Other than shoes and bullets
nothing was more important to a Civil War soldier than coffee.
Now the North and South love the stuff but the Confederates definitely had a harder time getting their hands on it
so they came up with alternatives like this rye and sweet potato coffee
which was sent to General George Pickett from his wife.
So thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video as we make Civil War coffee
or at least what passed as coffee
this time on Tasting History.
This week is the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg,
and as a Civil War buff myself I wanted to make a video that had some connection to that battle.
Well as it happens one of the most famous characters, persons, one of the most famous figures
involved in that battle General George Pickett
famous for his failed charge which bears his name and marks the turning point in the war,
well he once received a care package from his wife and it included the South's version of coffee.
"Come to think of it, my prettice, you must have been up all night to have made up and sent out such a basket of goodies,
and baked and buttered such a lot of biscuits, and made so many jugs of coffee as came this morning.
My, I tell you it all tasted good, and the coffee-
well, no Mocha or Java ever tasted half so good as this rye-sweet-potato blend!..
Bless your thoughtful heart!"
You know as odious of a man as he was, and he was, he does write a pretty sweet letter.
Anyway, I didn't actually think that I would find a recipe for this sweet potato and rye coffee,
and technically I didn't, but it turns out the newspapers especially early on in the war in the South
were filled with recipes for coffee alternatives, and I did find a recipe for sweet potato coffee,
and a recipe for rye coffee. The sweet potato coffee recipe comes from 'The Albany Patriot' in Georgia.
"Preparation - peel your potatoes and slice them rather thin; dry them in the air or on the stove;
then cut into pieces small enough to go into the coffee mill, then grind it.
Two tablespoons full of ground coffee and three or four of ground potatoes will make eight or nine cups of coffee,
clear, pure and well tasted."
So what's interesting is this recipe calls for mixing the sweet potato coffee with real coffee.
And that was possible at the very beginning of the war which is when this recipe was written,
but as time progresses most of the recipes drop off the coffee,
and we'll talk about exactly why that was a little bit later
but for this sweet potato coffee all you need is four or five sweet potatoes,
but exactly what sweet potato they're talking about is not very clear because
then just as now the term sweet potato especially in the South was often used interchangeably with yam,
and there are different types of sweet potato so I think either one is going to work.
I would steer clear from maybe purple sweet potatoes but since you are looking for a coffee color
I wouldn't go with the white sweet potato but something at least a little orange so it gives it some color.
So wash and peel them then slice them very thin, and set them on some trays to dry.
Now you can do this out in the sun and I imagine it would kind of take all day and I say I imagine because
I tried it but I had to abandon my endeavor because the squirrels just wouldn't leave them alone
so I ended up putting them into the oven for about three hours on the very lowest setting until they became like sweet potato hardtack.
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Once they're nice and dry and have shriveled up really tiny then break them up
and then put them into a coffee grinder, then grind until you have a powder.
Now according to the author of this recipe "The above is worthy of a trial.
We have thoroughly tested its qualities and can perceive no difference in taste from the genuine coffee...
We regard it as every way equal to Rio, Java, or the Mocha coffee."
I'm skeptical but I guess we'll find out,
but first we need to make our rye component and for that the recipe comes from the Charleston South Carolina Mercury.
"Take rye, boil it, but not so much as to burst the grain; then dry it, either in the sun, or on the stove, or in a kiln,
after which it is ready for parching, to be used like the real Coffee Bean.
Prepared in this manner it can hardly be distinguished from the genuine Coffee."
Again, skeptical especially because this one does not call for any actual coffee included,
it's just dried rye ground up,
and so for this what you need is a cup or so of rye added to a pot of boiling water.
Then reduce it to a simmer and let it simmer for about 12 minutes,
then strain them and let them dry.
And just like the sweet potatoes you can leave them out in the sun because squirrels don't like rye.
Oh it turns out yes they do, they'll absolutely eat anything or at least mess it around the yard so
leave it on the stove or put it in the oven.
Once dried they too are ready to grind.
Now neither of these look anything like real coffee grounds and they don't smell anything like real coffee grounds
but maybe they'll taste like real coffee grounds
but before we try that out
let me tell you a bit about coffee during the Civil War and why both North and South
love the cup whether it was real or not.
So like I said the coffee situation during the Civil War really depended greatly on which side of the battlefield you were on
so I'm going to break this up into Union coffee and Confederate coffee.
For those boys in blue coffee was a big part of their ration.
For every 100 men they received
"Ten pounds of green coffee, or eight pounds of roasted and ground coffee..."
Green coffee being unroasted coffee and it had a longer shelf life so they did prefer to to hand that out,
but it meant that the men had to roast their own coffee which they would often do either
in a skillet or in a pot just over the fire but
a few people did have access to coffee roasters
thanks to Wilder Dwight of the second Massachusetts Infantry.
Just a few months after the war started he wrote to his parents
"I wish you to buy, and forward by express, a large coffee-roaster, which will roast thirty or forty pounds at a time.
