Woodville Republican. (Woodville, Miss.) 185?-current, 1883-10-27
Hard-Tack.


As Twrite, there lies before me onny
tablean innocent looking cracker,which
! | have faithfully preserved for years. 1t
is about the size and has the appear
ance of an ordinary soda biscuit. If
you take it in your hand, you will find
it somewhat heavier than an ordinary
biscuit, and if you bite it-but, no;
will not let you bite it, for | wish to see
how long | can keep it. But if you
were to reduce it to fine powder, you
would find that it would absorb a great
or quantity of water than an equal
weight of ordinary flour. You would
also observe that it is very hard. This
You may. perhaps, think is to be attrib-
uted TO its great age. But if you i'm
agine that its age is to be measured on
IL by the years which have elapsed since
the war, you are greatly mistaken; for
there was common belief among the
boys that our bareback had been baked
long before the commencement of the
Christian era: This opinion was based
upon the fact that the letters B. c. were
stamped on many, if not, indeed, all of
the cracker boxes. To be sure, there
were some skeptics who shook their
heads, and maintained that these mys-
name of. some army contractor or in
spector of supplies, but the belief was
widespread and deep-seated that they
were certainly intended to set forth the
era in which our bread had been baked.
For our bareback were very hard.
1t was difficult to break them with the
teeth. Some of them you could not
fracture with Your fist. Still, there was
an immense amount of nourishment in
them-when once you had learned how
10 get at it, 1t required some expert
cnce and no little hunger to enable one
to appreciate bareback Alright, and it
demanded no small amount of inventive
power to understand how to cook hard
tack as they ought to be cooked. Ii /
remember correctly, in our section of the
army we had not less than fifteen diff
ferent ways of preparing them. In 9TH
er parts, L understand, they had dis
covered one or two more WAYS; but
with us, fifteen was the limit of the Gu
linary art when bareback was on the
board.
On the march they were usually MOI
cooked at all, but eaten in the raw
state. In order, however, to make
them somewhat more palatable, you
simply cut down slice of nice fat
pork, laid the pork on your cracker, put
spoonful of brown sugar on top of
the pork, and you had a dish fit for a
soldier. OF course, the pork had just
come out of the pickle, and was con-
sequently quite raw. When we halted
for coffee, we sometimes had fricasseed
hard-tack-prepared by toasting them
before the hot Goals. When, as was
generally the case on a march, our
bareback had been broken into small
pieces in our haversacks, we soaked
these in water and fried them in pork
fat stirring well, and seasoning with
salt and suffers pepper, thus making
what was commonly known as a
''hishy-hashy, or ''hot-fired stew "
Thus you see what vast and unsu-
pected possibilities reside in this inno-
cent-looking three-and-a-half inch
square bareback lying here on my
table before me. Three like the speei-
men made meal, and nine were a
ration; and this is what fought the
battles for the Union-Harry NJ
hiefcT IN st. Nicholas.