Civil War Food

Hardtack. Beans. Salted beef. Coffee. Sound appetizing? If not, you should be glad you were not a soldier during the Civil War area. This would have been the staples of your diet.

While beans, salted beef, and coffee are familiar to nearly everyone, hardtack is a culinary conundrum for many. Think crackers – hardtack, a bread made primarily of flour and water, was prized for it’s relative immunity to spoilage over long periods, even months. Almost inedible unless soaked in liquid – most often coffee during the Civil War era – hardtack was a staple that most soldiers enjoyed (enjoyed certainly being a relative term) at almost every meal.

Soldiers naturally grew tired of a diet that included almost no fresh food at all; as such, they often foraged the homes near their camp, commandeering whatever food was available for their own consumption, with little regard to the needs of those to whom the food belonged. This was a particular hardship to families in the South, who found their own food supplies dwindling as the war wore on.

Much has been made of the paucity of the rations that soldiers during the Civil War endured. However, it was only the Confederate army who truly suffered from a lack of rations; the Union army, well-supplied by the Federal government, was fairly well supplied with foodstuffs throughout the entire war, while the Confederates, due to several factors, spent the latter part of the war foraging as much as fighting. The Confederate soldiers weren’t the only ones who suffered – throughout the South, food was becoming scarce for those at home, as well.

The scarcity of food for both Confederate soldiers and Confederate civilians was directly related to several factors, factors which worsened as the war raged on. First, Union blockades kept both grocery items and seeds from reaching the Southern states. As supplies of both groceries and seeds dwindled, prices of these items soared. Inflation, however, was only part of the problem; by the last years of the Confederacy, Confederate-issued currency was worth less than the paper it was printed on, and many of the merchants who did somehow acquire groceries, seed, and other food stuff would not take the currency of their own nation. The lack of reliable transportation in the South also contributed to the famine. Railroads, rife in the North, were just making inroads in the South at the outset of the war, with most work ceasing when the fighting began. With no reliable long-range transportation system, fresh food and other food items could not be feasibly transported to both soldier or civilians throughout the South.

Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were nothing if not enterprising. When coffee became a luxury, chicory, corn and acorns, among many other substitutes, were used to make a coffee-like drink. Corn meal took the place of flour in many recipes, and peanuts, found mostly in the Deep South, made their way into many dishes as a source of protein when livestock for meat was scarce.

If you are interested in learning more about food in the Civil War era, check out these books, available for sale at the American Civil War Shop:

• A Taste For War: The Culinary History of the Blue and the Gray – William C. Davis
• Rebel Cornbread and Yankee Coffee” – Garry Fisher
• Civil War Cookin’, Stories, ‘n Such – D. Funkhouser
• Civil War Cookbook – Davis