On occasion when reading books about military history, or on subjects such as the Lewis and Clark expedition, I’ll come across such information as “each soldier was rationed 1 pound of flour and 1/2 pound lard per day.” or “1/2 pound corm meal and 1/4 pound salt pork”. I don’t remember the exact measurements, but you get the idea.
My question - how the heck do you eat that? Are they just assuming that the cook had stuff like yeast/salt/etc. to make that into a real meal, and the portions were just a reference? IE, there’s 14 soldiers, each rationed a half pound of flour a day. Therefore, on any given day, the cook could make bread with up to 7 pounds of flour. The yeast, salt, and water were assumed to be available. I guess a cook could take along a sourdough starter, so yeast, per se, was not necessary. Indeed, was yeast as a powder or block even available back then? I digress…
Or was each soldier actually given a measure of flour, and there was no yeast/salt or anything else? Plain flour - can it really be eaten? What about flour and salt pork? I guess you could flour the pork and fry it, but that would still leave a pile of raw flour left over.
I realize that they hunted and foraged for fresh food as well as relied on the rations. In the winter, though, the rations were the bulk of their food supply. What’s the dope on this?
I suspect that the flour was not converted to proper bread. Most camp bread is simply flour with a little water, cooked. Flour, lard, and water can make a very simple thing related in concept to a tortilla. Rising and complicated recipes probably weren’t possible. Cornmeal can be easily cooked into a mush with water and eaten as porridge. Often, too, military units would pool rations, or be granted their rations in a pool that one appointed cook would handle. Most men would also have additional things like salt, but yeast or sourdough starter were probably not available.
A good website to look at is the RevWar Campaigner–several articles on food, including this one by Greg Theberge http://patriot.net/~tpost/nourish.html about rations in the British army, including the wondrous ways in which flour, lard, salt, and water can be combined into foodlike substances. (I’ve eaten most of the stuff discussed, but were I to have to eat it on a regular basis, I can guarantee you I would be a hundred pounds lighter)
A little flour and water gives you basically an unleavened bread. Pretty much where hardtack comes from. Boil some salt pork and you have a soup or stew base. Mixing some lard with flour gives an unleavened biscuit, and with a bit of sourdough starter, some pretty darn edible biscuits. With cornmeal, just add in some water and you have the makings for “hasty pudding” which can be given a bit of flavor with some slivers of salt pork. Or use less water and make corn dodgers or a corn flatbread. It’s amazing what can be done with a few simple things for variety.
IIRC, as it worked on old ships, each man in a “Mess” would draw different rations each day, and they’d combine their daily issue to provide the components of meal. Each Mess would provide a man who had the ‘Mess Duty’ to assist the ships cook in preparing the meals, and this man would fetch and carry for the cook, along with handling any prep tasks and clean-up. He would also carry the cooked food back over to his ‘Mess Mates’. Each Mess was around 6 or 8 men.