Ships biscuits

I've been following the fabulous adventures of Buff Staysail over at Captain JP's for a while now. However, there are other adventures over there, and they deal with a special type of biscuits: Ships Biscuits. Ships Biscuits are known for their extreme durability, and for their ability to break teeth. Not for their good taste. Any sailor should know about these historical biscuits, so I googled them - just for fun - and look what came up:

A very old Sea biscuit

This here is one very old Ships Biscuit. The danish word is beskøjt;  English names seem to include Ships Biscuit, Sea Biscuit, Hardtack, Liverpool pancakes and Liverpool Pantiles. Obviously they are close to impossible to eat, but back then - when warships had sails - they were probably served with and dipped in some kind of grog. That might have helped a bit.

This particular Sea Biscuit can be seen at the naval museeum at Kronborg, Denmark. It is from 1852, and the museeum received the biscuit some 125 years after it was baked. The story goes that a Danish ship's boy, E. Gade, who served on board the schoonerbrig "Lydia" of Whitby, Capt. J. Wood, brought it home in order to show his mother what he got to eat on board. It's a meal in itself as it is 10 x 2 cm big.

Now, there's loads of recipies out there, so here I'll repeat the Danish version:

Danish Sea Biscuits, crew version.

1kg of - is it called - grahams flour?

4dl of water

25g of yeast

very little salt like one teaspoon or less

Mix it all up till it is no longer sticky. Create round or square biscuit sized biscuits and stick a few holes in them. Bake twice at 180 C for 35 minutes. The officers version uses wheat flour instead.

If you're into these things ( and who isn't ;-) then check out Captain JP's Sea Biscuit experiments. I think I'll do a similar experiment. I'll probably make three versions. The mediterranean Sea Biscuit with thyme, the original one with no additives and a Christmas edition with cinnamon and cardamon.