The meals were a little better at camp, where men had access to “desiccated vegetables” and could forage. But after a while, more and more men began dying of scurvy and starvation. When it came to providing adequate food early in the war, both sides struggled with making their supply chains better. “They’re desperately trying to find anything to feed them,” Wynn said.įor active soldiers, the dish of the day likely involved coffee and tasteless crackers known as hardtack. “And there’s no supply for them,” said Jake Wynn, a historian at the National Civil War Museum of Medicine. “They were able to produce some cool pancakes, some cool desserts and puddings, all kinds of cool stuff,” Beard said.ĭuring the war, there were more than 100,000 men in a 25-mile radius surrounding D.C. It was a useful alternative to flour, which was in short supply due to blockades. Sago is extracted from palm pith and would have been accessible to Confederates in Florida. It was quite sophisticated,” Beard said.įor example, the Confederates made use of a starch called sago, “which I thought would be a little exotic for the time,” Beard said. It appears in Beard’s first course as a sago blini - a type of pancake - with smoked apple, sago “caviar” and brown butter. “Reading these recipes, I was surprised with some of the products they were coming up with - the vegetables and the abilities to produce for large quantities of people. He’s whipping up a four-course meal plus dessert, and is using Civil War-era nutrition manuals for hospitals as his guide.
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