Hardtack & Hell Fire Stew

It's the old question: what do you do with the cookie, because biting into it is not the right thing to do? During the American Civil War they prepared an infernal

stew

. Thanks to Wondrium for sponsoring this video as I test the strength of my teeth and stomach with a Civil War

hell

fire

stew

, this time on Tasting History. So one of the main ingredients in Hell

fire

Stew is hard biscuit and last year I made some hard biscuit and I still have quite a bit left so I'm going to use that. Now this is actually called boat cake, they are the same thing.

Hardtack was a term later used during the American Civil War. There are differences between this version and the one that would have been used in the Civil War. This is based on what would have been done in the British Navy in the 19th century and there are some differences. First of all the form. It was intended to be stored in barrels, while the hard biscuit of the Civil War was to be stored in boxes so that it was square for easy shipping. Then there's also the size, especially how thick it is, as they typically weighed between four and one pounds.

They usually ranged from eight to ten to the pound. So the last difference is all whole wheat, not so much whole wheat and that's it. It's essentially the same dough, especially for our purposes, so I'll use a little of both. But I suspect that one-year-old hard cake will actually taste better, because like a fine wine, hard cake improves with age, or if it doesn't improve, at least it develops its flavor thanks to the worms. “I have often seen hundreds and thousands come out of a single cookie. However, we at the cabin have an easy solution for this: bake it in an oven that is not too hot, which makes everyone run away; but this cannot be true. allowed to the people on the ship, who must find the taste of these animals very unpleasant, since they all taste as strong as mustard.

Unfortunately, no worms got into my cake, so I'll have to pretend. Today's recipe comes from the journal of William Bircher, drummer for the Second Minnesota Veterans Volunteer Regiment. "When, as often happened during a march, our hard pasta was broken into small pieces in our canvas bags, we soaked them in water and fried them in pork fat, stirring well and seasoning with salt and pepper, and so we did what was commonly called 'infernal stew.'" Pretty simple, like most of the foods they ate, but more on that later, but for this recipe you'll need: Some pork fat.

Now they would have had several options for pork fat. The first and most common was salt pork, but sometimes they also had cured bacon, so that's what I'm going to use. One because it will taste better and two because it is not necessary to remove all the salt. A little salt and a little pepper and of course biscuit, which is just flour, water, sometimes a little salt that is fried until it's rock hard, and like I said, I made this a year ago and I prepared there is a video so if you want to learn how to do the

hardtack

I will put a link to that in the description and like last year that video was sponsored by Great Courses Plus and this year's video is sponsored by Wondrium which used to be the great plus courses!

What a great 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 everything from science, self-improvement, art, travel, and of course, history. There is a great lecture series called "The American Civil War" and at one of the lectures on prisoner of war camps I heard that Union and Confederate soldiers sometimes ended up in their own side's prisoner of war camp and I thought? It all came down to the exchange of prisoners.

Basically, if we had 100 prisoners and you had 100, you would trade and it wouldn't hurt, but if one side had more than the other, then those additional prisoners would sign a pledge not to return to the battlefield. Sometimes they returned home, but other times they were held in their own side's prison until they had other prisoners to exchange. Isn't that a kick in the butt? 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 simply visiting Wondrium.com/tastinghistory.

Now let's start pounding this hard cake. So you don't necessarily want to process this into flour, but you do want it to be pretty fine, maybe some larger chunks, but fine enough to thicken it. The best thing to do is put it in a pocket and hit it a few times with whatever blunt instrument you have on hand. Okay, both took a little effort to break, but the one year old ship cookie was much harder and I don't know if it's because of age or because it's thicker, but that took a lot of work. It's crazy how hard this stuff is, but not for long, because you put it in a bowl and pour some water on it, and within a few minutes it will absorb it and soften.

Now the soldiers ate so many hard things that they quickly got tired and one of the ways they expressed their frustration was by writing parody lyrics to other popular songs about how much they hated hard cookies. One of them was the song 'Hardtimes' by Stephen Foster: 'Let us finish our game of poker, take our tin cups in our hands, as we gather around the door of the cook's tent, where each man is they give dry mummies of hard biscuits; oh

hardtack

returns is no longer the song of the soldier who is tired, hungry and faint. Hard, hard, don't come back.

