/ Maggie Koerth-Baker / 7:26 am Tue May 10, 2011

A recipe for hardtack

PensacolaWentworthAug2008Hardtack.jpg

Now you can eat like a 19th-century soldier or sailor (or cowboy!). Just mix up this recipe and then serve it with, respectively, coffee, rum, or beans. Ration of semi-rancid meat sold separately.

To make hardtack: Mix 2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 cups whole wheat flour, and 1 tsp salt. Form it into a dough using 1.5 cups of water.

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Then spread it into a pan, prick it all over on top with a fork, and bake it for 50 minutes at 325 degrees F.

NOM(?)

Hardtack recipe comes from The Food Journal of Lewis & Clark: Recipes for an Expedition by Mary Gunderson. The other recipes in this book are a lot more appetizing.

Image: Infrogmation of New Orleans, via CC license. Why Mr. T. T. Wentworth Jr. decided to preserve a piece of hardtack from 1862, I have no idea. People collect weird things.

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    1. Reminds me of Master+Commander (film) when they have a conversation over dinner about the weevils that just fell out of their bread onto the table without ever bothering to say “GAHHH! WEEVILS!”

  5. A dish which inspired one of my favorite Civil War songs (to the tune of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times, Come Again No More”)

    Let us close our game of poker, take our tin cups in our hand
    As we gather around the cook tent’s door
    Where dried mummies of hard crackers are served out to each man.
    Oh hard crackers, come again no more!

    CHORUS:
    ‘Tis the song, the sigh of the hungry:
    “Hard crackers, hard crackers, come again no more.”
    Many days you have lingered upon our stomachs sore.
    Oh hard crackers, come again no more!

    There’s a hungry, thirsty soldier who wears his life away
    In torn clothes whose better days are o’er.
    And he’s sighing now for whiskey in a voice as dry as hay,
    “Oh hard crackers, come again no more!”
    — CHORUS

    ‘Tis the cry of the soldiers in camp both night and day,
    ‘Tis the wail that is mingled with each snore.
    ‘Tis the sighing of the soul for spring chickens far away,
    “Oh hard crackers, come again no more!”
    — CHORUS

    But to all these cries and murmurs, there comes a sudden hush
    As frail forms are fainting by the door,
    For they feed us now on horse feed that the cooks call cracker mush!
    Oh hard crackers, come again once more!

    FINAL CHORUS:

    ‘Tis the weary wail of the starving:
    “Oh hard crackers, hard crackers, come again once more!”
    You were old and somewhat wormy, but we pass your failings o’er.
    Oh hard crackers, come again once more!

    1. I’d always heard it as “Hard tack, come again no more,” but it is a favorite of mine too. The Skeleton Crew Pirate Band recorded it a few years ago and I never grow tired of it.

  6. I’m kind of surprised that Lewis & Clark and 19th century cowboys etc even had white flour. I thought it came in to use later than that.

    1. Err White flour has been around since at least Roman times if not well before that.

      You simply run the whole flour through a sieve (or for the whitest of white flour) pass it through a cloth. What you end up with is a very white flour for making fine white bread etc.

      This is obviously a laborious task to do by hand so it was expensive and available only to the richest and not something you would expect to find in hard tack. I suspect the recipe above uses the mixture of white and whole wheat flour to better represent a semi sieved flour such as would have been in general usage where some of the bran was removed but not all of it.

        1. Modern white flour is made by bleaching it.

          No, white flour means it is flour made from from the endosperm of the wheat grain (excluding the bran and and germ). You can get it in either bleached or unbleached varieties.

  7. @Bill-pan size doesn’t matter. It’s going to taste like cardboard; the only difference being thick or thin cardboard. Hardtack is survival food, plain and simple. I imagine a meal or two of hardtack and jerky was probably responsible for more tooth-loss (since dental hygiene was seriously lacking) than any other cause.

    1. Gotcha. I thought thickness might matter given the almost-hour baking time. Cardboard has to taste better than burnt cardboard.

  8. I made some hardtack once based off of a recipe in a cookbook based on the Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels. In retrospect, I think the thickness does matter a bit, since if it’s more than a couple centimeters, it takes either a lot of soaking or a hammer to break off a chunk. Also, less likely for it to dry out completely, which helps texture but harms preservation, I’d imagine.

  9. Hard tack is an excellent snack. Here in Newfoundland, Canada there is a company (Purity) that still produces the food albeit under the name Hard Bread. It comes in a small biscuit form and is still used in many traditional Newfoundland dinners.

    The cheap price and the amount of time that a bag of the stuff would last probably was what led me to carry one around in my backpack for a year or two during university.

