Campfire Cooking - Soldier Bread

Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War were promised a daily ration of a pound of meat a day and a pound of bread a day. Now if you read the memoirs and the journals of the soldiers in the time period, you find out that that wasn't always possible. In fact, some of them read like it almost never was possible and substitutions had to be made. Now if you think about it, if you were a soldier 250 years ago and you were given your daily ration of this one pound loaf of bread and a pound of meat, what are you going to do with it? And especially if you're headed out for a march, you might have been issued a ration for three or four days. You've got to juggle three or four loaves of bread while you're on the way. A loaf of bread isn't a very, let's say, useful size and it goes bad fairly rapidly. It starts to get moldy, especially bread back then compared to bread today. So bread, while it was greatly in demand by soldiers, it isn't necessarily easy to get a hold of and it isn't great in large quantities. Coming up with thousands and thousands of loaves of bread for your army is very difficult to do. And if we look at the writings of officers of the time period, they're trying to address these issues. They are saying maybe we need a regimental baker, maybe we need portable ovens and helpers, people to chop wood and to create this bread because they have so much difficulty in getting it supplied. That never really happens. They end up relying on contractors to supply bread to the army and they just can't keep up. So there are bread substitutes that they would issue instead. And one of those bread substitutes was ship's biscuit or, as we might know it, hardtack. Now, this is actually a much better substitute for bread than bread itself because hardtack or ship's biscuit can last a great deal of time. You can make it ahead of time, months and months ahead of time, and you can store it in large quantities in a fairly small area. A man can easily have three or four pounds of ship's biscuit as he takes on his march much easier than three or four loaves of bread. Ship's biscuit was issued to soldiers during the Revolutionary War and even Joseph Plum Martin talks about walking by or marching by this barrel of ship's biscuit and they were told to take as many as they could as they were going by. That's sort of how they issued it. He talks about how how it was great for him because they stopped right there and he could put in as many as he could carry at the time. But ship's biscuit wasn't always available. Most often they were issued raw flour as their bread substitute. Now, getting issued a pound of raw flour as a soldier in a setting with very, very few tools and equipment, well, it doesn't sound very useful. The soldiers in the time period did sometimes try to go into the towns or into a local house and have them bake bread for them. But the officers discouraged this action because it caused malingering. The soldiers would go out to get their bread and not come back the entire day. Not very useful. And many times whoever was baking the bread for them would take advantage of the soldiers and give them a very small quantity of bread for their larger quantity of flour. Baking bread in the field is almost impossible to do, especially with the equipment that a soldier would have available to him. He doesn't have a proofing area. He doesn't have an oven. He doesn't have yeast. So what is a soldier going to do with a raw flour ration? There are only a couple of easy choices. Now, you've got to remember that the soldiers here are 17, 18, 19 years old. They don't have a lot of experience. So what they're going to be doing in cooking is very simplistic. And the first method they're going to use and probably the most common, most popular one, the one we're going to read about the most often in the memoirs is making fire cakes or ash cakes. Now, this is just a very, very simple unleavened bread. You're just going to take flour and water and possibly a little bit of salt if you've got it. But most soldiers really didn't talk about having very much salt. But they would mix this together into a very thick dough and then cook it right directly on the fire, possibly under the ashes, on top of coals. And many times it's mentioned baking them on a hot flat rock. Now, I've done this many times and truly baking them on the coals is the most easy way to do that. Now, we don't have any pictures of soldiers doing this. We don't have any examples of exactly how big their fire cakes were, what shape they were. But we can certainly experiment here on the fire and make fire cakes exactly the way they would have done it in the time period. Now, making these ash cakes is very, very simple. It has to be because of the place we're at. We're going to take some flour, possibly about half a ration here or a half a pound. I am going to sprinkle a little bit of salt into it. And there is a possibility that soldiers at times would have a little bit of salt, especially that came off of their salt provisions. So, with a little bit of salt, we're going to add in water until we get to a very thick paste. We want to have an extra little bit of flour off to the side so we can add it to this to get it to the right consistency. We do want it to be not sticky. It's got to be a fairly stiff ball of dough. And we want it to cook all the way through and not get