cooking skillygalee

Frank Fusco

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I am currently reading a fiction novel that has flashbacks to the Civil War and experiences of a Union soldier.
At one point he is cooking his dinner. He is cooking what is called “skillygalee”. It is considered a major treat for ordinary soldiers. Basically it is nothing more than hardtack crumbled into a frying pan with greasy salt pork cooked together over a fire.
Not much of a recipe but interesting.
 
If memory serves.. they were usually moldy and the abuse in the pack turned the into crumbs. But with some bacon in a cast iron skillet would be yummy!
 
Probably helped flavor the weevils as well.

Man reading civil war stories makes you sure appreciate how good we have it nowadays no matter how rough we might think it is. Especially the Confederacy near the end about anything that resembled food was pretty top shelf compared to the not much of anything they mostly had.

Jim I reckon yummy is probably relative to the situation considering the salt pork probably rancid and the hardtack worse.
 
Probably helped flavor the weevils as well.

Man reading civil war stories makes you sure appreciate how good we have it nowadays no matter how rough we might think it is. Especially the Confederacy near the end about anything that resembled food was pretty top shelf compared to the not much of anything they mostly had.

Jim I reckon yummy is probably relative to the situation considering the salt pork probably rancid and the hardtack worse.

You ain't kiddin' Ryan! As a firefighter in CDF before the Navy, we were "lost" by our ranger unit...ate grass for 4 days, In Haiti, MRE's for 1 month...Chicken with Pesto sauce is still clogging me up and that was 4 years ago? Food is food and if you're hungry...it'll go down. Most bread carried on ships of that era and years earlier had bread where weevils were more common than mead!!
 
Probably helped flavor the weevils as well.

Yep. The link Ken provided mentioned that the crumbles were sometimes boiled in tea or just water and the maggots and weevils were skimmed off the top and discarded, or eaten. Not very tasty according the novel I am reading.
 
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