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Slumgullion, or Slum
Jack London's recipe: Fry half a dozen slices of bacon, add fragments of hardtack, then 2 cups of water and stir briskly over the fire. In a few minutes mix in slices of canned corned beef and season highly with pepper and salt.
The chief difference between a slumgullion and a mulligan is that "slum" started out to be a seafaring man's dish and hence was made thick with hardtack or pilot crackers. So "slum" should rightly be made in a galley, along with that other sailor's stew called:
A camp stew of bacon, hardtack and canned beef, meant to be cooked in one pan over a fire. The proportions are loose by design, but a few of the ingredients need translating.
- HardtackShip's biscuit, a hard unleavened cracker meant to keep for months. Pilot crackers, as the text suggests, are the closest survivor; unsalted saltines or plain water biscuits will thicken the pan the same way, though they break down faster and need less liquid.
- Get the bacon fat rightThis is the hinge. The bacon should render enough fat to fry the cracker fragments before any water goes in, so the starch toasts rather than simply swells. Modern thin-cut bacon may render less fat than the fattier cured side pork likely intended here; add a spoonful of oil if the pan looks dry.
- Two cups of water is a starting pointHardtack absorbs far more liquid than a cracker does. Add the water in stages and stop when the mixture is a thick porridge that holds a spoon upright, which is what distinguishes slum from a thinner mulligan.
- Canned corned beefCanned corned beef is already fully cooked and heavily salted; the recipe gives no quantity, only 'slices'. It goes in at the end only to warm through, and stirring it hard breaks it into shreds.
- Salt with cautionBacon, hardtack and canned beef are all salted. Season with pepper first, taste, and add salt only at the finish.
- YieldAs written this feeds two hungry people, or three alongside bread. It scales straightforwardly, but keep the pan wide so the liquid reduces instead of stewing.
- ReheatingIt thickens to a solid mass once cold. Loosen with a little water over low heat and stir constantly, as the cracker starch scorches readily.
Slumgullion belongs to a family of American vagabond and camp stews, along with mulligan, whose names were half joke and half insult: the word turns up in the nineteenth century for anything thin, muddy or of doubtful composition, including the runoff from whale-processing decks and mining sluices. Mark Twain used it in Roughing It for a wretched beverage served at a stage station. Attaching it to Jack London makes sense for a camp-cooking book of this period: London had been an oyster pirate, a sealing hand and a Klondike prospector before he was a bestselling author, and his name on a recipe sold the idea that this was authentic road-and-trail food rather than domestic cookery. The distinction drawn here between a hardtack-thickened sailor's dish and the hobo mulligan of the rail yards is the sort of folk taxonomy that outdoor writers of the day enjoyed asserting; it is traditional rather than documented, and both names were in practice applied to almost any pot of scraps.