Hard-tack recipes?

[Woods Dweller]

Any recipes for hard-tack? Or Sea biscuits?

 

[coloradoclyde]

Here watch this whole series.

http://youtu.be/FyjcJUGuFVg?list=PLD1F368B5848077C3

But I like these biscuits better!

http://youtu.be/FyjcJUGuFVg?list=PLD1F368B5848077C3

http://youtu.be/AYGEi8zpBrM

 

[Woods Dweller]

Thank you Clyed :hatsoff:

 

[BillinOregon]

Here are more recipes for Civil War hardtack:
http://www.grandarmyofthefrontier.org/articles/hardtack.htm

 

[Ringel05]

If you're doing a sailor impression don't forget to let the hardtack get wormy before consuming it......... Gotta have your protein...... :grin:

 

[Loyalist Dave]

The biggest problem with the vast majority of ship's biscuit/hardtack recipes, is the makers use the wrong type of flour.

You see, our modern, whole wheat flour, is made almost universally from hard, red wheat. Some folks call this winter wheat. The problem with the wheat is that it has a larger amount of gluten, and thus produces a much harder product than was actually produced in historic times.

The proper wheat is what we call today, soft white wheat, and you can find it in whole wheat pastry flour.

BUT we're not done yet...

Whole wheat pastry flour is meant to be used for very nice pastries, BUT the flour that was used for ship's biscuit and hardtack was NOT as high a quality product by far...in fact it was the lowest quality of flour offered for sale and was called "ship's stuff". It could vary quite a lot on the coarseness of the grind, AND had a lot of chaff left in it as it wasn't sifted very well.

So to simulate "ship's stuff", one needs to add some fiber to the whole wheat pastry flour...and the best way to do that (imho) is to add wheat bran to the flour. It's still not quite the same, but it will produce a much closer product than simply mushing up whole wheat flour and water from the local grocery store.

Ship's Biscuit
3 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup whole wheat bran
1 level tablespoon, sea salt
water
cornmeal for the baking sheet

Mix the first three ingredients dry, then add water to make a stiff but rollable dough. Roll it flat about 1/4" thick.

After rolling, cut into 2" to 3" discs with a biscuit cutter. Take the remaining bits of dough, combine them, roll them again, and cut again into discs. Repeat until you cannot form any more biscuits.

Pierce the biscuits with a fork many times to make holes to aid in the baking. (If your living history persona is British...use the tip of a table knife to make three lines in the center of each biscuit like this /|\ for the King's Arrow.)

On a dry cookie sheet, sprinkle a layer of dry cornmeal, then lay out the biscuits, and bake at 200º - 250º for about two hours. Watch them that they dry, and don't "toast". Remove, and allow to cool, and then place in a dry container


If it's still too hard for you to eat, add more bran to the next batch. You should be able to eat this with your teeth without soaking (it's when you use the modern wheat and no bran that the stuff becomes a roofing shingle)

I made a test batch with this recipe, and you don't necessarily need the salt, but some of these kept in a container now for more than two years....no mold.

You will find some places recipes for hardtack or ship's biscuit that include lard, or shortenting, and also sometimes honey, and even sometimes coriander... ship's biscuit or hardtack was the cheapest possible way to preserve a basic wheat ration for the military. They would not use ingredients that would speed spoilage, and increase price.

OH if you want weevils... add a tablespoon of uncooked, long grain, brown rice... and what you will end up with is a few of the biscuits at random will look like they have a weevil in them...and when eating you're supposed to rap them several times on a table top to shake out any live weevils that might be crawling inside....

Hardtack you can use the same recipe, just roll it into a square, poke holes, but don't add any /|\ to it. Break it into smaller squares when done for easier shipping by wagon or train and issue to the men...

LD

 

[George]

These seem unusual”¦

"THE SOUTH CAROLINA GAZETTE; AND COUNTRY JOURNAL
September 8, 1767
CHARLES-TOWN
INDIAN CORN, either ground or unground, to be sold at market price, by JAMES JOHNSTON, baker, in Church-street, next house but one to Tradd-street corner. ”” Corn flour at five shillings the peck”¦. Also all sorts of ship biscuit, either made of English or corn flour."

Spence

 

[coloradoclyde]

Corn tack or grit bricks :hmm: :haha:
I might have to try that.
I do have a few ears of Indian corn left

 

[tenngun]

'corn tack' I like that. Thouge we need to make some grit-brick and send it to Alden.
Keep in mind hard tack didn't start to get made until the middle 19th century. Before that they used ships bisket and pilot bread :haha:

 

[Ringel05]

Not necessarily corn as we Americans now consider corn.......
Corn:
Etymology of the word Corn
corn (n.1)
"grain," Old English corn, from Proto-Germanic *kurnam "small seed" (cognates: Old Frisian and Old Saxon korn "grain," Middle Dutch coren, German Korn, Old Norse korn, Gothic kaurn), from PIE root *gre-no- "grain" (cognates: Old Church Slavonic zruno "grain," Latin granum "seed," Lithuanian žirnis "pea"). The sense of the Old English word was "grain with the seed still in" (as in barleycorn) rather than a particular plant.

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“Corn” itself, though, has much deeper roots, going back to the misty prehistory of Proto-Indo-European. Both “grain” and “corn” come from the same very old PIE word, though there are two options for which that might be: either ger-, meaning “worn down,” or gher-, meaning “matured.” That stem wound up through Latin, on the one hand, which kept the G and gave us today’s “grain,” and through the Germanic languages, which, in their no-nonsense way, turned the G into a hard K, and gave us “corn.”

