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HASH, CRACKER (a sailor's dish)
Pound some captain's biscuits very fine, and pass through a sieve; chop some onion and salt meat, and add them; season with pepper and savoury herbs; pour scalding water on the mixture. When it is thoroughly soaked, add a little chopped fat, put into baking-pans, and bake until the meat is cooked.
A ship's-galley dish built from the two things always aboard: hard biscuit and barrelled salt meat. It works ashore, but only if the salt meat is dealt with properly first.
- Freshen the salt meat firstSalt beef or pork straight from the brine is far too salty for a dish where nothing dilutes it. Soak it in several changes of cold water for 12 to 24 hours, or simmer it until tender and cool it before chopping. Baking will not draw salt out.
- Captain's biscuitsA hard, unsweetened ship's biscuit; the term usually meant a finer, thinner grade of ship's biscuit, close kin to hardtack, and not the same thing as the modern packaged biscuit sold under that name. Plain water crackers, matzo or unsalted crackers pounded and sieved give the same dry, thirsty crumb.
- ProportionsNone are given. Roughly equal volumes of sieved crumb and chopped meat, with about a cup of scalding water per two cups of crumb, produces a mixture that holds together without being sloppy. Let it stand 15 to 20 minutes so the crumb swells fully before it goes in the pan.
- "A little chopped fat"Salt pork fat, beef suet or dripping, cut small so it renders through the hash rather than pooling. Two or three tablespoons per pound of mixture is enough; without it the dish bakes dry and crumbly.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven heat; a moderate oven, around 350F, for 45 minutes to an hour, until the top has browned and crisped, works. The instruction to bake "until the meat is cooked" suggests the meat went in raw from the cask; with pre-cooked or well-soaked meat you are baking for texture, not for doneness.
- SeasoningPepper generously and use thyme, savory, marjoram or sage. Add no salt until the mixture is tasted after soaking the meat.
- YieldA pound of meat and a pound of biscuit crumb fills a medium baking dish and serves four to six. Cold leftovers slice and fry well in a little dripping.
Cracker hash is a genuine sailors' dish that found its way into a Victorian domestic cookery book. On a long voyage the ship's provisions were essentially biscuit, salt beef or pork in cask, and whatever onions survived; cracker hash, along with relatives variously called dandyfunk, crackerhash and scouse, was the cook's way of turning rock-hard biscuit into something that could be eaten with a spoon. Scalding water was the only tool available for softening hardtack, which was baked to survive months at sea and was notoriously proof against teeth. Its appearance in a general dictionary of cookery says something about the late nineteenth-century interest in cheap, filling made-over dishes: the same technique of extending scraps of salt meat with a starchy soaked crumb turns up ashore in economical cookery manuals of the period.