Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: A War Won on Food

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Did you know that Hot Pockets, astronaut food, and maple bacon donuts all have their origins in the Battle Between the States? It’s true! During the Civil War, the most important thing for soldiers��� survival wasn’t ammunition or strategic plans. It was FOOD! So grab a snack and settle in. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range, making them perfect for enjoying music and

podcasts get up to 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled soft microfiber cushions engineered for comfort and a range of colors and finishes dyson on track headphones remastered buy from dyson canada.ca with anc on performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello, friends. Welcome. Are you ready to hear something wild? These three things. Hot pockets.

Hot pockets. Devoured by folks in search of a quick hot snack. Astronaut food. devoured by folks in search of a quick hot snack, astronaut food that keeps people in space nourished as they orbit the Earth, and the sticky, decadent maple bacon donut all have their origins in the battle between the states. It's true. During the Civil War, the most important thing for soldiers' survival wasn't ammunition or strategic plans or shoes or an adequate uniform or a blanket at night or a horse to ride. It was food. So grab a snack and settle in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. We all cook, or at least we all eat. And if you're a parent, you know that for some reason,

kids need to be fed just like three times a day. And they generally need food from all the food groups represented in their meals, which means you likely spend time thinking about the food that comes into your home. It's quality, availability, affordability, and quantity. Those are all pretty crucial things to the feeding of ourselves and others. This is not new, right? and others. This is not new, right? Union and Confederate soldiers faced the same daily dilemma of what are we going to eat for dinner? But obviously they couldn't swing by the local grocery store or schedule a DoorDash delivery. So let's do some math. Consider the basic caloric

intake and nutritional requirements to keep a human alive and active, and then add in a few things. Long distance marching, fighting on battlefields, living in highly stressful conditions with continual exposure to the elements, diseases that were common when large groups of humans with limited sanitation congregated together. And then we multiply that by every person in their military units. And it's clear that Civil War armies needed a lot of food. The sheer quantities they needed were rarely available to them as they marched through the countryside, and so they were forced to get creative. Really creative. Food scarcity for the military was not new in 1861. Over centuries of civilization,

wars and exploration were regularly shaping our modern world, and food logistics played a major role in the outcomes. As ships crossed oceans in search of lands they had yet to discover, starvation killed as frequently as disease. The farther battle armies traveled from their homelands, the more difficult it became to keep them adequately nourished. There were several reasons for this. The first is that anything they carried with them had to be transported. I mean, it seems obvious, but just think about how much food an army plus horses and any livestock they brought along, which also required food, by the way, needed to consume, and how much it weighed. That's a huge load to carry around. And on top of that, whatever they brought with them was perishable. Supply

chains were mostly non-existent, and getting food in the places where they were was not a certainty. They couldn't just roll up into the nearest town and ask for provisions to feed hundreds of people. In the late 18th century, as Napoleon made his way through conquering large portions of Europe, he needed to solve this dilemma. They required healthy, nourishing food to have energy for movement and battle, but how could they consistently get it? So in 1795, he offered a massive cash reward, the equivalent of $250,000 today, to anyone who could find a way to improve the method of supplying food to his army. A chef from France appropriately named Nicolas Appare solved the problem. In 1809, he patented the solution he discovered. Food tightly sealed in a wide-mouthed glass bottle and then thoroughly heated would keep

for years. Heat killed the microorganisms in the food, and sealing it kept others from entering the glass container. The process of canning food was born, and it was revolutionary. It would be another 50 years before Louis Pasteur discovered pasteurization, but for folks in the early 19th century, the fact that there was a way to rely on a food supply for a lengthy period of time changed everything, and not just for the military. Canning inventor Aper published The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances in 1810, the first cookbook of its kind on modern food preservation. It was wildly popular and had both immediate and long-lasting results that we don't often think about. The travel industry was revolutionized because people on boats and in land caravans were able to pack enough food for

their journeys. If you were unlucky in your hunt for buffalo on the Oregon Trail, chances were good that you still had reliably nutritious food to eat. Dry goods were most common, like coffee and dried fruits and salted meats and cornmeal for bread, but some families traveled with jars of pickles or canned butter. The same year that Au Pair published his cookbook, tin can preservation was patented. It replaced glass canning and made the process easier, faster, and more durable. In 1820, the practice of canning came to America when young immigrant William Underwood set up a cannery in Boston and set out to capitalize on the burgeoning understanding of food science.

