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SHIPS BISCUITS, SEA BISCUITS AND HARD BREAD Recipe for One Days Ration (1 lb) 2 cups whole

wheat flour 1 cup pastry flour or all purpose flour 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water Mix the ingredients completely and work the dough into a ball. Let is set up fo r a few minutes. Roll the dough out until it is about 3/8 inch thick, use a lar ge biscuit cutter to cut out the rounds, then punch them with 8 - 12 holes to le t the moisture escape during baking. Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 - 40 minu tes. Set aside to cool and let air dry for a day or two before packaging for st orage. Any additions to the recipe such as salt, sugar or shortening will short en the shelf life considerably. Fire Cake: (aka hoe-cake, corn pone, corn dodger, ash-cake etc) 1 1/3 cup boiling water 2 cups yellow corn meal (not cornmeal mix!) 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons Crisco, lard, bacon grease etc Add salt and grease to boiling water, then pour into the corn meal. Mix thoroug hly to make a thick, heavy glutinous dough. Let it set up for about 30 minutes. pat into 1/2 inch thick patties, using about 1/2 cup of dough. Can be cooked b y baking or frying in pork fat. The soldiers cooked them in the ashes, on flat rocks or on the blades of shovels and hoes. Corn pone plays a significant part in a chapter of my book, The Secret of Watten saw Bayou. I can attest, as can my characters, that corn pone with a bit of sor ghum molasses on it tastes might good! Hard Tack (Ships Biscuits) Apparently, the inability to bake runs in my family, but even I can get this one right. Today is the anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar, and its also Nati onal Baking Week, so I thought why not kill two birds with one stone and make so me hard tack or Ships Biscuits to take to a party being thrown in Lord Nelsons honour tonight. Ships biscuits are just about indestructible, and this recipe is a lot more pala table than the stuff that would have been eaten in Nelsons time, where the bisc uits were made with ground up bone meal, or pea flour. They also became infeste d with weevils on long voyages, and it was customary to tap them on the table be fore eating them to give said parasites a sporting chance to escape. Although th e weevils probably gave more nutrition than these biscuits. When I said I was making them, someone pointed out that they are the first thing you get taught how to make in infant school cookery classes, so maybe I will mo ve up to jam tarts next. These biscuits can be served with bone soup (I might m ake this one day - vegetables, stock, bones and lots of vinegar to dissolve said bones - tasty eh?) Ingredients 250g Plain Flour 180ml Water 1tsp Salt

Method Make a dough with the ingredients - add the water carefully because you dont wa nt it to become too wet, then roll it out into a sheet of less than 1cm, and cut the dough into squares or about 6 x 6cm. Decorate as you want - I pricked mine on both sides with a fork. Heat the oven to 200c. Put the biscuits on a baking tray and cook for 30 minutes , then flip them over and cook for another 30 minutes. The biscuits should just be starting to go a golden colour. Leave them to cool on a wire rack and then you can try to eat them. As they cool they will take on the consistency of a fr eshly fired brick, so watch you dont crack your teeth on them. Best served wit h grog! Now you can feel like a proper pirate! As for me, I will be celebrating the defeat of Villneuve and the hated French (a nd Spanish) with roast Beef, Port and fireworks! This recipe will teach you how to make hardtack using the original Union hardtac k recipe used during the Civil War. Hardtack is a very hard flat cracker, and it was often eaten by soldiers during the Civil War and sailors during sea journeys. Usually infested by weevils, larv a, and grubs, the soldiers invented many ways to ingest these "edible rocks". Th e most common system employed was to crumble the hardtack cracker into a cup of coffee, then skim the grubs off and dump them on the ground. Fortunately, thats probably not a technique youll have to employ. If kept dry, these crackers can and will last easily over 50 years. If you intend on going on a long backpackin g trip, make a dozen or so, and take them with you. These will help keep your en ergy up for the length of the trip. ...Ingredients... 3 cups flour 1 cup water 2 teaspoon of salt Preheat oven to 375F. (190C.) 2 Mix flour, salt, and water together in a bowl. Place the water and salt in the b owl, and slowly add in flour while stirring constantly, until the mixture become s too thick to stir, at which point enough flour has been added. 3 Rolling the Dough Rolling the Dough Knead dough and roll out until it is 1/2" (1cm.) thick. 4 Cut 3x3" square out of dough Cut 3x3" square out of dough Using a pizza cutter, cut the dough into 3"x3" (7cm. x 7cm.) squares. 5 Sketch of a Hardtack Poking 16 holes in each cracker Poke four rows of four holes in the cracker using a skewer stick. 6 Uncooked crackers on a cookie sheet Lay the crackers out on an ungreased cookie sheet. 7 Place in oven and bake for 30 minutes. 8 Flip the Hardtack Remove from oven, flip crackers over, and bake for another 30 minutes. 9

