The Unbeatable Ships Biscuit 

He smacked two biscuits together twice! Max must be happy.

Lol the 'Clack Clack'

“HE DID THE THING!” - me watching Jon click the biscuits together

Jon's smile when he did the clack-clack - he knows exactly what he did! :D

11:17 is music to my ears.

"Do you see those two weevils, doctor?" "I do, why?" "Which one would you choose?" "Neither, they are the exact same species of curculio." "If you HAD to choose ..." "If you are going to push me *puts on glasses* ... I would choose the righthand weevil, for it has significant advantage in both length and width" *aubrey smacks table* "THERE, I HAVE YOU! YOU'RE COMPLETELY DISHED ... do you not know that in the service ... one must always choose the LESSER of two weevils?"

11:14 nice tribute to Max Miller.

Gentleman and Ladies. It is my honor to bless this video with a *_CLACK CLACK_*

The camaderie between this channel and Max Miller will always delight me. I was half expecting them to cut away to Max with the clack clack, but now we have cuts of both of them clacking hardtack. Great work as always

Legend has it that whenever you bang two pieces of ships biscuits together, Max Miller's ears ring

Hardtacks are the real MVP of field cooking. To this day Polish Army issues special variant of hardtacks in MRE's. Soldiers call them 'Panzer waffles" and joke that in a pinch they can be used as extra ballistic plates in body armor. Couple of years ago there was a movement to replace hardtacks with lightweight rice crackers, but it was unpopular and hardtacks returned to MRE's.

I was a submariner and out cooks baked fresh loafs every day. The boat smelled so nice… until they blew the sanitary tanks and that was a whole different smell

Sailors also drank almost nothing but beer, cider, or ale (which was used to soak the hardtack biscuits to soften them); all these beverages have nutritional value and in a pinch could keep people from starving even without the biscuits. Beer or ale the way it was originally made in Europe was a thick, soupy survival food, with less alcohol content than typical beer today, and people of all ages consumed it.

The Hardtack clap is the harmony that binds us together.

Ships biscuits are like flavourless jawbreakers

In the Hornblower TV series you see the cook using one of those stoves. It was a wooden replica prop, and when the series ended they gave the prop stove to HMS Unicorn which is a museum ship in Dundee, you can see it there

Please forgive me but I can't hear about hardtack without my minds eye seeing Max Miller clack clacking 🙈😂

When I was a sailor aboard merchants ships in the 80s we had three meals a day prepared by cooks from a broad range of foods, but the quality of the stores and cooking talents varied widely. A ship was often referred to as a "good feeder" if the standards were high. But regulations that had long been superseded by modern contracts were still posted showing a pound of hardtack per sailor among the requirements. If we had a bad feeder, we might grumble of giving us the hardtack instead.

The first thing I thought when I saw the title of this video was "Replace hardtack?! No one tell Max!" And Jon's clack-clack and all the clack-clacks in the comment delight me. 🙂 I cannot WAIT until at some point, we get a collab video with Townsends and Max. It's got to happen eventually. I always thought that the point of hardtack was just to make flour easier to transport, just turning it into bricks like was done with tea.

Baking fresh bread would also take a massive quantity of fresh water every day that would be a massive cargo issue!

Clack clack

A two hundred man crew would get two hundred pounds of bread per day, a three month voyage would have nine tons of bread Pork, beef, oats, raisins for a once a week duff, oats cheese, butter, .. ships were food stores with cannons

11:19 Did he? Yeah he did! Thats Awesome! CLAK CLAK!

11:17 Tasting History, anyone?

Ngl I was really hoping that Townsends would reach out to Max Miller and get the [clack clack] clip to splice in there

When i see those biscuits idk but a vision and the sound of *clack clack* playing in my head

Ship's biscuits...CLACK! CLACK!...For a second, I thought I was watching Tasting History! 😆

In Romania we have a method to obtain natural yeast, named ,,MAIA` by fermenting a few days flour and water. It is also named PLĂMĂDEALĂ, the root of the word PLUMP, meaning round fluffy bread.

I'd love to see a collab with Drachinfel on the subject of food in the Navy in the time period. He had a great discussion of the weekly ration of the Spanish Armada vs the English Fleet.