  10. eating it as a cracker was a last resort.think of it rather as your flour ration of the day to be used as a base for some sort of stew.flour would not keep and bags or other containers were prone to rips and leaks.a hard cracker was easy to transport and hand out in equal amounts.the company that made this for the Union troops still makes them,Brents i think in Massachusetts.the Civil War reenactors buy heaps of this and i have tried it,it should be made without salt and makes a base for clam chowder.

    1. Cram IS Hardtack. They were still issuing the stuff to British troops in the First World War, which is where Lieutenant J. Tolkien became acquainted with the stuff.

  13. The G.H. Bent Co still makes hardtack. They stumbled onto the original forms for making it. Their biggest customers are historial reenactors and they even sell it in old style wooden boxes. You can order it here.

  14. Not thee best recipe I’ve seen. There are other recipes out there that provide for the older style, non-cracker, hard tack. Real sea biscuits.

    I used to make the stuff, years ago…and still have some from 1997. It keeps forever, so long as it doesn’t get wet.

    The recipe I used (by memory without going to look it up) was a pound of flour, a Tbsp of salt, and “enough water to make a stiff dough”.

    There is a piece of revolutionary war era hardtack in the Smithsonian.

  17. One man’s stale unleavened bread is another man’s cake…

    I actually tend to crave low-salt saltines and matzah, so I figure I’d rather enjoy hardtack; minus the worms, of course.

  18. When made propery, this stuff is almost literally as hard as a brick. Civil war soldiers would often have to break it apart with the butt of a musket and then stick it in the bottom of their tankard and let their coffee soften it enough to be able to sludge it down.

    It’s really pretty horrid stuff.

  19. We made this in Scouts back when I was a lad. It’s seriously nasty & pretty much inedible by modern standards. Of course we left out the grit, rocks, uncracked wheat grains, and assorted other detritus typically found in poorly cleaned flour.

  21. I can’t quite understand the purpose or use of hardtack, basically just flour and salt that’s sticking together after you’ve baked out the water. Maybe I didn’t do it right, but it’s made to be something that you almost can’t eat without soaking in water or liquid to soften it up. Is it supposed to have a longer shelf-life in this form than just flour? Otherwise you could take little bags of flour and salt and add them to water, without wasting time making hardtack. Maybe the purpose is to create a visual and tactile impression of something like bread, for people who wouldn’t want to just dig in to a bowl of salted flour and water?

    1. #19

      Another term for it was “sea biscuit”. It was designed to be a long-lasting type of bread, and was often used on trans-oceanic voyages, both to supplement other stores, and as emergency supplies. If kept dry, it kept nearly forever. Ships had galleys that allowed them to prepare meals and breads, but since they were wood-fired, they were not used in rough seas or foul weather. Under such conditions, hardtack (hard tac) became a staple.

      It was also much easier to eat a pre-made biscuit than it would have been to eat could flour mash which, when dried, is hard to remove (flour paste used to be used to hang wallpaper). I’m sure the tactile feel of chewing (softened) hardtack was preferred to bowls of paste.

  22. Besides “worm castles”, they were also called “molar breakers”. If you made it right, you won’t wonder why this other name applied. If you can bite through it with your front teeth, you made it wrong.

    I still make it regularly, especially for wilderness canoe and/or backpacking trips. Kept dry, it really does seem to keep forever.

    The limited oven time in the listed recipie won’t really dry it out enough, though. While that might reflect the original bake, I understand that commercial production of hard tack included other visits to ovens, or drying rooms.

    At home, after the initial bake time, I take them out for a bit (to let the steam escape, rather than trapping it in the cooling oven), and later return them to the oven for a second, lower-temp bake (c. 170F). I’ll usually sample one after the second bake. If they still are too moist in the middle, they get a third bake. If they are too moist when you put them away, they will moulder.

    Also, the fork-poking (docking) is much better done with either a docking roller or a docking board. To make a docking board, pound some 16 penny nails soildly into a piece of non-treated 2×4, then cut the heads off evenly, leaving only the shaft of each nail at the same length. I typically space them in a grid about 3/4″ apart, starting 3/4″ in from the edge of the board (the width of a 2×4 is a fine dimension for cutting hardtack). Use the docking board to poke your holes (while the bread is on a floured board, cutting board, or some other surface you don’t want to scratch with the nail shafts.

    When I make hard tack, I make a lot of it, so I use about a 2′ segment of board. You could easily make a palm-sized version for periodic use.

    Those larger docking holes help the hardtack to bake drier in the first place, by allowing moisture to escape more evenly across the biscuit. They further help it to dehydrate on repeat bakings.

  23. About 50 years ago in a small Vermont town my cousins and I were taken into the attic of the house next door and shown some family heirlooms from a trunk. I was 13. In the trunk were an ancestors Civil War memorabilia. His hat, sword, pistol, a letter of commendation from President Lincoln and two LOAVES of hardtack bread.

