Soldier Food Then VS Now

We have all heard the saying that an army marches upside down. Food is one of the most important parts of a

soldier

's equipment, without

food

you cannot fight. It's hard enough to feed an army today or maybe 50 or 100 years ago, but during the Revolutionary War it was almost impossible. Soldiers in this period had a problem with rations: the lack of them and the fact that they were very poor. They had poor equipment and impossible conditions. Every time I think I'm having a bad day and I need perspective, all I have to do is look back at this period of time, these

soldier

s think about the difficulties they had.

Whenever I want, I can go to the refrigerator. I can take out

food

. Cook in any number of cooking containers. I can eat it to my liking whenever I want and every night. I lie down in a warm bed and go to sleep for as long as I want. In previous episodes we have talked about the food, the rations and how they were distributed and even the episode of the soldiers' banquet where we talked about the difficulties they had in getting their food. What I want to talk about today is their mess kit, their cooking equipment, how they prepared their food, what they used as equipment in the field.

Imagine it was 250 years ago and you have been assigned the task of cooking for six men for a year and you have to be able to carry the equipment on your back. You have a choice, a kitchen. Implement what are you going to choose? Maybe a frying pan, saucepan, or large pot. Well, what did they have in the 18th century or specifically in the War of Independence? They had the kettle, the kettle was the standard kitchen utensil, whether you were a British troop or an American troop, it was always this size, anywhere from 2 and 1/2 to three gallons, about 10 tall and about 10 around.

It looks like a bucket or even a paint can, but nowadays it's basically the equivalent of a pot. In this they cooked everything and I think that for some reason the officers who were in charge of supplying the army wanted the soldiers to only cook one type of things, they wanted them to cook soups and stews. They didn't want them to fry their food or roast it, they thought it was a wasteful way of cooking and this was the most nutritious way to use their rations, so they said let's give them some type of kitchen utensil.

It's good, it's lightweight, we can use it for a lot of different things, we can carry our supplies, we can carry our food, we can carry water, so it was a versatile piece of equipment. Now sometimes people would try to use it for things they really shouldn't, so you could try frying in the bottom of this and probably many did and ruined their pots and we have documentation of officers complaining about their soldiers using things like this for frying. . and ruining their pots. Now these cooked pots are quite fragile, they are very light and easy to dent, if we fry them in them we will ruin the solder joints, so they are made of tinned iron or just plain iron.

Thin hammered iron sheet. and done in this kind of way. There was a lot of difficulty supplying them during the war because they needed a large quantity very quickly and no one could supply them as we didn't have the kind of industrial base or supplies here in North America during the year 1776 so that we could supply, say, 10,000 pots right away, so there was a problem getting them. The design was very similar to this from the beginning, they were usually supposed to be tin plated iron, they would have ears, a handle and a lid, making it a really wonderful piece of equipment, but they couldn't supply them fast enough , so they slowly changed the design, took off the ears and just made a hole to put the bail in and got rid of the lid and stopped using tin and just started using straight iron sheets to make them, so when end of During the war they were a little smaller and very, very simple and they didn't last much at most a year and they were worn out and everyone had to be resupplied with a new pot.

Remember that each and every one of these pots are basically made one at a time by hand, as opposed to something like later, when we get to the Civil War, when they have factories that produce these things, these pots are not made like that at all. . it's actually just a craftsmanship to make each one of these, it's not easy to make them, you have to hand form all these pieces, cut them all by hand, fold these seams the right way and

then

weld them all up and down . and around so they don't drip. Later in the war, when they were made from just sheet iron, they would be very difficult to weld, so we can imagine that the vast majority of them probably dripped and dripped a lot.

When our tin pot is worn out it won't be ready, they are not going to waste even a broken tin pot, they will cut the metal if they need to use it for something else or there is documentation for them to use them as a grater they would take. They used their bayonet and made holes in it and it was a very, very rough surface, they made a grater and sometimes they gave them something like just corn kernels. Now you can't really eat a hard, dry kernel of corn, but you can have this. Basically, you grate and grind that corn so you can make cornbread.

