LoveTheJourney

Now me, I don’t think you have to be a re-enactor to be fascinated by the American Civil War. I may not relish the thought of spooning with a bunch of unwashed men in a cold tent, but there are other ways to indulge an interest in history. Like, say, digging up answers to questions [...]

I mentioned in a post down below that hardtack can be difficult to find these days. One or two readers wrote in to ask if that meant the US military was still serving hardtack to the troops. The answer is no. Virtually all the hardtack that’s made in the US today is sold to Civil [...]

So then, imagine you’re a military rations purveyor to the US government circa 1865. The Civil War just ended and your hardtack business has tanked. You’ve got dozens of hard-earned dollars invested in your state-of-the-art baking equipment and need to find a way to re-purpose it for peacetime use. Could crackers be mass-marketed to ordinary [...]

Over the weekend, I realized I haven’t done a particularly good job of explaining how hardtack was made. Based on the posts below, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that early crackers were nothing but hunks of flour paste, slow-baked to maximum dryness. The truth is that there was often a bit — if only [...]

Of all the proto-crackers, hardtack is my favorite. Not because I eat it much. It’s not easy to find these days, and the fact is that even though I live in Kentucky now, I hope to keep my natural teeth as long as I can. But what exactly is hardtack? It’s a form of military [...]

You know, hardtack might have been hard, but at least it wasn’t rife with vermin. Oh no, wait, actually it usually was. Frequently with little granary weevils, but also the larger larvae of Indian meal moths. Both burrowed effortlessly through entire crates of hardtack, riddling crackers with holes, earning them the nickname “worm castles.”
While [...]

You can boil it down to two things: 1) they deliver lots of energy in a small package, and 2) they keep indefinitely. The reason for that is simple: they’re inhospitable environments for microbes. As anyone who’s ever attended a food safety class knows, microorganisms require several things in order to grow and multiply. Among [...]