Finished Hardtack Take crackers out when they are a light golden brown. 10 Let the crackers cool for 30 minutes before eating.

Spiced HardTack, Ships Biscuits Well Hard Biscuits! Kate 10/11/2012 Food (Sweet) 20121110-184005.jpg For some weird reason I have a thing about hard biscuits and having read about h ard tack or ships biscuits they really appealed but the just plain flour & salt seemed a little lacking in any flavour and so I tweaked it a little A slightly mo re modern take on ships biscuits. They sort of remind me of Rusks and would prob ably work well for teething, although its the adults in our house eating them. Now Ive started a blog you would have thought Id be a little more thorough on taki ng enough photos but obviously not, you dont want millions of photos of every ste p do you? Ill add some more photos when I make the next batch. Ingredients 200g Plain White Flour 400g Wholemeal flour 100g Golden Granulated Sugar 10g Baking Powder 40g Skimmed Milk Powder 2 tsp Ground Mixed Spice 2g Salt 220g Water You can substitute your favourite spice instead of mixed spice, cinnamon or perh aps ginger. The amount in the recipe gives a gentle flavour/hint, add more if yo u want them to have stronger flavour. Similarly with the sugar, increase or redu ce to taste the amount shown gives a light sweetness.

Method Sieve the flours into a bowl with the baking powder, add all of the other dry in gredients and mix well to combine. Make a well in the middle and the water and mix with either your hands or a spoo n, I tend to use a spoon at the start and once most of the water is combined the n use my hands to bring it all together. What you should end up with is a very s tiff dough, depending on your flour you may need some addition water. Be careful adding it as you dont want this too wet, my tip is to run your hands under the t ap and then mix/knead the dough so it picks up the water from your hands, you ma y need to do this a couple of times. Once you have your stiff dough then give it a bit of a knead to make sure its all combined, were not looking to make a bread dough so just enough kneading to make the consistency smooth and everything is combined evenly. Take your blob of dough and flatten it into a squarish block wrap it in cling fi lm and leave it to relax for 30 mins.