I wanted to compare this to modern military cooking equipment, but it turns out that the concept has completely changed from the 18th century to today. Nowadays soldiers in the field are fed MRE meals that are already cooked, no real cooking required, you can eat it right out of the bag, you don't need a pot, you don't even need a plate. In the modern army, they even give you a spoon, no mess. In the 18th century they gave you raw rations and the men themselves had to cook their food. Cooking pots were given out one for every six men when available, you could use this pot obviously for cooking and if you didn't have anything else you could also use it for eating, so you could leave the food here and pass the pot between the six men and eat directly from your pot or if you had one of the older model pots that had a lid.

You could use the lid as a plate and share it. Sometimes they would give turned wooden bowls and if they gave them it would be two bowls for every cooking pot so you would have one wooden bowl for every three men, you would think you know that the soldiers would be given a full mess kit In a bowl, they would give you a spoon and a fork, but it's not that simple and they just didn't have enough equipment to get by that way. They issued something like an iron cup, so this is a tin cup. It's probably even rarer than receiving a wooden bowl, so this is the mess kit for the Revolutionary War soldier.

It's big, it's clumsy, it wears out quickly and easily, but things. Keep going and everything will become much simpler. We received something like a mess kit for a World War II soldier, a simple canteen and a mess kit that folds up, turns into a plate, has a frying pan, has a knife and a fork, this is the mess kit. classic dining room we think of. Today, this is the simple clothing that every soldier would have. Each and every soldier had one of these, as opposed to having to share everything and everyone had a kit that was exactly the same thanks to industrialization.

There is evidence that spoons, knives and forks were sometimes issued to soldiers; it would probably be a pewter spoon or an iron spoon. We sometimes see knives and forks, even knives and forks with bone handles, but these would probably have been issued to officers, not ordinary soldiers. If a soldier is going to need a knife for eating, he will probably have to use his standard soldier's pocket knife. . Soldiers always had to find a new type of solution for missing equipment, so they had to make their own equipment. We have wooden spoons, soldiers constantly made a wooden spoon if they didn't have a plate or dish they were talking about using bark, planks or planks.

Bowls were scarce and so they begged, lent and stole anything they could use as a bowl so they could have a pewter bowl that they took from a house. There is documentation for using gourds as bowls and also this really interesting story about canteens. So the canteens wore out and there was a story about a canteen that lost the top of its head and was a perfect bowl that the soldier used and even received supplies of flour in his canteen bowl. We have documentation for broilers made with barrel hoops. They could put them over the fire and cook their meat on top.

At the beginning of the war there were not enough tin pots. Joseph Plum Martin talks about how he was given a cast iron pot to carry and the soldiers complained a lot and in his story Joseph Plum Martin talks about how no one wanted to carry it and finally he just threw it away and left it in a ditch because these things weigh like 10 pounds and the soldiers were told they had to take their cooking pots with them, they couldn't put them in a baggage car, they needed to have their equipment with them. at all times.

Maybe the pot would be lost if they put it on a cart, so they were told several times to take their pots with them. Now the soldiers did not necessarily have to cook every part of their food, they were often given bread from a pound of bread per day per man and this bread was baked by bakers who baked for the entire army. There were people who were just in charge of baking bread, they had portable ovens and they went and baked the bread. But sometimes the soldiers did not have bread available and they were simply given flour, so a pound of flour instead of a pound of bread they had to deal with this flour somehow, how were they going to cook it?

They could make fire pies that As we have done in previous episodes or a hard dumpling, simply mix this with water and place it directly into the pot with the meat that is boiling. The typical rash of a soldier was a pound of meat a day, a pound of bread a day, sometimes they would also give them things like beer or sometimes they would give them peas or rice vinegar or if they didn't have regular flour they might also give them cornmeal issued, it's fascinating to watch the evolution of these huge, primitive dining sets and what they become in WWII and they're nice and compact, and

then

the MRE, where the dining set disappears completely.

I'm sure some of you have experienced eating MREs in the backcountry not something you've ever had to do, so I'd love to hear about it in the comments section and even eat that way. The MREs in the field make me think about how easy my life is and I am so very very grateful.