burnt too badly. We should flatten this down into a little cake that's possibly a half inch thick, maybe even thinner. Here's a place where we can experiment a lot. If you want to make one that's a little thicker, you can experiment with how it cooks in your fire or on your flat rock. Now, John Greenwood talks about baking it on a piece of bark as a possible idea. Now, that might work depending on the bark you've got available to you. But truly, just right on the coals is the best way to do it. I would make this a fairly thick dough and make sure to have some flour on the outside of it at the very end. And that will kind of protect it. That might burn but we can brush it off when it's time to eat it. We want a nice even bed of coals and then we will gently set our fire cake on those coals. And we might need to flip this two or three times to get it baked nicely because what happens is, as it sets on the coals, it will cause them to cool and actually go out because the air can't get to the coals anymore. So, the heat kind of disappears from underneath it. We'll flip this over onto a fresh bed of coals, get the other side, possibly turn it over again. We're trying not to char it too much. But even if it gets charred, well, we can scrape that off if we need to. You can tell from the readings they had a difficulty with not burning this. John Greenwood writes in 1776 and he's a fifer for one of the regiments. He says, the flour was mixed up with water from the lake by fellows as lousy, itchy, and nasty as hogs. I have seen it when made and baked upon a piece of bark so black with dirt and smoke that I didn't think a dog would eat it. It may sound like an exaggeration but I can imagine the tough camping situations, the dirt, the difficulty in making your food that we get from this reading of John Greenwood. Our ash cakes or fire cakes are done here. I have gone ahead and scraped off the worst of the charring. You might think that's kind of odd. That is very common in the 18th century, even for regular bakers to do that to their loaves of bread. They would burn on the bottom because they were right at the bottom of the oven. They had rasps or whatever and they would just scrape off the burnt part. So that's really typical. People are used to that in the 18th century. So let's break open this biscuit here. It's not, I mean, it's tough around the outside but you can still feel it's kind of soft in the middle. It seems to have set up pretty well. It's not gooey at all and very, very chewy. A little bit of that charring on the outside actually gives it some really good flavor rather than just having a very, very plain kind of flour flavor. I think the fifer who was complaining about the rolled in dirt and even a dog wouldn't eat it was exaggerating. He was telling stories. If you take your time with ash cakes or fire cakes, they turn out really good. Another incredibly simple recipe from the time period that was very popular and it would be something the soldiers could make and that is hard dumplings. Now, we take basically the same recipe that we used for our fire cakes. We're just going to mix our flour with a little bit of salt. We're going to get it into a fairly stiff paste, not probably quite as stiff as we used for the fire cakes, but something close to that. And about a golf ball size piece is perfect for dropping right into boiling water. Now, if your ration completely consisted of just flour and you didn't have any kind of meat, you could boil these hard dumplings and you could just eat them as they are, but they're perfect to go along with the other parts of the rations that they might get. No matter how nasty the meat was, if you boil it into a simple soup and drop these very hard, simple dumplings in there, you'll make a much more palatable soup or stew. You want to have a rolling boil and drop these in and then they need to boil for approximately 20 to 30 minutes. So, if you're making something like a beef soup or beef stew with your other parts of your rations, you cook that meat first until it's getting close to being done and then you drop these in. You really can't overcook them though, so you could basically start them at the beginning if you want to. Now, some of this flour is going to come off of the outside of it and that is okay. That just thickens the rest of the soup and makes it better. Here are our dumplings. I've taken them out of the boiling water and normally, you might leave them in that. If you're cooking them in a stew, you're just going to leave them in there, but we're going to try these as they are, all by themselves. Now, recipes in the 18th century, hand of glass, we might cover these with butter, right? The soldiers aren't going to have that. They might have even had some spicing in them if they were done in a civilian context. Ginger. They might have even had yeast in them, but there are other recipes just like this that are just oh so simple. All by themselves, what do they taste like? Depending on the flour you've got and how much salt you've put in there, they have a nice chewy texture that'll go right along with other parts of your stew or soup. The meat and whatever has a nice tooth to it. If you're yearning for that bread flavor, even though this doesn't give you a perfect bread consistency, it does give you a bready flavor, and I'm sure it would fill in perfectly for the regular soldier who didn't have any other choice.