Hardtack. Ship biscuits. Molar breakers.
Seabiscuit. Galette or worm castles.
They were all one and the same thing. Whether during the Civil War or beneath the Jolly Roger,
these little pieces of overly dry dense bread were essential to the diet of any soldier or soldier,
and it's that latter one that we'll be talking about today. So thank you to
the Great Courses Plus for sponsoring this video as we make ships biscuits and grog,
and sail into the world of sailors and pirates
this time on Tasting History.
So I'm often asked where the ideas for these episodes come from and I thought this was
actually a good one to kind of explain because it's a really circuitous route. Circuitous,
yes. So I was talking to one of my Patreon patrons who goes by the name of Etrigan about Tolkien and
Lord of the Rings, and the Lembas bread and cram that he has in those books and how they were
probably based on the hard tack that he had eaten during World War one, so there you go episode on
hardtack, but we decided to kind of narrow in on ships biscuits which were the earlier form
of hard tack that was served on sailing ships. Though Townsends has actually done kind of the
quintessential video on ship's biscuits so I will put a link to that in the description,
but we do cover some of the same history as he did just for context but I was really looking to cover
new history that he didn't cover in his video that took us to pirates so thank you to Etrigan
for inspiring and helping me with this episode via your love of Lord of the Rings. Now Tolkien's
bread was probably a lot better than actual historical hardtack which was often crawling
with maggots once by the time it got eaten and was so hard that even Benjamin Franklin said,
"The ship biscuit is too hard for some sets of teeth."
Now I looked all over for a period recipe for hardtack and I just could not find anything
maybe it was so simple that nobody ever bothered to write it down,
maybe it's out there I just couldn't find it but I did find a wonderfully detailed
description of how it was made in 1815 by William Falconer for his majesty's royal navy.
"Sea Biscuit is a sort of bread much dried, to make it keep for the use of the navy,
and is good for a whole year after it is baked. The process of biscuit-baking for the navy is
simple and ingenious, and is nearly as follows. A large lump of dough consisting merely of flour
and water, is mixed up together and placed exactly in the center of a raised platform,
where a man sits upon a machine, called a horse, and literally rides
up and down till the dough is sufficiently kneaded- one man molds the dough, till it
has the appearance of muffins. [Another] stamps them on both sides with a mark.
The business is to deposit in the oven 70 biscuits in a minute- the biscuits thus baked
are kept in repositories, which receive warmth from being placed in drying lofts over the ovens
till they are sufficiently dry to be packed into bags without danger of getting mouldy."
And that last part is essentially why ships biscuits even exist
because keeping bread from getting moldy on a ship is darn near impossible but if it's sufficiently
dried it can last up to a year and later on when it was used on land like during the Civil War
it could last indefinitely there's actually still some hardtack left from the Civil War and,
there's a guy on the internet who eats it. I would not suggest doing that but
it's kind of an interesting video to watch. Anyway for this recipe what you'll need is:
4 cups or 450 grams of flour,
and 1 cup or 235 milliliters or less of water,
and that should make either four large biscuits or about eight small ones. They
change in shape and size throughout history so it's really up to you. Now for the flour
used they used all sorts it could either be really nice flour, or the worst flour kind of depending
on who is making it at what time and for whom, but I'm going to be using a stone ground whole
wheat flour which is rather coarse because in Jonas Hanway esquire's amazingly titled,
"Abuses in bread one of the most injurious practices of our times,
and the importance of removing the evil."
He says, "The flour which biscuit and gingerbread bakers use,
should be called coarse flour." Now I'm not adding any salt to this recipe because as Falconer says
it's merely flour and water and that makes sense because if you've ever spent any time on a ship
as I have, you know that everything is salty. The deck is salty. The food is salty. You're salty.
You don't need to add salt, and frankly if you're looking for flavor this is not the bread to go
with. There are a lot better breads out there and I'm actually taking a course on The Great
Courses Plus that is teaching me all about making some of those breads. The Great Courses Plus is a
fantastic subscription service with thousands of on-demand videos taught by top lecturers.
This one on bread thatIi'm taking deep dives into all the processes like
kneading and proofing and shaping. Really, really interesting, and it shows you
how to make things like baguette, and naan, and focaccia which is one of my favorites,
and if baking isn't your thing that's okay because The Great Courses Plus has lectures
on everything from history to travel, to learning how to play an instrument.
They even have one that is on how to use the fundamentals of a DSLR
camera which I really should take because one of my 2021 goals is to make the video quality
of Tasting History a little bit better.
So for a free trial please visit thegreatcoursesplus.com/tastinghistory,
or just follow the link in the description
for your free trial today. Now let's get back to them biscuits shall we?
So take the flour and start adding in the water. I'd
start with about half of a cup and begin mixing it in.
You want the dough to just come together.
The drier the better. Don't feel like you need to use all of the water.
Once the dough does come together get to kneading.
Now Falconer describes a man on a machine called a horse,
riding up and down on the dough to knead it. I don't have that kind of space
so I just used my hands. Knead for about 15 minutes or so.
You can't over knead this bread and kneading will help it so it doesn't crack in the oven.