The William Underwood Company, which is now part of B&G Foods, still sells its cans of deviled ham spread today, as in you can literally buy it at your grocery store right now. Look for it in the aisle with other canned meats, tuna and salmon and spam. Underwood deviled ham spread holds the oldest food trademark still in use, 153 years after it was patented in 1868. Initially, all canning was done by hand, and it was a time-consuming process. But northern U.S. industrialism quickly figured out how to manufacture tin cans in bulk and build factory systems to increase production. Interestingly, it was William Underwood's bookkeepers who popularized the name change from tin canisters to cans because they were tired of repeatedly writing out the word because they were tired of repeatedly writing out the word canister.

They were like, can we just use cans instead of canister? The production and distribution of mass quantities of food in cans changed humans' relationship with food. Underwood and others in the industry began to experiment with the preservation process, and their tinkering led to new developments in types of storage. Hot packing was canning the food after it had been cooked. Cold packing was canning raw food to be cooked at a later date. Pickling was canning the food in vinegar, which created a brine that would lead to the fermentation of the food. Vinegar had long been used to help foods last longer after cooking. During the Revolutionary War, vinegar pie was a catch-all name used to

describe any combination of food to which vinegar was added for flavor and preservation. Maybe you've even seen an evolution of this. Some pie crusts call for vinegar in the crust to make it more moist without stretching the gluten too much and making it tough. And Martha Stewart actually has a recipe for pioneer vinegar pie, which uses apple cider vinegar and pie spices to give it flavor. When the U.S. fought the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, they progressed in food preservation by turning to a solution from the past, one which had been used for centuries by pirates, the shipping industry, and extreme climate exploration adventurers, heart tack. In canning, an airtight seal preserved the food, often in liquid. But with bread and similar products, it was moisture that led to spoilage.

Heart tack is basically an extremely tough bread, more like a cracker in texture. Its ingredients were very simple, water, flour, and salt. It's repeatedly roasted until it is hard and every bit of moisture and also flavor has been baked out of it. This allows it to become a shelf-stable food that could potentially last for years. In fact, the military had prepared hardtack so well and in such abundance during the Mexican-American War that when the Civil War began, they still had a large stockpile to distribute in the troops' initial rations. While hardtack kept seemingly forever, having to eat it plain was beyond unpalatable. Sometimes troops had no choice, which is how it got the nicknames of toothbreakers and flower tiles.

According to one soldier, some hardtack we could scarcely fracture with our fist. That does not sound pleasant on your teeth. Whenever possible, troops would get creative and transform it for easier consumption and to make the bland rations more flavorful and appetizing. In fact, Civil War culinary experiences were sometimes more inventive than Food Network chefs, especially when they were on the move away from a base camp and both options and ingredients were limited. A Northern soldier recorded that we saw what truly vast and unsuspected possibilities resided in this innocent-looking three-and-a-half-inch square hardtack. Three made a meal,

and nine were a ration, and this was what fought the battles for the Union. what fought the battles for the Union. The most common transformation of hardtack was hardtack pudding, because it was the easiest way to obtain a variety of flavor in the monotonous meals. Okay, wait, hold, hold, prepare yourselves. Using the end of their musket, the end of their musket, soldiers would pound the hardtack into a fine powder, mix it with water, sugar, and a little flour or cornmeal, and add in any fruit that they could forage, like apples or pears or maybe in the South, peaches. It wasn't good. Nobody said it was good, but it was better than eating a three and a half inch square piece of dehydrated bread that you can barely break with your fist. Because rations were limited, it was to soldiers' benefit to find any additional food on the road by foraging for fruits or berries or nuts that could be added to their daily provisions.

They didn't just help make the food more palatable, it also made it more nutrient dense. And soldiers on both sides also regularly took livestock and other food from small towns and farms as a way to supplement their diets. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come,

first-serve spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guests are sitting next to me.

Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to

see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. Many first-time soldiers were at a loss when it came to preparing food because it had been considered women's work. Whether that woman was a wife or a mother or a sister or a daughter or an enslaved person. For soldiers who lacked experience in food preparation, Southerner or Northerner, learning how to cook was a challenge. Enter the United States Sanitary Commission. If you were a Union soldier, that is. The U.S. Sanitary Commission, which was usually shortened to the Sanitary, was the only civilian-run organization to be recognized by the federal government during the war. Volunteers, who were mostly women, worked to provide health support for soldiers,

including supplying them with food and goods they had purchased through fundraising. A member of the sanitary, James Sanderson, knew it was crucial to teach field soldiers a few basic culinary techniques and simple cooking knowledge. Sanderson successfully lobbied the War Department to create the position of cook major, a person who would be trained in the basics of sanitary food preparation and be responsible for rationing the food, preparing it, and delegating tasks to a rotating staff of company cook assistants. He also wrote the first official military cookbook that is surely in the running for longest book title ever. It was called, are you ready? Here we go. Campfires and Camp Cooking or Culinary Hits

for the Soldier, including receipt for making bread in the portable field oven furnished by the subsistence department. Very catchy. Very, very catchy. It gave useful guidance for cooking in camp, in travel, and on the battlefield. A Union soldier in the 128th New York Volunteer Infantry describes what mealtimes were like in camp. He said, we grab our plates and cups and wait for no second invitation. We each get a piece of meat and a potato and a chunk of bread and a cup of coffee with a spoonful of brown sugar in it. Milk and butter we buy or go without. We settle down generally in groups and the meal is soon over. We save a piece of bread for the last, which we wipe up with everything and then eat the dishrag. Dinner and breakfast are alike, only sometimes the meat and potatoes are cut up and cooked together, which makes a really

delicious stew. Supper is the same, minus the meat and potatoes. While on the move and not more permanently settled at a base camp, soldiers' main staples were hardtack, flour, sugar, beans, potatoes, vinegar, and a form of meat called salt pork. This meat, which was usually pork but also sometimes beef, as one would call beef, you would definitely call it salt pork. It was heavily salted, weird, and dried, but not cooked. Not cooked. It was not a jerky because it needed to remain a little bit pliable so it could be used in other dishes. One of the meat dishes they frequently prepared with salt pork was called skilligalee. I assume skilligalee is related to the word skillet. In the skillet, over a fire, they would cut up and fry pieces of salt pork, and the grease from the fat became a liquid base to which they could add crushed hardtack. As the cracker pieces soaked up the

grease, they turned to mush, almost like an oily cream of wheat. And then the meat was mixed in, and then they would add sugar or molasses to enhance the flavor. It sounds delicious. No, it doesn't. But it was easier on the teeth to eat the hardtack and salt pork cooked that way than it was to try to eat them separately. I'm going to add the recipe in the show notes for anyone who is like, you know what? No Friday night pizza for me. I am making skilly-killy. That rhymes. I am a poet and I didn't know it. This creation, if that's what you want to call it, was made even more nutrient dense when bacon was included in the meat rations. And for that iteration, bacon was fried in a pan, which created liquid grease.

And after the bacon was cooked, they would remove it from the skillet and add in the hardtack that had been crushed into powder. And then that mush was fried into a flat cake. And they called it ash cake. After removing the ash cake from the skillet, cooks would put bacon and molasses on top of it. Sweet and salty and savory. On the vehicle of carbohydrates, it was a 150-year precursor to one of everybody's favorite culinary phenomenons, the maple bacon donut. I mean, it is the same ingredients, right? It's like maple, bacon, and flour that's fried. It's just a slightly different format and probably a little bit more disgusting. But no one can survive on

maple bacon donuts alone. Fresh fruits and vegetables were inconsistently available during the Civil War because of this. Soldiers' immune systems weakened, and vitamin deficiency diseases like scurvy increased. The Union Army responded by issuing dried vegetables, which soldiers called desecrated vegetables. Described by a soldier from the 101st out of Ohio, they were compressed blocks made from a combination of corn husks, tomato skins, carrots, and other kinds of vegetables too numerous to mention. When boiled, a vegetable block expanded to many times its previous size and added to boiling water with beans and meat. They enriched a camp stew. The culinary science of the time was still pretty rudimentary, so it may not have been able to maximize the retention of vitamins during

processing. Nothing was like, you know, picked fresh and flash frozen, but the blocks had to provide some extra nutrients. Interestingly, this development served as an archetype nearly a century later when NASA was developing astronaut food for the Gemini and Mercury space programs. They used these same kind of cubes, which they sometimes called bullions. Before there was freeze-dried food for these missions, John Glenn and his fellow astronauts ate the same kind of vegetables that Civil War soldiers did. In the Jules Verne post-Civil War books, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Post-Civil War books, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Verne described the food his men in space were eating. The breakfast began with three bowls of excellent soup, thanks to the liquid faction in hot water of precious cakes of bouillon. These humble, dried cubes helped power

