Civil War: The Soldier's Food

The soldiers gathered in small groups each evening to prepare their food.  The food was low quality for both armies, but the Confederate soldier suffered more from lack of food.   For soldiers of the North, some food was obtained by plunder.  When food deliveries were interrupted by weather delays or other challenges, soldiers were forced to forage the countryside to supplement their meager diets.

Yankee Soldier

Hardtack

Hard as a rock, this cracker was the bane of many a Civil War soldier.  The ingredients were simple: wheat flour, water, and maybe some salt, mixed into a dense dough, rolled and cut into biscuit sized squares.  Mostly a food of the Yankee or Union Army, soldiers called the hard little biscuits, “tooth-dullers”.  Hardtack was almost inedible and nearly dense enough to stop a musket ball.  To soften, hardtack was often dunked in brine, coffee, or cooked with salt pork.  You can make hardtack, the recipe follows:

Ingredients:

2 cups of flour

 1/2 to 3/4 cup water 

6 pinches of salt

Optional:  add 1 tbsp of vegetable fat 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Mix the ingredients together into a stiff dough, knead several times, and spread the dough out flat to a thickness of 1/4 inch on a non-greased cookie sheet.  Using a knife, cut dough into 3-inch cracker squares.  Punch four rows of holes, four holes per row, into each cracker.

Bake for 30 minutes. Remove from oven, turn crackers over on the sheet and return to the oven and bake another 30 minutes. Cool completely.

Confederate Soldier

Sloosh

Many Southern soldiers simply cooked cornmeal mush around a rifle ramrod.  They took the cornmeal and swirled it around in grease, making a dough.  They then wrapped the dough around their rifle ramrod and cooked it over the campfire. That was called "sloosh". 

Corn Pone
Corn pone was a staple of early settlers and Civil War soldiers.

Recipe

4 cups ground white or yellow cornmeal 
1 tablespoon salt 
2-3 cups of very hot (not boiling) water 
 1/4--1/2 cup bacon grease or other oil

In a large bowl, add the hot water to the corn meal and mix into a thick batter. Cover with a dishcloth and let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes. The batter should still be soft enough to mold into a small cake. 

Take your cast iron skillet and put it over a medium heat on the stove or over your fire, add the bacon grease or oil. When the oil is hot lay the cakes into the pan. Cook them until they are browned on one side, this should take about 3 minutes. Turn each and brown on the other side. Drain the fat and serve.

source:  https://preparednessadvice.com

Food on the Home front 

Lacking many ingredients, the southern women learned to alter food recipes according to their scarce available resources.  

Oatmeal pie recipe:

The military needed a cheap way to feed a lot of people, and soldiers across the country were introduced to the idea they could eat their horses' oats.  So oats become a popular food.  During the Civil War  pecans were in short supply in the South, so oatmeal pie was a good substitute for southern pecan pie.

      


Idiot's Delight cake recipe:

An easy dessert to make, "Idiot's Delight" cake was quick and frugal.  It was often served on Christmas and Holidays.

To learn more Civil War food recipes and learn the history of survival of women in the south...
  Click here:

Brave southern women tell how they survived the desperate last days of the Confederacy in eyewitness accounts.  They outwitted the plundering Yankees and fed starving children. Includes accounts of slave women. Civil War food recipes:  cabbage stew, hoppin' John, oatmeal pie, Johnny cakes, molasses cookies etc.  Amazon Best Seller.

Black Confederates - Civil War

Nobody questions that the Confederate Army utilized blacks as cooks, teamsters, and body servants.  As for accepting slaves as soldiers, there had been resistance among Confederates to placing arms in the hands of slaves.  Fears of slave uprisings were factors.

Some assert the “black soldiers” were merely slaves the Confederate soldiers brought with them.  They say the “black confederate” soldier is a myth.  Others claim the opposite; that there were actual black confederate soldiers.  It is a controversial subject.

Why have we not heard more of these black soldiers?  The answer may lie in several possibilities:  1) ignorance of the situation or  2) bias.

