for a substitute. Dough-nuts or “nutcakes” were popular with civilians and soldiers at any meal. They were cut into squares and diamonds, not the “O” shape widely known today. One period recipe cautioned that temperature control of the oil/grease needed to be “exacting” because, “if too cool the dough will absorb all the grease, and if too hot the outside will burn while the inside remains uncooked.” How the temperature of the grease would be regulated exactly was not explained.
Cooking on a fire is an art largely lost to modern times. For a Civil War soldier in the South, breakfast might include beans soaked overnight and baked in a skillet with salt pork, but more commonly just salt pork, cornbread, and coffee. Sometimes eggs were foraged from a nearby farm and fried in the grease from the salt pork. In the South, corn pone and ‘jonnycakes’ often took the place of hard bread; they were fried in the renderings from the meat ration, if it existed, or otherwise baked on a rock placed on the embers. In other words, a soldier’s breakfast looked an awful lot like lunch and dinner.
For civilians, breakfast in the South evolved regionally, but also along urban/rural lines based on the kind of work that was performed during the day. The relationship was a simple one, “more work, more calories.” One account describes a farmer’s breakfast as follows “…besides the buttermilk biscuits, served as four halves (two biscuits) open faced and slathered with white sausage or red-eye gravy, breakfast might also include meat such as country ham or bacon, pork sausage or pork chops, or something called “livermush” that was served on the side but cut up on the plate and mixed with the gravy. And then fried apples or applesauce, eggs, grits, or potatoes, fruit pies made from blackberry, apple, or pumpkin (in the autumn) or fried doughnuts; all accompanied by buttermilk, hot coffee with cream and iced tea, with quartered lemons on the side.” Nineteenth century farmers needed a breakfast like that because the morning meal might need to last until late afternoon if they found themselves at work “on the lower forty.” Two meals a day were quite often the norm.
Craig L. Barry was born in Charlottesville, Va. He holds his BA and Masters degrees from the University of North Carolina The (Charlotte). Craig served Watchdog Civil War Quarterly as Associate Editor and Editor from 2003–2017. The Watchdog published books and columns on 19th-century material and donated all funds from publications to battlefield preservation. He is the author of several books including The Civil War Musket: A Handbook for Historical Accuracy The Unfinished (2006, 2011), Fight: Essays on Confederate Material Culture Vol. I and II (2012, 2013) and three books (soon to be four) in the Suppliers to the Confederacy series on English Arms & Accoutrements,
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