Hello. My name is Nate Hess and I'm a Park
Guide with the Lewis and Clark National
Historic Trail. As you can see I'm
sitting here at my dining room table,
I have a picture up here to my one side
as well as a mug rack over here on my
other side and I'm still working from
home due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now chances are many of you
watching from home will share a meal
around a table very similar to this one
whether that's your kitchen table
whether that's your dining-room table
and I'd like to ask you a question.
What makes a meal special? Is it the food? Is
it that it's perhaps a favorite meal of
yours? Or is it the people that you share
that meal with? Food has a unique ability
to bring people together, to bring people
together around a table, to form bonds, to
form friendships, to strengthen the ties
that you have with other people, and
people really do not change either all
that much, we form bonds as we eat
together today, and that is also true for
people in the past. Now I work once more
for the Lewis and Clark National
Historic Trail, and the members of the
Lewis and Clark expedition absolutely
grew closer, made bonds, by eating
together, by sharing meals together, by
sharing the food that they had hunted, by
sharing the food that they had traded
for, and that the members of the Lewis
and Clark ate a variety of different
items, mostly meat when they could get it,
however they also just like you and I
today, like to eat bread as well, now
whereas we might go get a loaf of sliced
bread from the supermarket to have with a
peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or
maybe some dinner rolls to have with a
special dinner, the members of the Lewis
and Clark's expedition bread was a bit
different, it was like this, what you see
here what I'm holding out in front of
you is a round sort of cracker and this
is called
hardtack.
That term was popularized during the
second half of the 19th century,
particularly during and after the
American Civil War. At the time of the
Lewis and Clark expedition these sort of
round crackers, would have been called a
biscuit, or just straight bread, and it
was these biscuits, that comprised most
of the bread ration during the Lewis and
Clark expedition, it's not very fancy
it's basically just wheat flour and
water mixed together, formed into these
round crackers like the one that I just
held up, and basically baked for several
hours and sort of almost dried out
rather than baked, and this is something
that you can still make it home today, in
fact I've got a few items up here that
helped me bake these along with my
wonderful fiancee Samantha, she helped me
out with this a couple nights ago and we
made our own hardtack and you can
too that's something that you can do at
home, and the first thing that you need
you need a big mixing bowl just like
this and in it you're going to mix four
cups of wheat flour, whole wheat flour
along with about a half cup of water is
what the recipe called for, my fiancee
and I found that we needed a bit more
water to get an actual dough out of it,
and that dough's going to look something
kind of like that,
that's a blob of some of the dough that
we had left over from making our
biscuit, making our hardtack. And
after that we had to make the actual
hardtack into the cracker shapes
that you see right here, like you see on
the plate here in front of me, that some
of the dough before we actually cooked
the hardtack, and in order to form
that we used a biscuit cutter, kind of
like that, in reality from what I read
the biscuits would have been a bit
bigger than the ones that we made, we
didn't quite have a biscuit maker large
enough to make ones that were super
historically accurate, but that's what we
had so that
we worked with, and after we cut out the
biscuits into these round shapes like
you see here, I washed a large nail just
like you see there that I'm holding out
in front of me, and I actually poked a
series of holes in top of the hardtack
as well, that's to help the dough dry out
once you actually bake them, and then
once you actually do bake them you get
some finished hardtack that looks kinda
like that, that's what they look like
after they've been baked, they're almost
kinda like big saltine crackers once
more these aren't fancy, they're just
wheat flour mixed with water there's no
salt in it, anything like that after you
form the dough into these shapes and put
them on a floured cookie sheet, I baked
these for about four hours it does take
quite a while, I baked them at 200 degrees
so it's not a very hot oven either and
this is what you end up with, this is the
biscuits that you end up with, and during
the Lewis and Clark expedition these
were very valuable because hardtack isn't
going to become moldy, it's not going to
become stale and inedible like fresh
white bread did, they did get fresh white
bread at a few different points on the
expedition, generally the one they were
staying in one place for a while, but
otherwise this was their bread ration
that they got and they had with meat they
ate with some of the other things that
they ate, as you can see they're quite
difficult to bite into, I couldn't even
really get a good bite out of it there
and they do become very very hard, as you
can see, they're quite tough! In order to
eat these, the men of the Lewis and Clark
expedition could have done a couple of
different things, they could have dipped
it into a hot beverage of some sort,
many of the men would have cooked these
up, by putting it in a pan with
meat fat of some sort, and cooking it up
that way, the biscuits are going to soak up
that fat and that's going to make the
biscuits much more edible and easy to
eat as well, and that's a little bit
about how the men of the Lewis and Clark
expedition would have eaten that hardtack,
it's quite tough to eat and that being
said, the important thing about those
meals isn't necessarily what they were
eating but how those meals helped bring
the men of the Lewis and Clark
expedition together as a team, when you
share a meal with someone you get to know
them a little better, and that's
certainly true today and that was
certainly true during the Lewis and
Clark expedition, so if you like you can
make this hardtack on your own, if not
that's okay too, to be honest they don't
really taste all that well, taste all
that good, but if you do, try to break
them up a little bit before you eat them,
please don't break any teeth trying to
eat this hardtack, as you saw I kind of
tried to take a bite into it and wasn't
even really able to make much of a dent
in them, so do be careful if you actually
make any of this hardtack, and otherwise
enjoy your next meal with your family or
friends it's a great way to get to know
someone, that's true today that was also
true during the Lewis and Clark
expedition, thank you so much ladies and
gentlemen have a great rest of your day,
bye bye now!
