the.com/hardtack
a biscuit so durable sailors built furniture jokes around teeth it shattered
means A hard, dense, long-lasting biscuit made from just flour and water, used as a staple ration by sailors and soldiers before refrigeration.
from A plain compound of "hard" and "tack," where "tack" is an old sailors' slang term for food or provisions — so the word means, quite literally, "hard food." The "tack" sense of victuals is of uncertain origin but was well established in nautical talk, where it also gave us "soft tack" for ordinary fresh bread. The name is an honest one: the biscuit earned every letter of "hard."
- shelf life
- Civil War samples survive edible-ish today
- nickname
- called worm castles when weevils moved in
- eating trick
- soaked in coffee to avoid cracked teeth
- recipe
- just flour, water, sometimes salt
- longevity
- powered armies and navies for millennia
hardtack from uss monitor — civil war ironclad ship's preserved biscuits, some specimens still edible after 160+ years
hardtack at gettysburg — union soldiers' primary ration during july 1863 battle, documented in soldier diaries as rock-hard and weevil-infested
hardtack on hms bounty — 1789 mutiny partly blamed on moldy, maggot-ridden hardtack rations under captain bligh