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Thank you for your service.
clack clack
I bet those guys on the USS Abraham Lincoln would have done dirty stuff for some of that good shit.
Hard tack was the inspiration for elvish lembas bread, no?
I have a passing interest in antique hiking/camping gear and I have no great love for hot food, so I should look into this.
The magic stomach-filling qualities of lembas bread combined with the knowledge it was based on hard tack was then combined by Terry Pratchett:
The dwarf bread was brought out for inspection. But it was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you’d rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.
You could eat raw sheep, but not raw camel. Those animals were so vile that their names were always a heavy insult.
Damn I love Discworld… I miss Sir Pratchett so much…
GNU Terry Pratchett
No, lembas is quite the opposite of hardtack, because it was soft, tasted great and you didn’t need a lot of it to satiate your hunger.
Lembas is what hardtack would be if it was made by elves.
Honestly, hardtack isn’t too bad, as long as you don’t look at it like a meal. It’s either an ingredient or an activity.
I do Napoleonic era reenactment, and that means I’ve made an eaten a fair bit of hardtack. Pictured here is the fancier, more modern sort, with holes so you can break it without using a tool. The alternative is just round-ish chunks of it, which make you happy the muskets of the day came with a nice, solid wooden stock.
If you treat hardtack like a meal, it sucks. You can’t chew it, so basically you’re just swallowing it whole after grinding it up, and that sucks both going in and coming out. If you use it as an ingredient, say for stew or porridge, it works just fine. Not even hardtack can remain solid after boiling it for an hour, and it’s an amazing thickener for pretty much everything. If you grind it up enough, you can even view hardtack as a form of solid flour, and bake pancakes with it.
The other method is to treat it like an activity. Eating hardtack is like chewing gum, something you can do while walking for a few hours. Keep a piece in your mouth and sloooowly let it soften, and at the end of the march, you’ll have gotten some free calories in.
TBF a French peasant might have had less expectations about what food is for, anyway.
Although, that can go either way depending on which bit of pre-modernity is in question. Sometimes land was plentiful and lots of ingredients were around and in season, so peasants ate okay.
Almost as good as dwarf bread.
For Dwarf stone bread you have to include rock dust.
K-ration biscuits weren’t very different from hardtack
The biscuits in German MREs are nicknamed armour plates. They are ok, though.
Ulf, schmeiß mal ‘n Panzerkeks hoch.
The only thing better than MREs if you want to be constipated
full of fiber, in the same way that particleboard is.
I’ve always loved the dimples in hard tack, I assume it’s so the weevils can feel like they live in apartment buildings.
They’ve got dental, right?
Time for a game of soggy biscuit!
Steve1989mre: “Let’s get that out on a tray. Nice!”
