Mother May You Never See the Sights I Have Seen by Warren Wilkinson
The army had set up huge bakeries at City Point, and thousands of loaves of soft white bread were made daily, but the system of distributing them over the growing lines of trenches—with every flanking move to the left made by the Army of the Potomac during its ten-month occupation, large stretches of new Petersburg real estate were occupied—was not very effective at the outset of the siege, and the bread sat in the sun at the depots, turning stale and sour. Many of the men refused to eat the soft bread when finally it was distributed, until they discovered that if sliced and toasted over the fire on a piece of scrap wire, it was not too bad. But the soldiers were so used to their hard bread—hardtack—that they generally favored it, and towards the end of the war, many of them bragged that they knew at least fifteen ways to prepare the hardy crackers.
A sampling of their inventive recipes showed their resourcefulness. Sometimes they would take hardtack and drape raw bacon over it and then cover this sumptuous dish with sugar, washing it down with sooty, green coffee. Others prepared the delicacy known as “Scouse,” a concoction of salt pork, hardtack, and potatoes boiled to perfection in a cook pot. Yet others thought their evening repast incomplete without the venerable “Skillygalee.” That culinary treasure was prepared the day before by delicately pulverizing some hardtack in a haversack with a musket butt, soaking the fragments overnight in water, and then frying them in pork grease. A variation of that recipe was to form the mixture into thin cakes and bake them when an oven was available or could be fashioned from rocks and mud. Those little cakes were called “Washington Pies.” More often, though, the soldiers would simply soak a whole piece of the bread in cold water until it was fairly soft and fry it in pork far, producing “Burnside Stew,” after their famous commander. And then there was the ever-popular “Hellfire Stew,” a curious blend of everything available at any given moment boiled in a pot and seasoned with dirt, soot, and dried soap, sometimes known by its other name, “Son of a Seadog.”
When on the march or in the forward lines the men frequently nibbled on the oversized soda cracker, and a few seriously debated whether their hardtack could have been left over from the War of 1812 because it was so rock-hard and rotten. (Some claimed to have seen dates for that war and the Mexican War stamped onto some of the wooden boxes in which it was delivered.) Others joked that it could follow the army on its own, so infested was it with maggots and weevils. Many of the boys often toasted the crackers to drive out the pests, but others simply ignored them, claiming that the insects had no flavor, and when hardtack was eaten at night, there was no way of knowing that the pests were even there.
But, hardtack, or “pilot bread,” or just plain “cracker,” was a principle staple of the army, and, unless they wanted to starve, the soldiers had no choice but to eat it, even though some unscrupulous government contractors, in order to increase their profits, substituted ingredients such as pipe clay and ground white soapstone when manufacturing the bread.
1990
Pg. 207-208
HarperCollins Publishers
New York, NY