CHIEFLY CULINARY.
It was Frederick the Great, I believe, who said that "An army, like
a serpent, goes upon its belly,"--which was but another way of
saying that if you want men to fight well, you must feed them well.
Of provisions, Uncle Sam usually gave us a sufficiency; but the
table to which he invited his boys was furnished with little
variety and less delicacy. On first entering the service, the
drawing of our rations was not a small undertaking, for there were
nearly a hundred of us in the company, and it takes a considerable
weight of bread and pork to feed a hundred hungry stomachs. But
after we had been in the field a year or two, the call, "Fall in
for your hard-tack!" was leisurely responded to by only about a
dozen men,--lean, sinewy, hungry-looking fellows, each with his
haversack in hand. I can see them yet as they sat squatting around
a gum-blanket spread on the ground, on which were a small heap of
sugar, another of coffee, and another of rice, may be, which the
corporal was dealing out by successive spoonfuls, as the boys held
open their little black bags to receive their portion, while near
by lay a small piece of salt pork or beef, or possibly a dozen
potatoes.
Much depended, of course, on the cooking of the provisions
furnished us. At first we tried a company cook; but we soon learned
that the saying of Miles Standish,--
"If you wish a thing to be well done,
You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!"
applied to cooking quite as well as to courting. We therefore soon
dispensed with our cook, and although scarcely any of us knew
how to cook so much as a cup of coffee when we took the field, a
keen appetite, aided by that necessity which is ever the mother
of invention, soon taught us how bean-soup should be made and
hard-tack prepared.
Hard-tack! It is a question which I have much debated with
myself while writing, whether this chapter should not be entitled
"Hard-Tack." For as this article of diet was the grand staff of
life to the Boys in Blue, it would seem that but little could be
said of the culinary art in camp without involving some mention of
hard-tack at almost every turn.
[Illustration: "FALL IN FOR HARD TACK!"]
As I write, there lies before me on my table an innocent-looking
cracker, which I have faithfully preserved for years. It is about
the size and has the general appearance 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; I
will not let you bite it, for I wish to see how long I can keep
it. But if you were to reduce it to a fine powder, you would
find that it would absorb considerably more water than an equal
weight of wheat-flour; showing that in the making of hard-tack
the chief object in view is to stow away the greatest amount of
nourishment in the smallest amount of space. You will also observe
that this cracker is very hard. This you may perhaps attribute
to its great age. But if you imagine that its age is to be
measured only by the years which have elapsed since the war, you
are greatly mistaken; for there was a common belief among the boys
that our hard-tack 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 wiseacres who shook
their heads, and maintained that these mysterious letters were
the initials of the name of some army contractor or inspector of
supplies; but the belief was wide-spread and deep-seated that they
were without a doubt intended to set forth the era in which our
bread had been baked.
For our hard-tack were very hard; you could scarcely break
them with your teeth--some of them you could not fracture with
your fist. Still, as I have said, there was an immense amount
of nourishment stowed away in them, as we soon discovered when
once we had learned the secret of getting at it. It required
some experience and no little hunger to enable one to appreciate
hard-tack aright, and it demanded no small amount of inventive
power to understand how to cook hard-tack as they ought to be
cooked. If I remember correctly, in our section of the army we had
not less than fifteen different ways of preparing them. In other
parts, I understand, they had discovered one or two ways more;
but with us, fifteen was the limit of the culinary art when this
article of diet was on the board.
On the march they were usually not cooked at all, but eaten in
the raw state. In order, however, to make them somewhat more
palatable, a thin slice of nice fat pork was cut down and laid on
the cracker, and a spoonful of good brown sugar put 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 consequently quite raw;
but fortunately we never heard of _trichinæ_ in those days. I
suppose they had not yet been invented. When we halted for coffee,
we sometimes had fricasseed hard-tack--prepared by toasting them
before the hot coals, thus making them soft and spongy. If there
was time for frying, we either dropped them into the fat in the
dry state and did them brown to a turn, or soaked them in cold
water and then fried them, or pounded them into a powder, mixed
this with boiled rice or wheat flour, and made griddle-cakes and
honey--minus the honey. When, as was generally the case on a march,
our hard-tack 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 sutler's pepper, thus making what was
commonly known as a "Hishy-hashy, or a hot-fired stew."
