-recipe for hard tack bread recipe-how to make Civil War hardtack bread-

Most histories of the Civil War focus on battles and top brass.

Hardtack and Coffee is one of the few to give a vivid, detailed picture of what ordinary soldiers endured every day in camp, on the march, at the edge of a booming, smoking hell.

John D. Billings of Massachusetts enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and survived the conditions he recorded.
The authenticity of his book is heightened by the many drawings that a comrade, Charles W. Reed, made in the field.

This is the story of how the Civil War soldier was recruited, provisioned, and disciplined.
Described here are the types of men found in any outfit; their not very uniform uniforms;
crowded tents and makeshift shelters; difficulties in keeping clean, warm, and dry;
their pleasure in a cup of coffee; food rations, dominated by salt pork and the versatile
cracker or hardtack; their brave pastimes in the face of death;
punishments for various offenses; treatment in sick bay; firearms and signals and modes of transportation.

Comprehensive and anecdotal, Hardtack and Coffee is striking for the pulse of life that runs through it.
This book was originally written in 1887 and this book is a reprint of this old edition, complete with sketchings!

Civil War Recipes: Receipts from the Pages of Godey's Lady's Book

Our Ladies Book Receipts deal less with grand dishes for high company occasions and more with the common dinners of every day. (January 1863)

Godys Ladies Book, perhaps the most popular magazine for women in nineteenth century America, had a national circulation of 150,000 during the 1860s.
The recipes (receipts) it reproduced were often submitted by middle and upper-class women from both North and South, and they reveal the variety of regional cooking very much in evidence before the homogenization of American culture in the twentieth century.

Civil War Recipes reproduces, in their original wording, receipts that appeared in the pages of Godys Ladys Book during the decade of the Civil War.
Editors Lily May Spaulding and John Spaulding have added annotations to assist those cooks who might not know, for example, that buscuits often referred to what we now call cookies.
They also provide a brief overview of the technical state of cooking in America before and during the Civil War. Although leavening agents were not unknown, the recipe for Christening Cake requires whisking the whites of sixteen eggs into a full froth and beating the entire mixture for more than thirty minutes.

Sections on both Union and Confederate army rations, cooking on both home fronts, and a list of substitutions used during the war by southern cooks round out the background material provided by the Spauldings.