Preheat your oven to 180C. Now we need to roll out our relaxed block of dough to about 8mm thick. Lightly f lour your work surface before starting, you can either roll it out by eye like I did, or if you can find a couple of 8mm thick pieces of wood you can use these as guides to roll things out to an even thickness. Once you have your slab of dough then we need to cut it into 9 x 9cm squares, th is is best done with a knife and a metal ruler. Use the knife/ruler to just mark out the squares and then use the edge of the ruler to do the cutting, just pres s down hard on the lines to cut through. Doing it this way seals the edge and gi ves a nice finish. You should be able to get around 12-14 tiles with some left overs depending on t he thickness. You can use/bake any leftovers, they dont look as pretty but still taste good. Place your tiles on a baking tray, you can pack them fairly close as they should nt spread. Once on the tray take a bamboo skewer or toothpick and make 5 x 5 hole s in the tiles, or less as this can be quite time consuming, use the blunt end, push in, twist out. 20121115-122903.jpg Now its time to bake for the first time, place your tray of tiles on a low shelf and bake until golden, which should be about 30-40 minutes, turn halfway through to give an even bake and cover with some foil if it looks like they are going t o catch/burn, beware they burn easily. Take them out place on a rack and allow them to cool. The recipe that I adapted doesnt talk about a 2nd baking but I found that after a day that they had gone soft inside an airtight container, obviously the first b ake didnt drive off all of the moisture from the centre of the tiles and this was getting reabsorbed into the rest of the biscuit and making it soft. The Wikiped ia article on ships biscuits talks about them being baked 2-4 times. A lot will depend on how wet your dough is, very hard dry dough is harder to cut/roll but h as less moisture to bake out. Put the biscuits in an air tight tin for 24 hours. The next day put the oven on to 120C and put the biscuits in on a low shelf and bake for a further 60 mins, a t this temp they shouldnt pick up any additional colour but cover with foil if it looks like they are. After the hour take them out and place on a rack to cool. Once cool place in an air tight tin/packet. They should keep for a very long tim e although in practice they dont seem to last that long as they are rather scrumm y if you like this sort of biscuit. If they do soften then put them into the ove n again at 120C for a time to drive off the moisture. They certainly arent fancy but everyone here loves them, beware though they are h ard and by hard I mean rock hard, teeth shattering hard. Ill often gnaw on whilst working, a single tile will take a while to work through, not a quick snack. Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit Posted on June 28, 2013 by Adam No Comments At this point, dear readers, you must surely already be aware of my deep and abi

ding love of Star Trek. But what you probably dont know about me is that Star Tre k is hardly the only shipborne drama that catches my imagination. Im a sucker for all things nautical, too. Wherever I travel, if my companions show even the slightest tinge of amenability , one of the first items on my touristy to-do list is to find the local maritime museum. In Reykjavik, it was a dockside exhibition showcasing the importance of fishing and whaling to the Icelandic economy. In Tallinn, it was a museum of na utical mines (the explody kind), followed by the Estonian Maritime Museum, nestl ed inside of a medieval stone turret named Fat Margaret. Blocks and lines, sexta nts, scrimshaw, or any other oceanic artifact instantly catches my interest. And especially if theres a robust and well-sourced explanatory card attached, its dif ficult to drag me away. And its the same with literature and film. Swashbuckling stories of piracy and hi gh-seas adventure arent really my thing. Im not so much one for buried treasure. B ut point me in the direction of a solitary captain pacing the quarterdeck, of mo nomaniacal obsession (cetacean or otherwise), of sailors singing on the forecast le, oblivious to their impending doom, and Im your man. Point me toward shades of Admiral Nelson, toward Patrick OBrians Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin outflankin g the French in the dear Surprise, and you might just have a friend for life. All I ask, as the poet writes, is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, and th e wheels kick and the winds song and the white sails shaking, and a grey mist on th e seas face, and a grey dawn breaking. Thats all I ask. And Ill be a pretty happy g uy.* Why, then, havent I written about this aquatic enthusiasm before right now? The r eason should be obvious. For all the romance of the open ocean, for all the appe al of being a single solitary cork bobbing in an endless expanse, long voyages e specially of the sort propelled by wind and sail are not known for their quality cuisine. I could write about salt beef, I guess. Or salt horse, or grog, or tha t horrific wasting disease that manifests in the absence of a ready source of vi tamin C. But none of that, I would suggest, is particularly appetizing. Neither is ships biscuit or hardtack, as its otherwise known. Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit via Wikimedia Commons And yet: welcome to todays experiment! Baked for longevity, not flavor, these pucks of flour, water, and salt gain thei r former name for having been a seamans staple at least since the time of the Spa nish Armada, doled out, a pound a day, to every sailor berthed before the mast. And they gain their later name for the fact that they are indeed hard as tacks b uilt to bust teeth, to be broken up with the butts of rifles before they are con sumed, and sometimes to stop musket balls fired off from the tops of attacking s hips. Navies would keg these little breads in watertight barrels, and stow them in shi ps holds. And unexposed to moisture, they would remain edible for years on end. E dible to us. And edible to whatever else, too. Which is why soldiers during the American Civil War, for whom hardtack was also a staple ration, called them worm castles. They would soak their hardtack in wat er for a couple of hours, skim off the inhabitants that wormed their way out, an d then fry the remaining biscuit in bacon grease to improve its palatability. I tried this. It was actually kind of delicious. I cant comment on the debugging