But the great triumph of the culinary art in camp, to my mind,
was a hard-tack pudding. This was made by placing the biscuit in
a stout canvas bag, and pounding bag and contents with a club
on a log, until the biscuit were reduced to a fine powder. Then
you added a little wheat-flour (the more the better), and made
a stiff dough, which was next rolled out on a cracker-box lid,
like pie-crust. Then you covered this all over with a preparation
of stewed dried apples, dropping in here and there a raisin or
two, just for "auld lang syne's" sake. The whole was then rolled
together, wrapped in a cloth, boiled for an hour or so, and eaten
with wine sauce. The wine was, however, usually omitted, and hunger
inserted in its stead.
Thus you see what truly vast and unsuspected possibilities reside
in this innocent-looking three-and-a-half-inch-square hard-tack
lying here on my table before me. Three like this specimen made a
meal, and nine were a ration; and this is what fought the battles
for the Union.
The army hard-tack had but one rival, and that was the army
bean. A small white roundish soup-bean it was, such as you have
no doubt often seen. It was quite as innocent looking as its
inseparable companion, the hard-tack, and, like it, was possessed
of possibilities which the uninitiated would never suspect. It was
not so plastic an edible as the hard-tack, indeed; that is to say,
not capable of entering into so many different combinations, nor
susceptible of so wide a range of use, but the one great dish which
might be made of it was so pre-eminently excellent, that it threw
hishy-hashy and hard-tack pudding quite into the shade. This was
"baked beans." No doubt bean-soup was very good, as it was also
very common; but oh, "baked beans!"
I had heard of the dish before, but had never, even remotely,
imagined what toothsome delights lurked in the recesses of a
camp-kettle of beans baked after the orthodox backwoods fashion,
until one day Bill Strickland, whose home was in the lumber
regions, where the dish had no doubt been first invented, said to
me,--
"Come round to our tent to-morrow morning; we're going to have
baked beans for breakfast. If you will walk around to the lower end
of our Company street with me, I'll show you how we bake beans up
in the country I come from."
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and the boys were
already busy. They had an immense camp-kettle about two thirds full
of parboiled beans. Near by they had dug a hole in the ground,
about three feet square and two deep, in which and on top of which
a great fire was to be made about dusk, so as to get the hole
thoroughly heated and full of red-hot coals by the time _tattoo_
sounded. Into this hole the camp-kettle was then set, with several
pounds of fat pork on the top of the beans, and securely covered
with an inverted mess-pan. It was sunk into the red-hot coals, by
which it was completely concealed, and was left there all night to
bake, one of the camp-guards throwing a log on the fire from time
to time during the night, to keep matters a-going.
Early the next morning some one shook me roughly, as I lay sleeping
soundly in my bunk,--
"Get up, Harry. Breakfast is ready. Come over to our tent. If you
never ate baked beans before, you never ate anything worth eating."
I found three or four of the boys seated around the camp-kettle,
each with a tin plate on his knee and a spoon in his hand, doing
their very best to establish the truth of the adage that "the proof
of the pudding is in the eating." Now it is a far more difficult
matter to describe the experiences of the palate than of either
the eye or the ear, and therefore I shall not attempt to tell the
reader how very good baked beans are. The only trouble with a
camp-kettle full of this delicious food was that it was gone so
soon. Where _did_ it get to, anyhow? It was something like Father
Tom's quart of drink,--"an irrational quantity, because it was too
much for one and too little for two."
Still, too much of a good thing _is_ too much; and one might get
quite too much of beans (except in the state above described), as
you will find if you ask some friend or acquaintance who was in the
war to sing you the song of "The Army Bean." And remember, please,
to ask him to sing the refrain to the tune sometimes called "Days
of Absence," and to pull up sharp on the last word,--
"Beans for breakfast,
Beans for dinner,
Beans for supper,--
BEANS!"