Hardtack

• 1. Introduction

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  Hardtack is a dense cracker of flour and a little water, and the people forced to eat it called it dog biscuits, molar breakers, sheet iron and tooth dullers. Australian and New Zealand troops sarcastically named it ANZAC wafers, a joke that should not be confused with the Anzac biscuit. Nobody hands out nicknames like that to a food they love. Yet this plain slab fed sailors, soldiers, settlers and gold seekers for centuries. Why did navies and armies lean on a biscuit that could barely be bitten? What did hungry men do to make it edible? And who is still buying it today?

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• 2. Built to Last

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  For a long sea voyage, hardtack was baked four times instead of the usual two, and the batch was made six months before the ship sailed. The dough was only flour and small amounts of water, with salt added now and then. It cost very little. Baked hard and kept dry, the biscuits could stay intact for years.

  From the 17th century to the early 20th century, hardtack stood beside salt pork and corned beef as a standard ration for many militaries and navies. It went wherever perishable food could not: long sea voyages, land migrations and military campaigns. Properly stored and carried, it survived rough handling and temperature extremes.

  A store-bought 24-gram cracker today can hold 100 calories, with 20 percent of them from fat. It offers 2 grams of protein and practically no fiber. Eaten dry, though, hardtack is dense and virtually inedible. Troops who were issued it usually dampened the biscuits or crushed them first, and those two fixes shaped many of the camp recipes that came later.

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• 3. Ancestors and Names

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  Egyptian sailors carried a flat, brittle loaf of millet bread called dhourra cake. A cracker named bucellatum is known from Ancient Rome. When King Richard I of England left for the Third Crusade, which ran from 1189 to 1192, he took "biskit of muslin", a mixed-grain bread of barley, bean flour and rye. A more refined version, made with finer flour, was known as captain's biscuit.

  In the 5th century BCE, physicians such as Hippocrates linked most medical problems to digestion. Under that thinking, eating one biscuit a day was considered good for the constitution.

  The word hardtack comes from "tack", British sailor slang for food. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1830. Other names include cabin bread, pilot bread, sea biscuit, ship's biscuit, sea bread, soda crackers and brewis. Brewis is possibly a cognate of "brose".

  Cocket bread is a related English puzzle. The Assize of Bread and Ale, dated to about 1266, lists it among several kinds of bread. It seems to have been a hard sea-biscuit, perhaps stamped with a seal called a cocket, or perhaps named for the coxswains or seamen it was meant for. Either way, that document puts a hard sea-biscuit in English records by about 1266.

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• 4. Rations at Sea

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  In October 1589, James VI and I set sail for Norway with 15,000 "bisquit baiks" among his provisions. Eighty years later the Royal Navy put its food on a firmer footing. In 1665, Samuel Pepys first regularized naval victualling with varied and nutritious rations. His rules called for "one pound daily of good, clean, sweet, sound, well-baked and well-conditioned wheaten biscuit." By at least 1731, naval regulations officially gave each sailor 1 lb of biscuit per day.

  The United States Navy followed a similar path. By 1818 it had outlined that each sailor serving onboard should receive 14 oz of bread per day, in the form of hardtack. The ship's Purser handled the procurement of these stores. The Board of Navy Commissioners did not strictly define how.

  During Queen Victoria's reign, Royal Navy hardtack came from machines at the Royal Clarence Victualing Yard at Gosport, Hampshire. Each biscuit was stamped with the Queen's mark and the number of the oven that baked it. The dough was thoroughly mixed and rolled into sheets about 2 yd long and 1 yd wide. A single stroke then stamped a sheet into about sixty hexagonal biscuits. Hexagons saved material and time, and they packed more easily than the traditional circular shape.

  Canned meat was first marketed in 1814. In 1847, preserved beef in tins was officially introduced to Royal Navy rations. Hardtack stayed central to a sailor's diet only until canned foods arrived.

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• 5. Settlers and Prospectors

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  The Pilgrims relied on hardtack during their 1620 voyage, mainly because it stored easily and lasted so long. They still struggled with insect infestation. They also had to dip the biscuit in water before it could be eaten.

  From the late 1700s, hardtack crumbled or pounded fine became a key thickener in New England seafood chowders.

  In 1801, Josiah Bent began baking in Milton, Massachusetts. He sold "water crackers" of flour and water, built to resist spoiling on long sea voyages out of the port of Boston. In 1849, gold prospectors heading for the gold mines of California used these crackers heavily. Because the journey took months, the hardtack rode in the wagon trains.

  Bent's company later sold the original hardtack crackers that troops used in the American Civil War. The G. H. Bent Company kept operating in Milton, selling them to re-enactors and others, until 2018.