properties of an hours soak, but I can say that its not nearly long enough to soft en the hardtack up. HARDTACK; OR, SHIPS BISCUIT So the question then becomes: if ships biscuit is so vile, so horrible, every bit as unappetizing, on the surface, as a case of scurvy, then why make it here? The answer is that its actually none of those things. The trouble with ships biscu it is a matter of monotony that when every days ration on a multi-year voyage sta rts with a pound of the stuff, it gets very old very quickly. And the trouble is a matter of infestation that when eating it first involves tapping, soaking, or crumbling out the little critters that live inside, its hard to be enthusiastic. But made in a weevil-free environment and eaten sparingly, hardtack is actually pretty tasty. Its sort of like a thick water cracker, perfect (as I said) for the bacon-grease treatment, good as a caddy for jam or cheese, and not at all bad a s a jerky-like snack, meant to be chewed and worried for a long, long time. Hard tack is perfect for making and hoarding, stashing in plastic and taking on long camping trips. (Some of the most vigorous defenses Ive seen of the stuff come fro m Internet survivalist message boards.) And hardtack is just right for historica l re-creation for taking with you to a reenactment of the battle of Shiloh, or a board a day-long cruise on a restored, wood-hulled clipper. In the recipe that I present below, Ive tried to stay as close as I can to the or iginal, long-lived concoction. Lots of versions that I see out there on the Inte rnet add butter or milk to pander to our delicate modern sensibilities. But that way leads to nothing but spoilage. My only concession to our time is to suggest a mixture of white and wheat flour. I do this partly for the sake of flavor. Bu t mostly its because lots of hardtack was likely made of what we now call first c lear flour, which is relatively hard to come by, and of which this mix is a fair (but far from good) approximation. So eat up, me hearties, and enjoy. And remember: when the end comes, and the sea draugar shamble up from the briny deep, and you have to flee for your lives, th is is one recipe that youll be glad to have on hand. Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit 350 grams 100 grams 200 grams 2 tsp Sea Unbleached AP White Flour Whole Wheat Flour Water Salt

Preheat your oven to 300F. Add all of the ingredients to a bowl, and mix with a spoon until they come together as a dough. It wont seem like theres enough moistur e there to accomplish it, but trust me there is. Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured pastry board and knead it for about fi ve minutes, until all the ingredients are thoroughly mixed and youre starting to get some gluten development. Then form the dough into a ball, cover with plastic wrap, and allow it to rest for fifteen to twenty minutes to let the flour finis h hydrating. At the end of that time, give the dough a couple of light kneads, then divide it in half. In turn, with each half, use a lightly floured rolling pin to roll the

dough out until its about a third of an inch thick. Use a biscuit cutter (or the lip of a glass) to cut the dough into three-inch rounds, and move the rounds to parchment-lined cookie sheets. Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit Hardtack; or, Ships Biscuit With a serving fork, perforate each uncooked biscuit all across its surface in s traight rows. Then bake for an hour, turn the heat off in the oven, and allow th e biscuits to sit inside for a second hour while the oven cools. This should make about two dozen biscuits in all. Stored in airtight containers, they should last just about forever. And the recipe can easily be doubled, trip led, or even quadrupled if your plan is to provision a long sea voyage or a post -apocalyptic bunker. Godspeed! "Mix 5 cups of flour to 1 cup of water containing a 1/2-tablespoon of salt. Knea d into a dough and roll out to 3/8-inch thickness. Cut into approximately 3-inch squares and pierce each with a fork or ice pick several times. Bake in a 400-de gree oven for 30 minutes or until slightly brown."

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