And the author of our recipe, the drummer, complained: "Our hard pasta was very hard. We could hardly break it with our teeth. Some we could barely break with our fist." But he said it provided them with plenty of food once they figured out how to get it by doing things like making an infernal stew. “So we saw the truly enormous and unsuspected possibilities that were hidden in this tough, innocent-looking three-and-a-half-centimeter square tack. Three of them were a meal and nine were a ration, and this was what fought the Union battle.” Pretty good thumbs up, as long as it's edible and for that you need a little bit of pork fat.

So heat the fat and then add the soaked biscuit to the pan, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper and stir until golden brown. It only takes a few minutes, enough time to hit the like button, make sure you're subscribed to Tasting History, and listen to me as I talk to you about what else a Civil War soldier could eat. Now, any conversation about what a Civil War soldier might eat comes with a number of caveats. Were you an officer? Were you Union or Confederate? What part of the country did you fight in? What time of year was it and how far along was the war?

And of course you were wounded or captured? Last year I made a video about what you could eat at a hospital in Union and honestly, it wasn't that bad food compared to what everyone else was getting. On the other end of the spectrum, if you were in Andersonville, you'd be lucky to get anything. So, with that in mind, I'll focus on what the average Union soldier would get if he got what was coming to him. In his memoirs, aptly titled “Hardtack and Coffee,” John Billings of the Army of the Potomac stated that they rarely ran out of rations of any kind;

They were quite well fed. As for the quality of those portions, it was a little more variable. So much so that when they were given salt meat, they wondered where it really came from and called it salt horse. He even goes so far as to claim that army food inspectors were actually in cahoots and accepted bribes from contractors who gave them poor quality rations. and the child should have pity for such small beings, many of whom today benefit from the wealth they have thus acquired.” But as long as all went well, the soldier in camp could expect some variety: "salted pork, fresh beef, salt beef, rarely ham or bacon, stale bread, soft bread, potatoes, occasionally an onion, flour , beans, peas, rice, dried apples, dried peaches, dried legumes, coffee, tea, sugar, molasses, vinegar, candles, soap, salt and pepper." Mind you, not everyone got that every day.

It was always kind of a variation, it came piece by piece, and that was only when they had already set up camp. When they marched, they were given 'a pound of stale bread, three-quarters of a pound of salt pork, or a pound and a half of fresh meat; sugar, coffee and salt.' So it was important that when you were in camp you saved some of those rations for the days you were marching, and there are a few reasons why those two rations were so different. Firstly, the supply train was often far behind the majority of the marching army.

Another was that, although they often brought herds of cows with them, they had to set up camp to slaughter and butcher them for meat. Now, to break down some of these rations and discuss what the men did with them, we must start with the basic pasta. According to John Billings, there were actually three types. The first was the kind that was so hard you couldn't really eat it. This was the best guy. The drummer who wrote our recipe claims that the hardness is due to age. "Because among children there was a widespread belief that our heart attack had occurred long before the beginning of the Christian era.

This belief was based on the fact that the letters 'BC' were stamped on cookie boxes." BC probably meant brigade commissioner or the company that supplied them. The other two types of hard crackers were soggy and moldy, usually due to poor storage and types infested with worms, maggots, and weevils. And if a man got his hands on one of these guys, he was supposed to be able to take them back and trade them for some good hard pie, as long as there was some good left and as long as they knew it was bad, because in the dark it can be hard to tell.

And "It was not unusual for a man to find the surface of his coffee cup covered with weevils, after breaking into it a cookie that had broken away from the fragments to drown himself." Although he says that once skimmed they left no discernible flavor. But even if you had the best kind of cookie, you had to do something to make it edible, and the drummer says there were fifteen different ways to do it. One, of course, was our stew today, infernal stew. Another one was called Skillygalee and they are actually very similar. Although it was described as a dish "for curling the hair and was certainly indigestible enough to satisfy the desires of the most ambitious dyspepsia." Another dish was the lobster, which was basically like a stew depending on what was around and then thickened with the hard biscuit.