the Civil War, the fiction of Jules Verne, the launch of the U.S. space program, and now the NASA Food Lab is utilizing them in their preparation of food options for missions to Mars. Many Union generals convinced their wives to send them lemons and onions from home, which would keep a little longer than other fresh produce, enhance the flavor profile of their meals, and most importantly, help prevent disease by adding vitamin C into their diets. Sometimes the letters from home contained reminders about out-of-the-box options that soldiers could create should they happen to take certain foods from farms along the way. Their most treasured find. Watermelons. In 1858, the popular publication Godey's Lady's Book

published a recipe for preserved watermelon rind that would turn the tough fruit exterior into a salty, candy-like chew. It was all the rage at the time, and soldiers could prepare it even while they were traveling. They also used the inner parts of the watermelon to make a sugary syrup, a welcome alternative to the more bitter taste of molasses. And the seeds packed a little protein too, although they probably didn't know that. Horses, by the way, also love watermelon. If anyone was trying to coax a horse into doing something, they could probably bribe them with a little cube of watermelon. Occasionally, soldiers would leave the battlefield or travel camps and reach a larger, more permanent army camp. There, food options expanded into something approximating the food they would

have had back home. In addition to massive stockpiles of canned food, camps would have little mini farms where they kept cows and pigs for fresh meat, goats for milk, and chickens for eggs. Large-scale ovens were built to make fresh bread. And with those ovens, they could bake 120,000 loaves of bread per day. On holidays and special occasions, the cooks would prepare rasol, which were patties of meat, eggs, spices, herbs, and breadcrumbs rolled together, wrapped in a pastry dough, and deep fried. If it sounds familiar, it's because it was the mid-19th century equivalent of a Hot Pocket, minus the microwave, and it was a wildly popular camp meal. They may not have had all the culinary comforts of home, but camp cooks created alternatives.

They didn't have chocolate for hot cocoa, but they found a way to create it using peanuts. The peanut chocolate, as they called it, was made from peanuts that were roasted until the skins slipped off, and then pounded into a fine powder that was combined with sugar and milk and then heated. Peanuts were so popular that after the war, when soldiers got home, they had their wives and mothers experiment with them. This eventually led to the patent of peanut butter in 1884, and George Washington Carver would go on to revolutionize the American South's agricultural economy by supplementing the cotton crop with peanuts. A peanut chocolate drink may have been a treat, but the most important beverage, the item that was more important than food for many soldiers? Coffee.

I cannot stress enough how very important coffee was to soldiers during wartime, not just for increased energy, but also for warmth and comfort in the morning and throughout the day. The Library of Congress says that the word coffee appeared more than any other repetitive term in letters during the Civil War. Soldiers loved it so much that on marches, whenever they would stop, they'd immediately begin grinding coffee beans to have a cup before continuing on their journey. 16-year-old Union soldier Charles Knott describes the feeling of having coffee as a staple in their rations, especially when out and away from base camp. He said, again, we sat down beside the campfire for supper. It consisted of hard pilot bread, raw pork, and coffee.

The coffee you probably wouldn't recognize in New York, boiled in an open kettle and about the color of a brownstone front. It was nevertheless the only warm thing we often had. Coffee was the perfect liquid to dip hardtack in, giving it some flavor and softening its structure so it could be eaten. And plug your ears here if you are sensitive about food safety. Sometimes hardtack supplies that still had a little bit of moisture in them attracted maggots and other bugs. And soaking contaminated crackers in hot coffee killed the bugs, and they would just rise to the top, and they could just pick them out. Other people just ate the infested hardtack and coffee

anyway, because they knew the insects were not going to kill them. Union soldiers had a steady supply of coffee in their rations, but it was not as easily accessible to the Confederate soldiers. The Confederate army got creative and found ways to make the meager coffee portions stretch by mixing a small amount of the grounds with other items that they had on hand or that they foraged. Their army often called it Lincoln coffee, blaming the president who they saw as responsible for the war and for the blockades that prevented their coffee imports. Peanuts, their coffee imports. Peanuts, grains, and acorns were all ground up and added to coffee, as was chicory root, which is still today a popular blend in the southern United States. But by far, the most popular was sweet potato coffee. The Albany Patriot, a Georgia newspaper, printed the recipe for it in a December 1861 issue so even

