochran writes this little book called The Sean's guide but basically this book is mostly all about bread and how can we bake bread on board ship the standard sailor ration of this time period was a gallon of beer and every day they would get a pound of ship's biscuits and ship's biscuits are the hardest bread known to mankind you can use them to hammer in a nail the author here thinks that soft bread would be so much better for these Sailors and how can soft bread be baked on board ship there are different problems with bringing Bread on board ship if we're at sea for months at a time we can't bring soft bread from on land it's going to get bad in just a couple of days certainly by the first week it's already starting to turn green it might sound easy to bake bread at sea but we have a lot of different kinds of problems we need to have a fairly large oven and we need to have the materials flour that's no problem but yeast is the big problem and he spends most of the book here talking about the problem of yeast at Sea bread in Great Britain and North America at the time was mostly baked with a liquid yeast that you got from the Brewer now that's a problem at Sea there is no Brewer right down the street that we can go get our yeast so how do they do this how do they leaven bread at Sea what John Cochran is suggesting here is called either the old dough technique or the leaven technique and this is a bread method they were using on the continent in Europe especially France and other places so this is the typical liquid yeast that people would be making their bread with in Great Britain and North America they would get this from the Brewer and they' get it fresh every time this might have a little bit of hopsy flavor to it but mostly it's probably from ale which doesn't have a lot of hops in it wouldn't be very bitter so what happens if we can't get that if we're on board ship then we can use this leaven technique and we talked about it before it has to do with taking a lump of dough from a bread baking that you've already done a previous day 2 or 3 days previously when you've done this you tear off a specific section of dough and you leave it behind for your next day's bread or maybe two or 3 days in advance the yeast will stay alive and he takes a long time talking about the three stages of yeast inside your bread now remember 1797 they did not know what yeast really was they had no way of understanding exactly its Essence so they just knew that if you used this old dough that the yeast was still alive in that and that it would go through these three stages of kind of a early fermentation stage a standard fermentation stage and then a a late stage which he calls putrid bacteria actually starts to live in it and it gets very sour and almost well smelling like rotten bread that's what happens if we just leave dough around for 3 or 4 days it starts to go really bad but he says if we keep feeding this yeast with fresh flour it will stay in a proper fermentation stage and we can just keep using it and using it and using it and so that's the technique that he really wants us to kind of embrace a technique that was used for hundreds of years over in France and other places in Europe and even as he was speaking was starting to be used in places like Edinburgh I think the reason why in France and other places they're using this old dough technique is because they don't have the fresh yeast either in that instead of drinking beer and Ale they're drinking wine and they don't have access to that same kind of yeast so they are kind of forced to used this old dough technique for the bread that Cochran suggested we have just four ingredients and these are the standard four ingredients that every real bread in the 18th century is made out of we have flour we have water we have salt and we have whatever we're using leavon or Yeast so I've got flour here and a little bit of salt and water and then we're going to take this lump of dough from a couple of days ago and we're going to break it up and it'll work its way through our entire loaf to mix our bread I'm not even going to do any great quantity of measuring and they certainly didn't do that in the 18th century they took a large pile of flour and they start mixing the ingredients in we are just trying to get to a certain consistency after that's all kneaded and mixed together we're going to set it aside to rise and we'll let that rise for a couple of hours maybe longer depending on how warm our environment is and since this old dough M it may be three or four generations old it might take a little bit longer but that's okay maybe it might take all evening or an entire day but it'll work out as long as we give it a little bit of time and where it's not too cold after it's risen once we can go ahead and punch that down kneaded a little bit and let it rise another amount of time generally it doesn't have to rise quite as long that second time and form it up into our loaf then after it's second Rising we can put it right into the oven depending on the size of your loaf if you're baking this into a modern oven I'd go ahead and set it at 400° and it might bake for 30 minutes bread isn't some magical stuff it is something that just about anybody can make and I really want to encourage everyone to try this out it may not be the perfect loaf of bread like you get in the grocery store but that's not what they had in the 18th century and that's not real bread anyway so what is it like on board ship when you you are the Cook what is your ship's Galley like as they move into the 18th century a special kind of Galley stove comes into use especially in the British Navy and probably something very similar in other navies we would kind of recognize it as a stove wood fired with an oven on one side and a very large cooking vessel built into this this is a very dangerous spot in the ship when you have fire going on and 18th century ship are basically a big match the vast majority of cooking on board ship especially for the common sailors and soldiers is boiling and that's why they have this large boiling vessel you can basically fit everything you need to cook for all those 200 men inside of that vessel beside that there is probably a small oven area we can imagine this being maybe even half the size of an apartment oven and possibly even an area so that you can roast off to the side for smaller ships and gunboats sometimes the ship's Galley is just a small brick Hearth with the cooking vessel in