And it doesn't actually sound that bad, says John Townsend, who did it in his wonderful show Townsends and seemed to like it. But as tasty as lobster sounds, there is another concoction that sounds a little less so and that is that if you were marching and didn't have time to light a fire but were very hungry and were willing to risk your teeth, then they would eat. However, to make them a little more tasty, a thin slice of thick pork was cut and placed on the biscuit, and a spoonful of good brown sugar was placed on top of the pork, and we had a dish worthy of a soldier.

The pork, of course, was raw and just coming out of the pickle.” Sugar, yes. Salted raw pork... no. Now if they didn't want to eat it like that or if they didn't want to soften it by mixing it with a little fat or a little coffee. Then "they ground them into powder, mixed it with boiled rice and made grilled cakes and honey, except the honey." But perhaps the most impressive dish they made with cookies was called cookie pudding and they pounded it into flour and then mixed it with a little wheat flour and water. "and we made a hard dough, which we then spread on the lid of a biscuit box, as if it were a tart base; then we covered all this with a preparation of stewed dried apples, and put a few raisins here and there, especially for Old Lang Terwille of Syne.

They would then wrap it in a cloth and boil it like any other pudding, and serve it with wine sauce "Though usually the wine was left out and hunger took its place." like the hardtack, they also had other options. One was a small, round white bean that they simply called the army bean. And although the drummer admits that it is not as versatile as the hardtack "The only great dish that could be made with it. It was so excellent that it quickly eclipsed '

hell

stew' and 'hard pudding.'" That dish consisted of baked beans and I have to admit that baked beans are one of my favorite foods, although nowadays they usually have sugar and the way They made it only with beans, water and lard that was cooked over low heat. a pot overnight on hot coals.

If you were in camp for a while and the supply lines worked likeThey should, the food would be much better. First of all, you had access to that fresh meat and lots of fresh bread. When they camped they built ovens and many of them. When the army was stationed outside Petersburg, Virginia General Grant ordered the civilian bakers at City Point to man those ovens. And they baked 123,000 loaves of bread every day. All of these rations, whether biscuits, pork, beans, or coffee, came in very large quantities, usually intended for a hundred or more men in large bags and boxes.

These would then be delivered to the orderly sergeant of a company who would be in charge of distributing them equally among the men. And it seemed like the most popular way to do it was to spread out a large blanket and then put all the rations in little piles for each man. And “to avoid any accusation of dishonesty or injustice, the sergeant turned his back on the rations and took out the company list from him. Then someone else pointed to a pile and asked, 'Whose turn is this?' and the sergeant called out a name from his list without turning around.

William Bircher, our drummer, tells a rather sad account of how this process changed over the course of the war. At first it took a long time because there were a hundred men. in the company and many rations arrived. 'But after we had been in the field for a year or two, there was a cry: 'Act on your tough approach!' It was answered calmly by only a dozen men, thin, wiry, hungry-looking fellows, each with his duffel bag in his hand. So there is a lot more information on this topic that I could cover. I won't because I think this video is already getting pretty long, but I'm going to cover coffee specifically, Civil War coffee, in an upcoming Drinking History video. , so stay tuned for that, but for now it's time to try our nicely browned Hellfire stew, just take it off the heat and serve it, and here we have the Hellfire stew from the American Civil War, I'm not going to lie to you, it looks like dog food. .. premium dog food, but the dog food smells like bacon grease.

That's really strange. It sticks in every crevice of the mouth. Actually, it's not that bad. It reminds me a little of chorizo. much drier and crumbly If you add even more fat it may stick a little better, but I still think it will fall apart regardless of how much fat you use. The thing is, the hard approach is all-consuming. It only needs liquid. So the water and fat just add more, but overall it's not that bad, and if I was really, really hungry and hadn't eaten as much and had just done a 20 mile walk, I would happily eat this.

So be sure to follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller and I'll see you next time on tasting history.