@10:20- He raises a very good point re: sailors in the Age of Sail (say, 1550-1850)- they ate far, far better than most people at the time- especially in the navy (the British Royal Navy in particular)... Their diet would come out to over 5000-6000+ calories per day! They would have, in addition to the ubiquitous daily pound of hardtack, a whole pound of meat (salt pork or beef) five days each week- as well as butter, peas, cheese, veggies if available, and even puddings, etc, as well as a gallon of small (like 2% alcohol or less) beer, and on long voyages, the far more popular grog (1/2 pint of rum @ 120+ proof mixed 4-1 with water and lemon or lime juice to prevent scurvy- it's actually pretty tasty, too) every single day, along with an optional tobacco ration, as well as whatever they could buy or catch. The sailor's rations were probably far more nutritious (if not very tasty) than what 95% of what most people ate in that era. (People who could expect meat MAYBE once per week, if they were successful tradesmen, farmers, etc.)

This is why they say an Army marches on its stomach. At sea, resupply is almost impossible at this time. Aside from the fire hazard, think of the fuel requirements to bake for the ship? Just stowing it would be a problem.

There is a type of traditional bread made here in Sweden that shares a few properties of ships biscuit. It's called "Knäckebröd" (Crisp bread) and is still enjoyed today at swedish breakfast and dinner tables. It's a pretty thin slice of bread that's also very dry so it can be stored for months without going bad so long as it's kept away from moisture. In modern grocery stores they are normally shipped being cut into rectangular pieces, but hundreds of years ago they were shaped into big circular discs with a hole in the center. This shape had a purpose where you could thread several discs of bread onto a wooden dowel, and the dowel would be mounted high up in a kitchen to prevent rats or mice near the fireplace so the vermin couldn't reach it and the heat from the hearth would ensure that the bread was kept dry and good to eat for a very long time.

@townsends John I've always been a huge fan, like from day one. But this video shows how far you've come as an absolute professional. Your research and delivery is top tier. I would say one of the best historian video makers of all time. God bless and keep up the good work.

Incredibly interesting. Also love the Hard Tack Tap!! Tasting History indeed

Thanks to all the Navy Chefs. The cooks in 18th century must have had an almost impossible task. Our cooks on the USS Canberra CAG-2 worked very hard and did the best they could. The ship, a heavy cruiser, could have up to 1200 sailors on board. (some WW2 ships of near the same size were called Pocket Battleships) With modern shipboard rations the task is not as hard as 18th century, yet I respect their ability to keep us fed. The task was much harder when we were on the line during General Quarters when the food had to be passed to us at our battle stations. There were times they could only give us US Navy "C" rations which were not as bad as some say.

A bread leavening video! Holy moly, this takes me back to 10 years ago when I first started watching this channel, when it seemed like that was the main topic, haha! Don't get me wrong, I love every direction this channel has gone in since then. One of very few channels I keep coming back to for so many years ❤

I would also encourage anyone to make their own bread. With a dutch oven, you can easily make the crusty bread that costs $4-$5 per loaf at the store. Pan bread is even easier. It's better quality than store bought and can save you money. It's also really not difficult to do.

I've had both burgoo and just ships biscuit soaked in grog and burgoo is nice and fills you up. Having to chew on rum soaked ships biscuit isn't pleasant. Thanks Jon

When I lived in France, there was a bakery that made something they called "pain au levain" - bread with leaven. I'm not sure if it was a sourdough or using something like this old dough technique, but it was so good and had so much more flavor than a traditional baguette. I used to go there every day to buy bread and have coffee, and sometimes got there while it was still warm. I miss that.

11:14 - very slick!

This old dough technique reminds me of traditional methods of making yoghurt. In much the same way they'd keep an amount of old yoghurt to use for the next batch, which meant that for every dairy farm the bacteria culture involved would be unique and also had an impact on how the yoghurt would taste.

we don’t even have a good understanding of beer. Our beer today is more like beer flavores water. Beer of period would of made you overfilled if you drink like we do now

2:5 "There is no brewer at sea" Got it, we just need to build a brewery into the ship!

