Hardtack

Hardtack (or hard tack) is a type of dense cracker made from flour, water, and sometimes salt. Hardtack is very inexpensive and long-lasting, allowing it to be used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods. It is commonly used during long sea voyages, land migrations, and military campaigns. Along with salt pork and corned beef, hardtack was a standard ration for many militaries and navies from the 17th to the early 20th centuries.

The name is derived from "tack", the British sailor slang for food. The earliest use of the term recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1830.

It is known by other names including brewis (possibly a cognate with "brose"), cabin bread, pilot bread, sea biscuit, soda crackers, sea bread (as rations for sailors), ship's biscuit, and pejoratively as dog biscuits, molar breakers, sheet iron, tooth dullers, Panzerplatten ("armor plates"; Germany) and worm castles. Australian and New Zealand military personnel knew them with some sarcasm as ANZAC wafers (not to be confused with Anzac biscuit).

The introduction of the baking of processed cereals, including the creation of flour, provided a more reliable source of food. Egyptian sailors carried a flat brittle loaf of millet bread called dhourra cake. A cracker called bucellatum is known from Ancient Rome. King Richard I of England left for the Third Crusade (1189–1192) with "biskit of muslin", which was a mixed grain compound of barley, bean flour, and rye. The more refined captain's biscuit was made with finer flour. Some 5th century BCE physicians, such as Hippocrates, associated most medical problems with digestion. For sustenance and health, eating a biscuit daily was considered good for one's constitution.

Because hardtack biscuits were baked hard, they would stay intact for years if kept dry. For long voyages, hardtack was baked four times, rather than the more common two, and prepared six months before sailing. Because it is dry and hard, hardtack, when properly stored and transported, will survive rough handling and temperature extremes. Dry hardtack is dense and virtually inedible; troops issued it usually made it edible by dampening or crushing the biscuits.

When James VI and I set sail for Norway in October 1589, his provisions included 15,000 "bisquit baiks". In 1665, Samuel Pepys first regularized naval victualling in the Royal Navy with varied and nutritious rations, to include "one pound daily of good, clean, sweet, sound, well-baked and well-conditioned wheaten biscuit". By at least 1731, it was officially codified in Naval regulation that each sailor was rationed one pound (450 g) of biscuit per day.

Hardtack, crumbled or pounded fine and used as a thickener, was a key ingredient in New England seafood chowders from the late 1700s.

In 1801, Josiah Bent began a baking operation in Milton, Massachusetts, selling "water crackers" made of flour and water that would be resistant to deterioration during long sea voyages from the port of Boston. These were also used extensively as a source of food by the gold prospectors who migrated to the gold mines of California in 1849. Since the journey took months, hardtack was stored in the wagon trains. Bent's company later sold the original hardtack crackers used by troops during the American Civil War. The G. H. Bent Company operated in Milton and sold these items to Civil War re-enactors and others until 2018.