That conflation, of “grain” and “corn,” gets at another whole facet of corn’s past, too. Back in the day, English speakers could use “corn” to refer to any grain they felt like, though it usually meant the predominant crop in a given region. In England, wheat was “corn,” while oats were “corn” in Scotland and Ireland, and even rice was “the only corn that grows in the island” of Batavia (a.k.a. the Indonesian island of Java), as described in a 1767 travelogue.

What we call just plain “corn” today started out as “Indian corn,” but we dropped the qualifier by the early 1800s. Today Americans, Canadians, and Australians are still the only Anglophones who call the stuff on the cob “corn,” and a trip down a British Tesco aisle will yield more references to “maize” than you’d ever find stateside (unless you’re at a grade school Thanksgiving pageant).

 

[Loyalist Dave]

I think you will also find that "corn" is sometimes (as you mentioned) in older references barleycorn, or ryecorn while when they refer to Maize they write Indian corn, and wheat is sometimes wheatberries, while oats are often called groats.

LD

 

[Ringel05]

I think you will also find that "corn" is sometimes (as you mentioned) in older references barleycorn, or ryecorn while when they refer to Maize they write Indian corn, and wheat is sometimes wheatberries, while oats are often called groats.

LD

Just found a reference to English Wheat being "soft wheat".

Soft wheat or English wheat was grown and milled. Wheat was sifted or bolted into white flour. In sifting the bran and middlings (cereal) is removed. The middlings also was called ships stuff or red dog, was used for ships biscuit.

History of Flour Milling in Early America

From what I can tell English Flour is very fine milled soft wheat, basically a pastry flour.

Hard vs. Soft

Hard varieties of wheat are the most common and versatile. Hard wheat has a higher gluten (protein) than soft wheat. It is better for making breads, pastas, pancakes, etc. Soft varieties have lower protein and nutrients but are better for pastries and other items where a light fine flour is required.

Link

 

[George]

Sometimes, strange as it may seem, things mean exactly what they say. The ad referred to "Indian corn", and then said you could have your ships biscuit made with either "English or corn flour". How much more plain does it have to be?

Spence

 

[Ringel05]

Sometimes, strange as it may seem, things mean exactly what they say. The ad referred to "Indian corn", and then said you could have your ships biscuit made with either "English or corn flour". How much more plain does it have to be?

Spence

The ad referred to Indian corn, whole and ground then it referred to corn flour...... English sentence structure 101...... Yup, pretty plain it was referring to two different products otherwise why repeat it. Besides Americans didn't start referring to Indian corn as specifically "corn" until after the War of 1812, prior to that it was referred to specifically as Indian corn or Maize. Locally grown grain (wheat, rye, barely) crops were referred to as corn.

 

[George]

The ad referred to Indian corn, whole and ground then it referred to corn flour...... English sentence structure 101...... Yup, pretty plain it was referring to two different products otherwise why repeat it.

So you think ground Indian corn and corn flour are two different things”¦ why cannot the Indian corn be ground into corn flour?

Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier:

"As I have just before observed, we had no wheat flour, all the bread stuff we got was Indian corn meal and Indian corn flour. Our connecticut Yankees were as ignorant of making this meal or flour into bread, as a wild Indian would be of making a pound cake; all we had any idea of doing with it was, to make it into hasty pudding, and sometimes (though very rarely) we would chance to get a little milk, or, perhaps, a little cider, or some such thing to wash it down with; and when we could get nothing to qualify it, we ate it as it was. The Indian flour was much worse than the meal, being so fine it was as clamy as glue, and as insipid as starch."

Spence

 

[Ringel05]

The ad referred to Indian corn, whole and ground then it referred to corn flour...... English sentence structure 101...... Yup, pretty plain it was referring to two different products otherwise why repeat it.

So you think ground Indian corn and corn flour are two different things”¦ why cannot the Indian corn be ground into corn flour?

Joseph Plumb Martin, A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier:

"As I have just before observed, we had no wheat flour, all the bread stuff we got was Indian corn meal and Indian corn flour. Our connecticut Yankees were as ignorant of making this meal or flour into bread, as a wild Indian would be of making a pound cake; all we had any idea of doing with it was, to make it into hasty pudding, and sometimes (though very rarely) we would chance to get a little milk, or, perhaps, a little cider, or some such thing to wash it down with; and when we could get nothing to qualify it, we ate it as it was. The Indian flour was much worse than the meal, being so fine it was as clamy as glue, and as insipid as starch."

Spence

From your quote:

Indian corn flour. Indian flour.

He made the distinction even though he did use only flour once it was "directly" associated with Indian corn flour.
The ad referenced ground Indian corn then "corn" flour. The problem is (as is all too common with historical interpretation/identification) either one of us could be right. :idunno:
My argument is based on common usage and (in this instance) sentence structure besides if advertising was as it is today, paid for by the advertiser, why would he list ground corn and corn flour twice? Wouldn't that most likely be the same thing based on your argument hence redundant and expensive?

 

[George]

We'll have to disagree on this one.

Spence

 

[Ringel05]

We'll have to disagree on this one.

Spence

Such is life. :haha:

:thumbsup:

 

[coloradoclyde]

Also all sorts of ship biscuit, either made of English or corn flour."

Is it possible that a distinction between what we would call white flour and whole wheat flour or finely ground and coarsely ground flour is being made here ?

 

[coloradoclyde]

Soft wheat or English wheat was grown and milled. Wheat was sifted or bolted into white flour. In sifting the bran and middlings (cereal) is removed. The middlings also was called ships stuff or red dog, was used for ships biscuit