Ship's victuals (dry bread that keeps for months at sea)
Long-Voyage Galette for the Travel Trunk
TravelReconstruction🧂facile1 h 45 (including drying)
A flat, dense, very dry galette, baked twice to drive out all moisture. Tasteless but indestructible: soaked in soup or coffee, it softens and nourishes where nothing else keeps.
Ship's victuals (dry bread that keeps for months at sea)
A flat, dense, very dry galette, baked twice to drive out all moisture. Tasteless but indestructible: soaked in soup or coffee, it softens and nourishes where nothing else keeps.
You who have never crossed the Atlantic shut up for months on a ship, you do not know the worth of a simple sea galette. No fresh bread on board, I tell you! Only these discs hard as stone that I stored in my trunk and had to soak long in soup so as not to break my teeth. It was ugly, it was dry, but it sustained the body when the pitching sea stole even the taste for life. I chewed many a galette dreaming of the land I no longer saw.
Ingredients
- •Wheat flour — two measures (base)
- •Water — as needed (binder)
- •Salt — a pinch (preservation and taste)
How it was made : Hardtack (biscuit de mer) was the staple of shipboard food: flour, water, salt, no leavening, baked then long-dried to last months. Hard to break, it was systematically soaked. It was the obligatory companion of every long-distance passenger in the 19th century.
Sources : Flora Tristan, Pérégrinations d'une paria (1838)