    These were full size loaves of bread cooked in a bread pan and “twice baked”.

  24. White flour was available, but it was unbleached. Use of whole wheat flour by specification is a fallacy. The wheatgerm causes hardtack to spoil much more rapidly, so storing wholewheat hardtack for long periods of time in in open air is not recommended.

    Why add whole-wheat flour? Perhaps it’s an attempt to synthesise the colour. Perhaps it’s a nod to modern nutrition knowledge. The pictured cracker is visibly made of white flour and the US War Department specification.

    Eating hardtack raw is only for dire emergencies. Smash with rifle/musket butt (or hammer, boot, rolling pin, whatever is to hand) and add to a stew or boil to make a porridge with some dried apple, dried peach or a few raisins if you have any. Soak whole in coffee (or any other liquid) until soft, eating straight away or frying in the fat rendered from the cooking of salt pork.

    Spending your downtime living in the woods off of mostly salt pork and hardtack is optional and shouldn’t be done for long periods of time without some consideration of vitamins and mineral supplements, although by the civil war extensive efforts were made to supply micro-nutrients.

    1. Pilot Bread goes with stinkheads, too, although I have not tried them (stinkheads a.k.a., fermented fish heads).

      In Aotearoa/New Zealand one can get Cabin Bread in giant tins. The empty tins make good drums for Pacific cricket (kirikiti).

  27. No, wrong on flour bleaching, it was hugely popular during the industrial revolution. However the US War Dept specified unadulterated white flour and took a dim view of suppliers putting additives including bleaching agents in the flour.

    Of course there were opponents of the white flour fad, Rev. Sylvester Graham being most notable.

    1. Man, this cram is bland!

      White flour wasn’t something you’d sift out by hand – it was sifted by machine at the flour mills. If you go to the Hagley Museum in Delaware, you’ll not only see early-1800s gunpowder mills but also exhibits on colonial-era flour milling and other water-wheel-powered industry. The advantage of while flour and white rice is that they keep longer than whole grains; the disadvantage is that they do so because they have less nutrients in them, especially oils and proteins. Making them cost more labor and used more raw material, so the poor people were stuck with the more nutritious food, but it didn’t keep as long.

  29. Weevils, memories of …

    I was in the US Navy 1973-76, floating around the Pacific. Standard breakfast procedure was grab a tray (wonderful trays!), grab a bowl, go thru the line and populate the tray, grab a half dozen of those little single serving cereal boxes on the way to the mess tables. Eat the tray food. Then dump one box of cereal into the bowl. Do not stir it up, or you will see the weevils. If you see the weevils without stirring, dump it out on the now-empty tray and try the next box. If you do not see the weevils, add the milk (and if it is sterilized milk, add a ton of sugar to hide the foul taste of stuff with a six month shelf life manufactured a year ago) and eat. Proceed to the next box. Never tempt fate by dumping two boxes in together, for sure as shit, the second box will have weevils and you will have to dump both out.

    Bonus P.S. The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins with “Once upon a time” whereas a sea story begins with “Now this is no shit”, in a hashed voice after leaning forward conspiratorially and looking to each side. I leave as an exercise to the reader to determine whether this is a sea story or not.

  30. I bought a package of hardtack at the gift shop at the Fort Scott, Kansas historical site. I gnawed my way through it over a 2-day period. Only then did I read the label on the empty package and discover that it was “Sold as inedible souvenir; not for consumption”.

  31. So, NOBODY else errantly read this a, “A Recipe for Hacktard”?

    I think THAT might’ve been a more interesting article…

  33. Flour, water, and salt will get you a dough that you can fry up on a hot cast-iron skillet. . .indian flat bread! Add a bit of yogurt and garlic and it’s extra delicious.

    1. Hard tack is pretty good if you smash it up and mix it into your chili or soup (assuming you can’t get your hands on saltines, oyster crackers or Milk Bones).

  35. Credits to Mr. Bart Simpson:

    Neslon (as Huck): “I’m considerable hungry. We got any food left?”
    Bart (as Tom): “Hmmm – looks like we’re out of corn pone, fat back, hard tack, fat pone, corn tack-”
    Nelson: “Any tack back?”
    Bart: “Tack back!?”
    Nelson: “I mean back tack.”
    Bart: “Plum out.”

    1. That was a damn funny bit that I’d completely forgotten about. Thanks for the memory.

  36. The hard tack that I grew up with was made from rye flour. The texture was awful, but it was quite tasty.

  39. The G.H.Bent link was bad – here it is again: http://www.bentscookiefactory.com/

    I ordered some from them and strange as it may seem, a number of crackers came broken. I don’t think the ones they sell are quite as hard as the original civil war type.

    They’re customer service was great and the sent me replacement crackers. They are pretty tasty to me – very similar to saltine crackers.

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