When you mentioned that the old dough can be generations old, and how sour it could get, it suddenly reminded my of a memory my late father shared with me. They used old dough when he was a child in pre-WWII Poland. He remembered one of his neighbours had an old dough they used that was actually black, and really, really sour. He said it tasted terrible - but they kept using it!

I got some doubts about the notion that the reason why the old dough technique was more common over in europe had to do whether people drank beer or wine. Even in places with a very dedicated wine culture, be that italy, france, the german rhineland, austria or else, you still had a lot of beer drinking. I think what may have mattered more was the style of beer. When making ale, you use a top-fermenting yeast which does nicely as baking yeast, producing a sweet-ish and flavourful dough. However, many regions on the continent started using bottom-fermenting yeast which ferments at a lower temperature (mostly for Lager-style beer), making it less likely to be ruined by unwanted bacteria or fungi, but it ferments more slowly and generally just doesn't produce as nice of a taste in baking. Of course, there's also another simple reason: If you do the old dough technique, you only need to get barm from the brewer once and then can just keep on using your bread starter over and over again. The bread you'd get is closer to sour dough than white bread, but especially for people in rural areas who'd bake their own bread at home, it was simply a means to make yourself more self-sufficient. You wouldn't be buying a staple food such as bread from a baker if you could help it, money was spent on things that you couldn't really make yourself because you were either lacking the skillset or the required resources to do it at home.

As a professional baker it's amazing to see just how many of these techniques we still use. We make a kind of combo bread that uses both old dough (for flavor) and fresh yeast (to decrease rise time).

I think you are correct at the very end of this video, that the reason this never because 'standard fare' is because the number and size of the ovens that would be required to bake enough bread for all of the men aboard the ship.

I think ships biscuits must have been the inspiration for Terry Pratchett when he came up with 'dwarf bread' in his Discworld novels 😂

"A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."

If you have never baked your own bread you should try it. It's easy and you won't regret it.

This channel has such wholesome vibe to it. Keep up the good work!

Lol the 'Clack Clack'.

Jon, another absolutely amazing video. Thank you, and keep up the great work.

Great info. Thx for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.

Hardtack *CLACK CLACK*

I remember reading a old British story about a poor Family who found a barrel of ships biscuits on the beach. It kept them from starving that winter.

During the Klondike gold rush, and before and beyond, 'Sourdough boys' would keep a small piece of the risen dough as a starter for the next batch of bread, often kept near the stove to help it propagate... There were stories (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) about sourdough starters which came from an original batch many, many batches ago, each time a small amount would be held back and used to starter for the next batch, repeated again and again, until, sometimes, it was supposedly decades old! (Like a pigtail on a 18th century man-a-war's sailor, the age of one's sourdough was a mark of authenticity and credibility for the explorers in Alaska and the Yukon). I'm not sure how much of that is true, but it is definitely a good story!

fascinating video as always, I appreciate the background research, stories and pictures you put together. So interesting to think about the history of bread.

Hindsight 20-20 and all, but I'm surprised pickled cabbage wasn't put in drums and served.

The earliest recipe I have for hardtack says to "beat the dough for half an hour with wooden clubs." It is misery in the shape of a hockey puck.

Funny that hard tack being clacked together is a core memory 🤣

Thank you so much for this excellent video! Your knowledge of these things continues to Amaze!

Finally have a chance to watch this episode (Townsends is one of my top 3 channels for watching while I wash dishes) and had to stop long enough to thank you for the Max Miller nod. I laughed so loud my dogs were worried :D

0:03 A ships biscuit in the wild

Click click!! Thanks for the taste of history. Your channel has enriched my life.

It’s said that whaling ships would sometimes stay at sea, never touching land, for years at a time. Their sailors must have been very happy to get something to eat other than ship’s biscuits (hard tack) and the occasional bit of dried meat or dried fish.

Lol... When he said that some sailor's would complain about soft bread, and would rather have hardtack, it reminded me of a book wherein a sailor, being held captive in France, complained about the fresh French bread- he was worried that if he ate bread with holes in it, he would naturally 'blow out (his) gaff' (fart)... 'it stands to reason, sir!'