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• 6. Civil War Rations

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  During the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, hardtack measuring 3 by 3 in shipped out from both Union and Confederate storehouses. Soldiers generally found their rations unappealing. The biscuit's talent for hosting worms earned it the nickname "worm castles".

  Soldiers also turned the complaint into music. "Hard Tack Come Again No More" was sung to the tune of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More". Its lyrics called the rations 'old and very wormy' and blamed them for many 'stomachs sore'.

  John Billings, a soldier in the 10th Massachusetts Battery, recorded many details of how hardtack was used in his book Hard Tack and Coffee. Improperly stored provisions often carried insects, mostly weevil larvae. So soldiers broke the biscuit into their morning coffee. It softened, and the larvae floated to the top, where the men skimmed them off and ate the biscuits. The grubs "left no distinctive flavor behind."

  Some men beat the biscuits into mush with rifle butts and added water. With a frying pan, the mush became a lumpy pancake. Without one, it went straight onto the coals of the campfire. Another dish mixed hardtack with brown sugar, hot water and sometimes whiskey, and the men called it pudding and served it as dessert.

  As early as the Spanish-American War in 1898, some service members used military hardtack for etching or writing notes. These often marked events or recorded phrases of the time.

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• 7. Asia and Europe

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  Ma Bo mentioned hardtack as a staple food of Chinese hard-labor workers in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution.

  In Japan the biscuit is called Kanpan, and in South Korea it is geonbbang, also spelled geonppang. Both names mean "dry bread". Military servicemen in both countries lived on it well into the late 20th century, and it is still sold as a fairly popular snack. Canned kanpan is also handed out in Japan as emergency rations after an earthquake, flood or other disaster. A harder version called Katapan is a regional specialty of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka. In Korea, geonppang mixed with byulsatang, or star candy, makes a popular snack medley.

  In Russia the biscuit is galeta, and it remains a staple of military rations, especially in the Navy. Most Russian varieties contain some fat or shortening, so they are softer and more crumbly, closer to saltine crackers. One variety, khlyebtsy armyeyskiye, meaning "army crackers", is included in Russian military rations. Other brands are popular with campers and the wider public.

  In Genoa, hardtack is a traditional addition to cappon magro, a fish and vegetable salad.

  Germany puts hardtack in every military ration. Soldiers call it Panzerplatten, meaning armor plates, or Panzerkekse, meaning armor cookies or tank cookies. Conscription once exposed much of the male population to it, so it became somewhat popular with civilians, and its maker sells it unaltered to them. Soldiers joke that it can be combined with standard issue shoe polish to make a flammable device, or glued onto vehicles for extra armor. Some also claim it hinders the need to defecate, with a few saying they went three days without needing to after eating large quantities.

  Polish Army rations still include hardtack wafers, officially called Suchary Specjalne SU-1 or SU-2. In military slang they are Panzerwaffel, a pun on Panzerwaffe, the Wehrmacht's armored motorized forces. Civilians like them too, and they are a common part of a meal in some regions.

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• 8. North America Today

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  Purity Factories of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, makes traditional hardtack for parts of Canada. The company specializes in a high density, high caloric product that suits expeditions. It produces three varieties.

  The first is a cross between an unsalted saltine and hardtack, described alongside the Crown Pilot Cracker. That cracker was popular across much of New England and was made by Nabisco until it was discontinued in the first quarter of 2008. It had been discontinued once before, in 1996, and a small uprising by its supporters brought it back in 1997. It came in two sub-varieties, Flaky and Barge biscuits. The second variety, Hard Bread, is traditional hardtack and the principal ingredient in fish and brewis, a traditional Newfoundland and Labrador meal. The third, Sweet Bread, is slightly softer because of more sugar and shortening, and people eat it as a snack.

  Interbake Foods of Richmond, Virginia, makes most of the commercial hardtack in the United States, under the "Sailor Boy" label. As of January 2015-98 percent of its production went to Alaska. Alaskans are among the last people to eat hardtack as a significant part of a normal diet. It first arrived as a food that could endure transport across the state, and it stayed a favorite even when less robust foods became easy to find.

  Alaskan law requires all light aircraft to carry survival gear, including food. So the blue-and-white boxes of Sailor Boy Pilot Bread are ubiquitous at airstrips, in cabins and in virtually every village. Unlike the traditional recipe, this version contains leavening and vegetable shortening.

  In Hawaii, hardtack is a common pantry item, and The Diamond Bakery's "Saloon Pilot" cracker sells in grocery and convenience stores. The round crackers come in large and small diameters.

  In the contiguous United States, commercial hardtack mostly goes to people stocking long-lasting disaster rations, though those stockpiles are usually ration bars or freeze dried meals. Many other buyers and bakers are Civil War re-enactors. The 3rd US Regular Infantry Reenactors, for example, often cook hardtack among many recipes at their reenacting camps.

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