that again very dangerous and if you are at Sea and it's a rough sea maybe you have a storm or there's just big waves you can't start the stove at all you're going to eat all your food cold and you hear about Sailors complaining about that over and over again you might have to go days and days with no hot food the ship's Galley is usually located below decks on these larger military vessels but on smaller commercial vessels they might have it bolted on the deck so that it's out there in the wind and sometimes in the weather but it's also a safer location and these ships G on these smaller ships might only be say 4 ft Square very very small kitchen area they were experimenting with some other kinds of cooking vessels in this time period they had pressure cookers sometimes called digestors but they were very dangerous and sometimes exploded because of people didn't know how to use them it was very important to keep the sailors happy on board ship after all without them the ship can't sail and especially on board a man of war like this there are a lot more Sailors than there are officers of the captain and food is a big part of that so there's a lot of tradition in the food of the sailors they expected a certain kind of food and we would look on their rations of a pound of salt pork or a pound of beef and these hard chips biscuits and maybe a gallon of small beer as very very unpalatable food but compared to the food that most standard workmen were eating during the day in the 18th century this was considered a very good meal not everything they're eating on board ship we would recognize as a complete meal and some of these were very simplistic one of the great examples of this is burgu of the 18th century and a burgu on board ship is basically a kind of oatmeal and again you can see how if you had to feed 200 men a giant vat of oatmeal might be exactly what you wanted to be able to cook burgu is one of the simplest dishes is for the ship's cook to prepare he's just going to get his cauldron of water nice and hot and then start pouring in his ground oatmeal and this is something that is not only popular on board ship but it's standard fair for just about everyone Chip's biscuit is what Cochran is trying to replace this is the main stay of the diet of a normal sailor in this time frame and this is so popular that they would have literally thousands of pounds of ship's biscuit on board ship this would have a lot of different problems though it had to be made onshore months at a time and it would come in giant bags that they would have to keep dry on board ship that can be difficult to do so they would have special tin lined bread rooms to keep the rats out and even then they were attacked by weevils so many times your ship's biscuit would be full of worms when it was time for you to eat them ship's biscuit also took up a lot of room compared to just plain flour so Cochran said maybe we can actually take up a lot less room if we just had kegs of flour and you could bake soft bread on board ship instead of using these hard hard biscuits ship's biscuit are also not just edible right away you just can't eat these you'll break your teeth immediately they have to be soaked now now some Sailors thought this was the only kind of bread to eat and soft bread would actually mess up your stomach so they would complain about soft bread and want hard biscuits instead these biscuits were very very handy in situations where you could not cook on board ship if you have a storm and you can't light your stove you could feed your Sailors and they could sustain themselves on nothing but chips biscuits I found it very interesting that his concept of using the old dough technique or the leevan technique to make fresh bread on board ship does not take over it does not get popular in the least in fact it kind of goes the other direction that ship's biscuit continues to be used for a hundred years even more after this book is printed and even this old dough technique sour dough kind of goes out of favor in the 19th century because the industrialization of the yeast process so yeast starts to become available in Little Cakes and in dried yeast so most of the bread Bakers even in Europe change over to Manufactured yeast regardless it's great to dig into these historical documents to understand what people were thinking in the time period what was actually popular so he tells us even though you know he wants to change it to something else we understand what is popular in the time period and what happens to some of these people's ideas we've got a couple of different sailor meals here we've got the bergu which is I mean so much of a standard meal and you can imagine this might be the big meal of the day for a sailor and this is all they're going to have a little bit of U molasses just to sweeten it up and then a plain wonderful oatmeal I'm not sure how I could work all day and that's the only thing I would eat but sometimes that's what happened and now we have the big kind of conclusion here the bread that Cochran thinks they should have on board versus the bread they did have on board and let me tell you ship's biscuit is tough stuff you can only eat it without doing any kind of preparation by breaking it into tiny little pieces and sticking them in your mouth and sort of letting them dissolve over maybe a half an hour this one's been soaking and it's certainly soft enough to eat but is this has been soaking for probably more than an hour and it's still kind of tough a bread that is hard to believe anyone could survive upon Crockin bread no it doesn't have really big voids in it it's not your classic white bread it's a little dense because of the way you would have to make it and how the leaven works and you know if we if we tried this over weeks at a time it would probably be you know a good bit fluffier but I can understand a meal with this is your kind of bread but how would you ever on board ship ever be able to make enough loafs you would need a loaf like this per man per day you would need to have huge ovens or spend your entire day and even night baking bread in one of these little tiny ovens he talks about redesigning the oven to make them bigger but even then I can't imagine it would ever work out and maybe that's one of the reasons why this was never adopted in the Navy

Channel: Townsends

Views: 146,016

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking

Id: gTw-68Ag-nM

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2024