There is a kind, I am told. It would be of immense advantage to us."
And only two weeks later he wrote
"Coffee-roaster has arrived, and is merrily at work.
This is a comfort.
Tell father he is the regiment's friend, and I bless him."
Once roasted then they had to grind their own coffee beans either with a pan or hitting them with a bayonet
though some have said that they would hit them with the butt of their rifle which seems like a terrible way to treat
a rather important tool on the battlefield but
there was actually a gun called the Sharps Carbine which in some models was fitted with a hand cranked grinder in the stock,
and was often referred to as a coffee grinder.
Now it probably wasn't actually meant for coffee, nobody seems to know what it was really really meant for
but after practical tests in recent years they've determined it's likely
that it was used to grind charcoal for gunpowder which would make sense to have that
in the butt of your carbine, your gun but
maybe some people did use it as a coffee grinder. It was called a coffee grinder often but probably just because it looked like a coffee grinder
but maybe people were mashing them with the butt of their gun and thought hey we should just
put a grinder in the coffee, or in the gun, I don't know.
But whatever they did once they had their grounds it was time to make your coffee.
Now a lot of 19th century recipes for coffee have you boil the water
with the coffee grounds in it but
"The coffee should not be put in the water before it boils.
At first I was green enough to do so, but soon learned better, being compelled to march before the water boiled,
and consequently lost my coffee. I lost both the water and the coffee."
All that work to roast and grind it and he lost his coffee and there was nothing worse than losing your coffee.
"Coffee was their staff of life and they must have it no matter what risk attended.
The most disheartening event that could happen a soldier was to be called into line just as his coffee pot was beginning to bubble."
That was Fenwick Hedley of the 32nd Illinois Infantry and he says that
the men needed their coffee no matter what risk attended
i.e. people would risk their lives to get coffee and perhaps the most famous person to do this
was a 19 year old commissary Sergeant named William McKinley,
future president of the United States.
On September 17 1862 his Ohio regiment
was at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history.
"Early in the afternoon, naturally enough, with the exertion required of the men they were famished and thirsty,
and to some extent broken in spirit.
The commissary department of that brigade was under Sergeant McKinley's administration and personal supervision.
From his hands every man in the regiment was served with hot coffee and warm meats.
He passed under fire and delivered, with his own hands, these things so essential for the men for whom he was laboring."
What I find fascinating is that quote was from an officer in that same regiment
named Rutherford B. Hayes another future president of the United States.
Two future presidents and one regiment, kind of crazy.
Later in McKinley's political career he used the event as kind of part of his origin story,
and at the battlefield today there is a monument
that commemorates history's most dangerous coffee run.
Now the reason that someone would risk their life to get coffee to the troops was because the caffeine
in that coffee was essential to many, they would often call it their nerve tonic.
And there were some soldiers or even generals who really, really
believed in the virtues of this nerve tonic, of the caffeine.
Most famously was General Benjamin Butler,
he would have his men pour the water out of their canteens and fill them instead with coffee,
and it said that he would even plan attacks around the time of day when his troops were most caffeinated.
He told one general that "If your men get their coffee early in the morning,
you can hold."
That said Butler is often considered one of the worst generals the Union had
so maybe his advice should be taken with a grain of salt but it wasn't just him who loved an excess of coffee.
As "What we each man drink at every meal would keep a New England family a day..."
And Alexander Downing of the 11th Iowa Infantry wrote "One man in our company,
'Long John', as the boys have nicknamed him is a great coffee drinker.
He carries a two-quart Peach can strapped to his haversack,
and every day buys up one or two rations of coffee from the boys who do not use much."
Though poor coffee-loving Long John would have been frustrated as the war went on because
even the Union began to have trouble getting good coffee. In 1863 an Ohio Soldier wrote
"There is a good deal of complaint in our company at least about the coffee we get.
It seems not quite so good as that we have had,
and I suspect it has been adulterated by someone who is willing to get rich at the expense of the poor soldier..."
And by the end of the war Ebenezer Gilpin lamented
"We are reduced to about quarter rations, and no coffee,
and nobody can 'soldier' without coffee."
But he wrote that in April of 1863 after General Lee had already surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse
while General Lee's men, the rebel soldiers, well they'd been going without coffee since pretty much day one.
The Anaconda Plan was General Winfield Scott's idea to completely blockade the South
from getting any supplies from outside the Confederacy
and this meant no coffee was coming in from Brazil or the other coffee growing regions.
And just a few months after Fort Sumter was fired upon Southern newspapers start including recipes for fake coffee.
Like I said, at first they were just a way to to supplement your coffee to make what coffee you had last a little bit longer
but very, very quickly like within within the first year coffee is pretty much gone,
and it's just recipes for something warm to drink that might look and taste like coffee.