Next he says that they are molded into the shape of muffins, and that would be an English muffin.
So round with a flat top and flat bottom. Also, you want to make sure that they're no
thicker than about a half inch because they're not going to dry properly.
Then it says they were stamped presumably with a royal insignia or something. I don't
have that so instead Im just going to poke holes which is called docking,
and that makes it so it doesn't puff up in the oven. Then set them on a baking sheet, and bake
at 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius for three or four hours, or until they're dry enough
that they easily come off of the baking sheet. Now at this point they should be pretty dry
but we are looking for biscuits drier than the humor of an English baker after two g and t's
for "...nothing is more injurious to bread than moisture." Now the term biscuit comes
from the French word meaning twice cooked, and that's often what they would do they would let
it cool and then put it back in the oven and let it bake again or three times or even four times,
but in the description that we're using instead they put them in these lofts above the ovens they
would get hot and dry but not as hot as the oven. So to approximate that we're going to put it back
in the oven at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 degrees Celsius for a few more hours.
Now while we want our biscuits dry we do not need to hold that standard to ourselves.
So let's make some grog.
For this all you'll need is four parts water and one part rum.
That was the standard set by vice Admiral Edward Vernon who they called old grog on account of the
old grogram coat that he used to wear. See at this time sailors especially in the Caribbean
would get a half pint of rum each day for their ration, but Vernon noticed that they were saving
that ration up for a few days, and then getting plastered so to stop that he watered down the rum,
and had it doled out twice a day. Now if you think that rum and water sound just a little boring,
don't worry because the vice Admiral says that crew members who
"Are good husband men may from the saving of their salt provisions and bread purchase sugar
and limes to make it more palatable to them."
And I think I'm a good husband men so I'm going to add a little bit of sugar
and squeeze in a little bit of lime, and yeah.
Swirl it around, bottoms up.
That's actually really good. Quite refreshing. Yeah I like that. Also how cool is this mug?
It's perfect for grog. I'll put a link in the description below if you want your own pirate mug,
because that's what i'm calling it. Anyway now that we have our grog in hand
make sure to bedight this video with a hit of the Like button as we take a
gander what dem salty sea dogs might have been enjoying for them vittles.
Now to find out what pirates ate in the 17th and 18th centuries you gotta kind of look at what the
Navy was eating because a lot of pirates came directly from the Navy. Luckily for
us the head of vittles and provisions for the Navy was that prolific diarist Samuel Pepys,
"By the morning we were come close to the land, and everybody made ready to get on shore.
The king and the two dukes did ear their breakfast before they went...
only to show them the manner of the ship's diet,
they eat nothing else but peas and pork and boiled beef."
Now that entry was from 1660 and he must have been so appalled at the limited provisions
that a few years later when it was in his power to actually do something about it,
he did expand the diet and kind of standardize the rations.
"Englishmen and more especially seamen,
love their bellies above everything else and therefore it must always be remembered,
in the management of the victualling of the Navy,
that to make any abatement in the quantity or agreeableness of the victuals,
is to discourage and provoke them in the tenderest point
and will soon render them disgusted with the King's service than any one other
hardship that can be put upon them." So just like me, 17th century sailors
would get hangry and up and quit the Navy, that's why I left. I wasn't in the navy.
So a few years later in 1677 Pepys laid out the daily rations
which included, "one pound of good, clean, sweet, sound, well-bolted, with a horse cloth,
well-baked and well-conditioned wheaten biscuit; one gallon, of beer
two pounds of beef, killed and made up with salt in england of a well-fed ox for Sunday, Mondays,
Tuesdays, and Thursdays." Now if you think a gallon of beer sounds a little excessive
it was a small beer. So it basically had all the alcohol of like a half a Zima. Do they even
make those anymore? I don't know. Now Pepys also laid out some additional foods that crew members
could eat on certain days such as salted English pork, peas, three inches of northern sea cod,
butter, and cheese, and he promised that no English Navy men should ever be given Irish beef
"for the Irish meat is very unwholesome as well as lean and rots our men."
Which explains why my Irish nana always ordered her corned beef extra lean. Now something you'll
note missing from this provision is anything to stave off scurvy, which was the scourge
of sailing ships. Almost 80 years before in 1601 a privateer named Sir James Lancaster,
and a privateer was basically a pirate who was in cahoots with the government, kind of stumbled upon
lemon juice being a way to combat scurvy.
He had four ships and the crew of three got sick with scurvy,
and one did not and it just so happened that that one had been drinking three spoonfuls
of lemon juice each morning. He reported his findings to the British Navy who then
proceeded to ignore them for 200 years. It wasn't until 1795 that the admiralty finally
against the advice of many physicians added lemons to the daily ration. Crazy.
Interestingly enough those lemons often came from Spain,
and a few years later when Spain got into bed with monsieur Napoleon Bonaparte
against England the lemons dried up,
so the English started getting limes from the west Indies,
and became known as limes. Now with such a limited diet for the majority of the crew the
ship's cook really had to get creative if not with the ingredients than with the names of the dishes.