Yet in diaries we find references to the black Confederate soldiers:

" ...As usual with the enemy, they posted their negro regiments on their left and in front, where they were slain by hundreds, and upon retiring left their dead and wounded negroes uncared for, carrying off only the whites, which accounts for the fact that upon the first part of the battlefield nearly all the dead found were negroes." - Federal Official Records, Vol. XXV, Chapter XLVII, pg. 341 - report of the Confederate Commander, Savannah, April 27, 1864 -  

Although the Confederates did not officially enlist blacks until March 1865, some states allowed them to serve on a local level as early as 1861.  Perhaps no one knows how many blacks served as soldiers in the Confederacy.

Eyewitness to the Battle of Gettysburg - Tillie Pierce

 3-day battle, July 1, 1983 - July 3, 1863

Gettysburg was a small town in Pennsylvania, with rolling hills of corn and wheat fields and only 2,400 inhabitants.  The residents seemed unaware that two huge armies, about 170,000 men, were converging on their sleepy little town.  The fiercest battle of the war was about to ignite.

Tillie Pierce:

Tilllie Pierce had lived all her life in the village of Gettysburg and was 16 years old at the time of the Battle.  Her father was a butcher and the family lived above his shop in the heart of town.  Tillie witnessed the entire battle.  She was attending the Young Ladies Seminary school when the cry "the Rebels are coming!"

"Rushing to the door, and standing on the front portico we beheld a dark, dense mass, moving toward town.  Our teacher, Mrs. Eyster, at once said:  'Children, run home as quickly as you can.'

"It did not require repeating. ...  I had scarcely reached the front door, when, on looking up the street, I saw some of the men on horseback.  

What a horrible sight!  There they were, human beings!  Clad almost in rags, covered with dust, riding wildly, pell-mell down the hill toward our home!  Shouting, yelling most unearthly, cursing, brandishing their revolvers, and firing right and left.

Yankees plunder
Soon ...ransacking began in earnest.  They wanted horses, clothing, anything and almost everything they could conveniently carry away.  Nor were they particular about asking. Whatever suited them they took.  They did, however, make a formal demand of the town authorities, for a large supply of flour, meat, groceries, shoes, hats, ... ten barrels of whisky; or, in lieu of this, five thousand dollars.

But our merchants and bankers had too often heard of their coming, and had already shipped their wealth to places of safety.  Thus it was, that a few days after, the citizens of York were compelled to make up our proportion of the Rebel requisition."

At the urging of her family, Tillie and some friends left the town and went to what they thought would be a safe farmhouse, Jacob Weikert's farmhouse.  Over 700 wounded and dying soldiers found shelter in the farmhouse and barn during the battle.  Tillie provided water and food to the soldiers and assisted the surgeons and nurses caring for the wounded. On July 7, she went back to her home saying: "The whole landscape had been changed and I felt as though we were in a strange and blighted land."

To learn more Civil War food recipes and learn the history of survival of women in the south...
  
Click here:
Brave southern women tell how they survived the desperate last days of the Confederacy in eyewitness accounts.  They outwitted the plundering Yankees and fed starving children. Includes accounts of slave women. Civil War food recipes:  cabbage stew, hoppin' John, oatmeal pie, Johnny cakes, molasses cookies etc.  Amazon Best Seller.

Civil War Sweetener - Sorghum

The blockade of southern ports, initiated by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861 causes many food shortages.   Among the scarce items was sugar.

Southerners were resourceful and began to use "sorghum" in place of cane sugar.  Sorghum was cheap and plentiful in the south, and often went by the name of “sorghum molasses”.  

Sorghum is a grain that grows tall like corn, and is used for sweetening and also as livestock feed. From a distance it looks like corn. 


However, you’ll find no ears and there is a reddish tinge to the leaves, stalk and ripe seed head.  Stalks stand up to 10 feet tall.

Sorghum holds a sweet juice extracted by crushing the cane. That sweet juice is then reduced until it runs slow as molasses, but boasts a deeper, more complex flavor. 

Sorghum  is known as “the camel of crops” because it doesn’t need much water and grows in soils other grains won’t.