These coffee alternatives became known as Lincoln coffee and were made of among other things
acorns, rice, okra, peanuts, asparagus, persimmons, field peas, beets, rye, sweet potato, and even cotton seeds.
In New Orleans they would use chicory which proved so popular that years later
when coffee became available again they continued to use the chicory as well.
You can still get it with your beignets at Café Du Monde which set up shop in 1862 during the Civil War,
though I do believe it is now blended with caffeinated coffee.
Though caffeinated or non-caffeinated just chicory coffee still sounds preferable
to what Luther Hopkins of the Sixth Virginia Infantry described.
"During the winter months, when we needed some kind of beverage to wash down our hardtack,
the only thing we could get was horse feed, which was roasted and boiled.
We called it coffee... we had to rob our horses for this, and we all felt mean when we did it."
And if a Confederate soldier was able to get their hands on real coffee it was usually done by
trading with Union soldiers.
"Our boys and the Johnnies on the skirmish line entered into an agreement not to fire on one another...
Boys would meet between the lines, exchange tobacco for coffee.
The rebs were always very anxious to get hold of New York papers."
But if you weren't able to get it in a swap then you'd better be saving your pennies if you wanted to have some real coffee,
because at the beginning of the war in March of 1861
one pound of coffee was sold for a dollar twenty in the Confederacy
but by the end of the war it was up to $196 dollars a pound.
And now the Confederate dollar was way devalued but even so
that was really, really expensive for some coffee.
That is why most were dependent on these faux coffees
but if the recipes were to be believed you couldn't tell the difference between
the fake coffee and a real cup of coffee.
Like one recipe for war coffee, it called for mixing equal parts coffee and equal parts cornmeal
and swore that "I have used it for two weeks,
and several friends visiting my house say they could not discover anything peculiar in the taste of my coffee,
but pronounced it very good.
Try it, and see if we can't get along comfortably even while our ports are blockaded by the would-be king."
And there were tons of these recipes and they all read very similarly always ending with
and you'll never believe it's not coffee.
Kind of reminds me of those I Can't Believe It's Not Butter ads from the 90s.
I can't believe it's not butter!
But just like Family Guy mocked those ads...
I can't-
believe!
...so too did the newspapers of the South mock the recipes for the faux coffee.
Like this one from The Arkansas True Democrat "Recipes for the Times.
To Make Coffee. Take tan bark three parts;
three old cigar stumps and a quart of water, mix well and boil fifteen minutes in a dirty coffee pot,
and the best judges cannot tell it from the finest Mocha."
And they mocked it because as much as people tried to convince themselves that this stuff tasted like real coffee,
it didn't, and they knew it.
"...after every experiment to make coffee of what was not coffee,
we were driven to decide that there was nothing coffee but coffee..."
And when a British officer Sir Arthur Lyon Fremantle visited the Confederate States in 1863 he remarked
"The loss of coffee afflicts the Confederates even more than the loss of spirits;
and they exercised their Ingenuity in devising substitutes,
which are not generally very successful."
Nobody was fooled, which is why I'm really curious what this rye and sweet potato coffee is going to taste like.
So to start off bring a quart of water to a boil.
You can use a coffee pot or just a regular pot,
or if you have a mucket use that.
Muckets were what many of the soldiers would have boiled their coffee in and basically it's just a tin canister.
Once it's boiling at a heaping quarter cup of the coffee mixture. I am using half the sweet potato and half the rye
but you could use like a third sweet potato, a third rye and a third regular coffee
if it's the beginning of the war and you still had access to coffee.
What you don't want to do is add it while it's boiling, you want to turn off the heat and then add it
because if you add it while it's boiling it does this.
So take it off the heat, add the grounds and let it steep for seven or eight minutes
or until all of the grounds have fallen to the bottom of the pot.
Then you can pour yourself a cup of General Pickett's rye and sweet potato coffee.
So I have the tin cup here but I also poured it into a glass so you can see a little better
what this actually looks like
and it ain't coffee.
Now one of the early recipes would have you add coffee as well so it probably would look a lot more like coffee
but this looks more like tea or apple cider. The thing is
smells really good. It smells like sweet potatoes. Let's give it a go.
It's very, very hot. Hmm!
That's very, very hot but mmm.
Tastes like sweet potatoes. It is sweet potato tea, I'm not sure that the rye necessarily- no,
it does. It adds kind of a nuttiness to it
but coffee?
No.
But good? Yes.
Also I have some hardtack here, a little broken piece of hardtack that I just want to dip in it because
that's often how they would have eaten their hardtack was just dipping it into coffee to soften it up. Hmmm.
[struggle bus]
It doesn't really work in this cup but I'll have a tiny tiny piece that hopefully I won't break my teeth on.
I don't know how long it needs to soak probably longer than that.
Yeah, longer than that.
Well, I got a little bit off.
This is two years old at this point.
And still as tasteless as the day it was baked.
And it is still really, really hard.
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and I will see you next time on Tasting History
with more hardtack.
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