citizens at home who were also stuck rationing coffee could drink the hot beverage alternative. It said, peel the potatoes and slice them thin, dry them in the air or on a stove and cut into pieces small enough to go into the coffee mill. Grind them to a powder and mix the powder with some coffee grounds. Brew with boiling water. A southern general exclaimed in a letter to his wife that no mocha or java ever tasted half so good as this rye and sweet potato blend. At the start of the war, Confederate soldiers had pretty decent food rations. A near daily meal of what they called hog and hominy, pork and boiled corn. The city of Vicksburg, Mississippi was a vital port for the supply chain of the South, which is why this was an early target for the Union.

In a strategy of hoping to starve the Confederacy of supplies, Lincoln even called the Siege of Vicksburg the Hog and Hominy Campaign. The South lacked manufacturing, had drastically reduced farming due to war participation, and a lackluster railroad system, so it was no surprise that obtaining supplies for their troops quickly became a struggle. General Robert E. Lee said in a letter that his soldiers' daily rations were now only 18 ounces of cornmeal, four ounces of bacon, and once-a-week portions of rice, potatoes, and sugar or molasses. As supplies dwindled, they resorted to often eating what they called hellfire stew, which was just crushed hardtack, pork grease, and water boiled into a runny paste. Confederate soldiers suffered great food insecurity, so much so that one wrote in response to their food deprivation,

our men get a vegetable diet by cooking up polk, potato tops, maypop vines, curlip weed, lamb's quarter, thistle, and a hundred kinds of weeds I always thought were poison. I thought it trash, but the boys call it long forage. Their starvation was so great that they were boiling weeds and eating them. Hospitals treated hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were there not for bullet wounds or rudimentary amputations, but for food-related diseases that left their bodies perilously weakened. Treatment involved introducing proper nutrients back into their systems, but it had to happen intentionally and slowly to give the body time to absorb. It usually began with what was called hospital toast soup, which was made by taking a quarter loaf of bread and toasting it until it was almost burned. This was then added to boiling

water until it created a broth, which was slowly fed to patients. After toast soup, they'd move on to beef tea. Today, we'd probably call it bone broth, and it was made by boiling beef with bones and fat in water. Once a patient kept that down, nurses would add milk to the beef tea, which, would add milk to the beef tea, which if you had a little involuntary shudder there, I am with you. That is a no gracias to gelatinous beef fat steeped in milk for me. Patients would then move on to onion broth and lemon water to build up their vitamin C levels. And once their digestive systems could handle all of those liquids, it was time for the good stuff. Civil War bread pudding.

A hospital recipe said to boil one pint of milk with a piece of cinnamon and lemon peel, pour it on two ounces of breadcrumbs, add two eggs, half an ounce of currants, and a little sugar. Steam in a buttered pan for one hour. After burned bread and beef milk tea, that probably tasted quite delicious. When General Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, he made a request to the victorious Union general. His troops were starving. Men had gone two days without food, some even longer than that, and they needed to eat. General Grant sent food wagons to the Confederate camps, which may have taken some of the sting out of their loss. Food was absolutely a key factor in the outcome of the Civil War. Starving troops don't win battles,

and after four years surviving on meager rations, the Confederate Army was too weak and too short on supplies to continue to gain battlefield ground. Soldiers who survived the war took home with them culinary tips that continued to revolutionize the American food industry. Cooking techniques like deep frying and braising became more prominent, and flavor profiles expanded. Rationing made it necessary for people on and off the battlefield to get creative with what they had. And that creativity propelled them into a new era. Americans' consumption of beef after the Civil War skyrocketed, which helped prop up the success of the meatpacking industry. And by the end of the turn of the century, canned goods were a staple

in nearly every household's pantry. But some of the things are best left in the past. Hartak, I'm looking at you. Thank you for joining me today. Next time, we're going to dive into the deep world of Civil War propaganda, because even in the 1860s, media bias and fake news made front page headlines. But you'll be interested to know that people got some of their wartime news from a rather unique propaganda source, music. I'll see you then. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit the

follow or subscribe button on the podcast platform of your choice. We also benefit so much from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you again soon.