You know, hardtack might have been hard, but at least it wasn’t rife with vermin. Oh no, wait, actually it usually was. Frequently with little granary weevils, but also the larger larvae of Indian meal moths. Both burrowed effortlessly through entire crates of hardtack, riddling crackers with holes, earning them the nickname “worm castles.” While […]
READ ONOf all the proto-crackers, hardtack is my favorite. Not because I eat it much. It’s not easy to find these days, and the fact is that even though I live in Kentucky now, I hope to keep my natural teeth as long as I can. But what exactly is hardtack? It’s a form of military […]
READ ONMexico Bob maintains that “pilot bread” is actually named for boat pilots, not plane pilots, as my sources tell me. I shall investigate his claim… UPDATE: I stand corrected. Military crackers were called “pilot bread” well before there were airplanes.
READ ONWhile technically it is possible to trace crackers well back into human history, the modern cracker was born, so it’s said, in 1801, when a fellow by the name of Josiah Bent began manufacturing what he called “water crackers” for seafarers at a plant he built in Milton, Massachusetts. Though militaries had employed severely dried […]
READ ONIf any blogger geek was going to stand in line for a hour waiting for an iPad, you knew it would be me, right? What can I say, it was a fun way to spend Saturday morning. I’ll try blogging a little with it today if I can, though I can’t promise much since I’ll […]
READ ONYou can boil it down to two things: 1) they deliver lots of energy in a small package, and 2) they keep indefinitely. The reason for that is simple: they’re inhospitable environments for microbes. As anyone who’s ever attended a food safety class knows, microorganisms require several things in order to grow and multiply. Among […]
READ ONI wrote last week how irritating it is when food columnists and/or recipe writers try to trace everything we eat back to antiquity. As intellectually lazy as that is, it’s easy to understand why so many writers do it. There’s something deeply attractive about preparing and consuming a food that dozens of generations of humans […]
READ ONReader Kasia writes: Janissaries might have needed appeasement because they were originally forced draftees, mostly very young Christian boys from occupied countries, who were trained to become killing machines against their own country men, were forced to convert to Islam and not allowed to have any life outside the barracks until retirement, if they lived […]
READ ONReader Scott submitted that question last week and I forgot to get to it. As far as I know there are two different ways of making filo dough. One is to simply roll it, which is the way commercial manufacturers do it, starting with a fairly stiff dough and employing a machine that’s analogous to […]
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