My father left school at 14 to be a boy on trawlers in the North Sea. His principal task was cooking and everything, bar fried fish after a catch, was boiled in a single big cauldron. The reason was that food being boiled could be left in the hot water for as long as you wanted if a shoal of fish was found and all hands went to work the nets etc. and worked at that until the fish ran out or the hold was full. There is not much you cannot cook inside a suet pudding in a pudding cloth. Sweet or savoury.

Excellent video! A sailor's life aboard the wooden ships was difficult in the extreme.

Rickety? Old? I'll have you know she is an aged man of war sir, no one would call her old. She has a bluff bow, lovely lines. She's a fine seabird: weatherly, stiff and fast... very fast, if she's well handled. No, she's not old; she's in her prime.

I was a cook/officer on a 192 foot boat in the Alaska Bering Sea and I can tell it wasn't easy to cook out especially when you forget to latch your pots down 😂😂😂 great video thank you

Super interesting and informative episode, as always team.

That was awesome. I always enjoy your videos! Appreciate you, sir 👊 ❤🇺🇸

This is the video I’ve been waiting for! More info on how to maintain constant food sources for the masses please!

I’m a ship’s cook, and let me tell you: thank the gods for modern refrigeration

11:17 @tastinghistory 🤣🤣

Hard tack is nothing compared to my grandma's cookies.

It is amazing how far we have came, looking at modern naval ship galleys today and what they can make is amazing.

Broke the sound barrier when he clapped those biscuits together.

A hunk of bread , a spread of butter and served with a big bowl of mushroom soup. Perfection to me.

Flour can only be stored for a few weeks after which it rots. He meant casks of grain to be ground into flour.

Flour would take up less room than hardtack, but then you would have to carry more fuel for baking.

How I would've approached it is just skip even the Sourdough technique entirely and make "Soft Tack", essentially just unleavened bread, in either loaves ir the same disc shape, but not baked to the point that it becomes a rock.

Thanks for the video 👍

I asked for this video like three years ago, not just a hard tack video but a shift biscuit video

That tap tap reminds me of max tasting history

I love this topic every single time.

The old dough technique is really a starter for the next batch.

Happy Sunday!

Thank you for preserving and highlighting the practices of the past. It is this reverence for the past that will save our future.

My understanding is that modern navies (particularly the submarines, where space is at a REAL premium) do leave port with the ingredients for bread and bake while on patrol. But obviously, crew sizes on most ships (that aren't supercarriers) have shrunk considerably.

Sour dough is popular to this day in center/eastern Europe. In Poland we have bakery that makes bread from same dough for over 50 years now.

Oddly, this remains a popular method to this day. You can't get fresh yeast in jail either.

I would be very interested to know more about whether sailors on ships at the time took any time to fish during their voyages to supplement their diets. Were there times when the ship was moving slow enough to allow for a handline or other manual fishing techniques? Did Navy or Privateer ships even have time to consider something like that?

I made hardtack a few years back to try it out. I baked it twice to make sure it was hard and dry like many real biscuites were. It was way to hard to bite into, but smashing it it a bag yielded little chunks that could be chewed and that looked a little like granola. The texture and flavor was sort of like what I'd expect wood to taste like (minus a wood grain of course) and it was very dry. At first it was sort of unpleasent to eat, but after a bit it sort of grew on me as food to snack on a bit. However it wrecked my digestive system, I'd guess that sailors stomachs probably got used to it which could be why some thought that soft bread was worse for them if their gut wasn't ready for the change (just a guess though not sure how accurate that would be).

I have a tough time wrapping my head around how these guys were doing all this intense manual labor with almost no protein in their diets

i'd love to see a video discussing the struggles and methods of storing water aboard a sea vessel, i understand they largely drank beer as an easy way to get calories to the men and water would go bad at sea but they needed water for their oatmeal+puddings and other hot meals that required water as a cooking ingredient/method

Great episode

This reminds me a bit of baking sourdough and keeping a starter around that you keep feeding.

I'm picturing a cover of the Blue Danube waltz with Jon and Max providing *clack clack* at the end of each phrase.