Hard tack,5 cups flour-1 cup sugar-half cup brown sugar- 2 cups water-1tsp salt.Mix ingredents thourghly knead dough and roll out till it's half inch thick.Cut dough into 3x3 inch squares.Bake at 425% until dry,and lightly golden brown.

How do you eat it? I saw a guy break his teeth on some!

Hardtack and pemmican article here.

Most Civil War soldiers crumbled up the hardtack and put it in their coffee. This would soften it up enough to make it edible.

Onward and upward,
airforce

AF, what does that article have anything to do with hardtack?
But yeah, I don't think your supposed to eat it dry. The recipe is similar to those decorative bread-basket things.

That link should be working now. Actually, hardtack was almost always crumbled up in coffee (rarely soup or stew, when available). There are several more recipes in the article, including the Union Army specifications. Eating hardtack dry is like eating a rock.

From the article:

Hardtack is thick cracker made of flour, water, and sometimes salt. When properly stored, it will last for years. Before the American Civil War, soldiers called it biscuit or hard bread, sailors referred to it as sea biscuit or pilot’s bread, but to the Union Army of the Potomac during the American Civil War, it was known as hardtack, a name that stuck and spread to other units, including the Confederacy, but the name hardtack seems to have not been in general use among the armies of the West.

Because it could be prepared cheaply and would last so long, hardtack was the most convenient food for soldiers, explorers, pioneers, or anyone else who needed to be able to pack light and move fast.

While hardtack was furnished to the army by weight, the biscuits were doled out to soldiers by number. In some units, a ration of hardtack was nine, while it was ten in others, but there was usually enough to go around because some soldiers would refuse to eat it.

Although it was nutritious, soldiers complained that they could eat ten of them in a short time and still be hungry. But the most common complaint was that they were often so hard that they couldn’t be bitten into, that it took a very strong blow even to break them...


Onward and upward,
airforce

Hey, put them in the trauma panel part of your kevlar vest if you have one lol

I am on vacation now in Outter Banks NC! Will make this tonight and let you all know how it tastes on board ship!

Hey Pilgrim, here's where you can find a
Gooooood Cracker!

In 1801, Josiah Bent began baking biscuits in his Highland Street home in Milton, Massachusetts. One day, he over baked his biscuits and a "crackling" sound emitted from the brick oven. Thus, he coined a new American phrase "cracker" and subsequently began to sell his wares to ship merchants in Boston Harbor. Because simple ingredients of only flour and water, the water crackers remained fresh on the long transatlantic voyages. Across the young nation, the Bent's cracker played a historical role by providing the "hardtack" cracker to the Union troops during the Civil War.

Bent's Cookie Factory
7 Pleasant Street
Milton, Massachusetts 02186
P: (617) 698-5945
F: (617) 696-7730
E: info@bentscookiefactory.com

http://www.hardtackcracker.com/

Bet it doubles as body armor too.

I beat ya to it... lol.
Seriously, that could work.

You guys ain't kidding.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Well, I did make it, but I think I put too much flour in it. I think I was to slowly mix in the 2 cups of water and stir and stir instead of dumping it all in. It does taste good, but you can tell it was not done in center. How long do you bake it? No one else seemed tgo like it.