The Recollections of a Drummer-Boy

by Henry Martyn Kieffer

"Fall in for Hard Tack!"

As I write, there lies before me on my table an innocent-looking cracker, which I have faithfully preserved for years. It is about the size and has the general appearance of an ordinary soda biscuit. If you take it in your hand, you will find it somewhat heavier than an ordinary biscuit, and if you bite it—but no; I will not let you bite it, for I wish to see how long I can keep it. But if you were to reduce it to a fine powder, you would find that it would absorb considerably more water than an equal weight of wheat-flour; showing that in the making of hard-tack the chief object in view is to stow away the greatest amount of nourishment in the smallest amount of space. You will also observe that this cracker is very hard. This you may perhaps attribute to its great age. But if you imagine that its age is to be measured only by the years which have elapsed since the war, you are greatly mistaken; for there was a common belief among the boys that our hard-tack had been baked long before the commencement of the Christian era! This opinion was based upon the fact that the letters B. C. were stamped on many, if not indeed all, of the cracker-boxes. To be sure there were some wiseacres who shook their heads, and maintained that these mysterious letters were the initials of the name of some army contractor or inspector of supplies; but the belief was wide-spread and deep-seated that they were without a doubt intended to set forth the era in which our bread had been baked.

For our hard-tack were very hard; you could scarcely break them with your teeth—some of them you could not fracture with your fist. Still, as I have said, there was an immense amount of nourishment stowed away in them, as we soon discovered when once we had learned the secret of getting at it. It required some experience and no little hunger to enable one to appreciate hard-tack aright, and it demanded no small amount of inventive power to understand how to cook hard-tack as they ought to be cooked. If I remember correctly, in our section of the army we had not less than fifteen different ways of preparing them. In other parts, I understand, they had discovered one or two ways more; but with us, fifteen was the limit of the culinary art when this article of diet was on the board.

On the march they were usually not cooked at all, but eaten in the raw state. In order, however, to make them somewhat more palatable, a thin slice of nice fat pork was cut down and laid on the cracker, and a spoonful of good brown sugar put on top of the pork, and you had a dish fit for a—soldier. Of course the pork had just come out of the pickle, and was consequently quite raw; but fortunately we never heard of trichinæ in those days. I suppose they had not yet been invented. When we halted for coffee, we sometimes had fricasseed hard-tack—prepared by toasting them before the hot coals, thus making them soft and spongy. If there was time for frying, we either dropped them into the fat in the dry state and did them brown to a turn, or soaked them in cold water and then fried them, or pounded them into a powder, mixed this with boiled rice or wheat flour, and made griddle-cakes and honey—minus the honey. When, as was generally the case on a march, our hard-tack had been broken into small pieces in our haversacks, we soaked these in water and fried them in pork-fat, stirring well and seasoning with salt and sutler's pepper, thus making what was commonly known as a "Hishy-hashy, or a hot-fired stew."

But the great triumph of the culinary art in camp, to my mind, was a hard-tack pudding. This was made by placing the biscuit in a stout canvas bag, and pounding bag and contents with a club on a log, until the biscuit were reduced to a fine powder. Then you added a little wheat-flour (the more the better), and made a stiff dough, which was next rolled out on a cracker-box lid, like pie-crust. Then you covered this all over with a preparation of stewed dried apples, dropping in here and there a raisin or two, just for "auld lang syne's" sake. The whole was then rolled together, wrapped in a cloth, boiled for an hour or so, and eaten with wine sauce. The wine was, however, usually omitted, and hunger inserted in its stead.

Thus you see what truly vast and unsuspected possibilities reside in this innocent-looking three-and-a-half-inch-square hard-tack lying here on my table before me. Three like this specimen made a meal, and nine were a ration; and this is what fought the battles for the Union.

The army hard-tack had but one rival, and that was the army bean. A small white roundish soup-bean it was, such as you have no doubt often seen. It was quite as innocent looking as its inseparable companion, the hard-tack, and, like it, was possessed of possibilities which the uninitiated would never suspect. It was not so plastic an edible as the hard-tack, indeed; that is to say, not capable of entering into so many different combinations, nor susceptible of so wide a range of use, but the one great dish which might be made of it was so pre-eminently excellent, that it threw hishy-hashy and hard-tack pudding quite into the shade. This was "baked beans." No doubt bean-soup was very good, as it was also very common; but oh, "baked beans!"

I had heard of the dish before, but had never, even remotely, imagined what toothsome delights lurked in the recesses of a camp-kettle of beans baked after the orthodox backwoods fashion, until one day Bill Strickland, whose home was in the lumber regions, where the dish had no doubt been first invented, said to me,—

"Come round to our tent to-morrow morning; we're going to have baked beans for breakfast. If you will walk around to the lower end of our Company street with me, I'll show you how we bake beans up in the country I come from."