There was dog's body which was a sort of pease pudding,
and burgoo or loblolly which was essentially oatmeal with either molasses or pig fat in it,
and there's actually a really good video again from Townsend's on making that so i'll put a link
in the description to that as well. Skillygallee was just ground up hardtack with pork, fat,
and water, and then lobscouse was basically a meat stew thickened with ground up hardtack.
Then there was my favorite dandyfunk which was again just ground up hardtack with fat,
and molasses. They do sound pretty hearty if not particularly interesting though there
is one interestingly named dish that actually does sound pretty good and that is salmagundy
which was like an early cobb salad. It had fresh meats and greens, and a little bit of a dressing,
hard-boiled egg, sometimes some onions, but that was going to be reserved for the captain and
his mates and it said that salmagundy was actually what the infamous pirate captain
Black Bart Roberts ate the morning that he went to Davy Jones's locker.
Now despite these bland foods being what most of the crew ate most of the time especially on
long voyages when they did get to you know different ports of call around the world
the food got more adventurous and to learn more about that we again go to a great pirate.
William Dampier was originally captain of HMS Roebuck for the British Navy but then in 1702
he was court-martialed for being cruel to his own crew and expelled from the navy so
he became a pirate, but again one of those privateers who
you know was kind of okay with the British Navy, because he would only attack the Spanish
but it was his writings that made him famous because he catalogued everything that he did
on his journeys especially the foods that he came across. In the bay of Panama he ate a fruit called
"avocado-pear.. the inside is green, or a little yellowish, and as soft as butter.
It is usually mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together in a plate."
And there you have the first English language recipe for guacamole.
Also the first English language use of the word avocado.
In fact the dictionary credits him with a lot of firsts including chopsticks and barbecue,
and cashew, and kumquat and supposedly he came up with the term breadfruit.
Some of his other interesting writings find his captain "... feeding sometimes on land-turtle,
sometimes on sea-turtle... Captain Davis... found such
plenty of land-turtle that he and his men ate nothing else for three months."
And he mentions that "flamingo's tongues are large having a large
knob of fat at the root which is an excellent bit,
a dish of flamingo's tongues is fit for a prince's table."
Which is cool because the ancient Roman food
writer Apicius basically writes the same thing, so checks out.
Also Dampier talks about taking aboard foods that would last long times on voyages like coconuts,
rice, "yams, and potatoes which are good store to eat at sea."
but not everything he was eating agrees with me like penguin meat or
the "extraordinarily sweet, wholesome meat,... of manatee."
Don't you dare Mr. Dampier. >:/
They are my favorite animal and I would sooner turn to cannibalism
than eat a manatee, and turning to cannibalism seems to have been on the table as well.
There are actually lots of stories of pirates and mutineers resorting to cannibalism
and even though the writing is full of levity I am guessing that Dampier
was a little worried when his trip to Guam was taking longer than expected.
"It was well for Captain Swan that we got sight of it before our provision was spent
of which we had but enough for three days more, for as i was afterwards informed,
the men had contrived first to kill Captain Swan and eat him when the victuals was gone
and after him me. This made Captain Swan say to me after our arrival at Guam, 'Ah! Dampier,
you would have made them but a poor meal for I was as lean as the Captain was lusty and fleshy."
I sure hope nobody ever refers to me as lusty and fleshy, it's not a compliment.
Dampier also talks about a lot of excessive drinking which pirates and
sailors alike were notorious for, which is the reason that there are songs like
'♪ What do you do with a drunken sailor? What do you do what a drunken sailor♪'
It is the year of the sea shanty according to TikTok. Though
probably by the time this video airs that will be gone because teenagers are fickle.
In Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson wrote double grog was going on the least excuse,
and the sailor Edward Barlow was dissuaded from going to sea by his
family "...knowing how many ill husbands and drunken fellows used to go to sea,
and that it was a place where many ill vices were in practice..."
but he went anyway and quickly learned why that beer and rum ration were
so looked forward to in comparison with whatever else was on the menu.
"...A piece of hard biscuit cake, or a piece of old salt beef or pork, and maybe both
stinking and rotten having lain in a pickle one year or two,
and nothing to drink but a little fresh water, many times both stinking and dirty..."
So can you really blame a pirate when in the pirate haven of Port Royal Jamaica "They used
to buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and oblige everyone that passed to drink."
A pipe of wine being 126 gallons,
so I don't feel that bad about needing another cup of grog with my ship's biscuit.
So after a couple hours your ship's biscuit or
hardtack is probably ready to go but if you want to dry it out some more,
you can just leave it out for a few hours or days or weeks or months because it lasts forever.
But for today here are our ship's biscuits and grog, and you can tell they're done because
*knocks on door
I mean...
that's crazy it did break off a little bit which is
which is good because I think that that's the only way I'm gonna be able to eat these.
I worry for my teeth, let's give it a shot.
Yeah that is- that is crispy.
Crispy and flavorless, a little flavor it's just not very good.
They did use to break them up, and like put them into stews and stuff like I said, or just
dip them into their grog, or water, or wine, just to soften them. I mean wow! That is like-
*Choking intensifies
That'll get stuck in your throat.
I can see why Polly want a cracker, and not a ship's biscuit. Smart parrot.
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and I will see you next time on Tasting History.