One of the bitterest complaints made by soldiers was against their desiccated vegetables. I understand that they might have been pretty awful back then but would it be too farby to bring a couple handfuls of dehydrated vegis to an event. Perhaps rehydrating some in a cup and then throwing them into a skillet at dinner? I used the search function but couldn’t find anyone discussing this. I’d be interested in reading people’s thoughts, ideas, or experiences with these. Were they just dehydrated using heat and air current or were they dried out with some chemical, possibly salt, process?

Charles might be able to correct me on this.. but wasn't there an article in an issue of Civil War Historian on dessicated vegetables..

I may have to look back through my stack to see if I can find it.

They were issued at times.  Mel, you will see some of these vegetables with the Sixth.  Alpheus is notorius for having them.

A few years back we were issued desiccated vegetables at an event and I don't blame the orginal boys for having issues with the vegetables. It may have been Charles Heath who figured out a way to have something as close as the original I can't remember.

Drying veggies is easy. Geting them pressed into the "blocks" they were issued in is the challange. Any yes, there was an article in CWH, in which, Mr Heath discussed how they were made for the event at which, same were issued.

Dave, you say they came in blocks? Can anyone describe these things? I'd just imagined chunks of dried vegis but that must be incorrect. What are we talking about here?

Company sized blocks. Imagine a brick, but large enough to feed a company.
Here's some good info from the AC-FAQ's:

http://www.authentic-campaigner.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18135&highlight=dessicated

Desiccated vegetables were used as a substitute for fresh vegetables, put away in the summer and fall by civilians to allow them a varied winter diet; but the War forced desiccated vegetables into the Army, too. Desiccated vegetables could be dried beans, onions, turnips, carrots, and beets. They received the soldiers’ appellation "baled hay" because of the unfortunate tendency to find that the vegetables often included roots, stalks, and leaves.



Here you go boys, if any are brave enough to try it...



You will need a food dehydrator for this to work well.  It can be substituted by doing this stuff in the oven, but it is a great deal harder to work with in the end.

 

INGREDIENTS:

Cabbage, 2 medium to large heads

Carrots, 1/2 bag of sliced, frozen kind will do

Turnips, about 4 medium sized with the tops on them.

Parsnips, about half the volume amount of turnips

Onions, maybe 3-4 of the smaller yellow onions.



VEGETABLE PREPARATION:

Slice the cabbage into quarters, then remove the stem, and separate them so that the leaves are not connected to each other.  Cut the turnips into small slices with the turnip tops diced into smaller portions and set away from the meatier turnip bodies.  Slice the onions up.



VEGETABLE COOKING:

In a large pot, boil the turnip tops and cabbage together until tender.  In a separate pot, boil the rest of the ingredients until they are cooked completely.  DO NOT OVERCOOK THE VEGETABLES!  They must be done almost completely, but still retain the roughage texture.  Drain everything well, pressing as much water out as you can.  The best way to do this is take a smaller bowl and push the veggies in the

strainer to get as much water out as possible.  

The more water you remove now, the less the dehydration process will be.

 

DEHYDRATING THE VEGETABLES:

If using the dehydrator, use the 4"x4"x3" freezer containers for molding the veggies into shape.  It will help if you poke a lot of small holes into the containers (about the size of the tip of a ball point pen) to aid in the dehydration process.

If using the oven method, put the veggies into a 9"x13" pan and preset the oven to 200-250 degrees.



Layer the veggies into the containers in the following manner:  

Cabbage mix (1/2 inch),

carrot mix (one even layer).

Always start and end with the cabbage mix.  

The layering should end up with a 3 inch thick lasagna type dish.



If using the dehydrator, dehydrate the containers until the veggies in them become a hard brick of inedible food.  There can not be any moisture in the mix when done with it.  This can take a few days to do.  When done, take out and it should be ready to go.



If using the oven method, put the pan in the oven, then put a wooden spoon or something in the door of the oven so that the moisture will escape.  This may also take hours to work.  



PREPARE THE BRICKS

When they are all done, take a saw (yes I said a saw, like a butchers bone saw or a clean carpenter's miter box saw) and cut the big block into smaller blocks of about 2-4 inch squares.  you may need to first trim off the edges if they have turned dark brown before trimming the bricks into the appropriate sizes.    

--Last edited by grumpydave on 2009-02-12 15:23:57 --

Dave,

You forgot the various stems from the vegetables and the pumpkin vines....

Yea, can you imagine. I remember Mark Pflum telling us those stories from the guys in Ringgolds Battery. Odd crap in their veggies, getting issued salt pork in the form pig hooves or the pigs head. Good stuff. I can't remember if it was Wilbur Fisk or someone else who described getting some pretty odd parts of a steer as their beef ration. I can imagine contractors put into their products and sold to the army, anything that might even slimly qualify as food.  

--Last edited by grumpydave on 2009-02-12 15:29:43 --

Grumpy,

Thanks. I was not looking forward to retyping that same crap for the 100th time. Okay, more like 500th, but who is counting?  

Period desiccated mixed veggies came from at least three vendors. Chollet's of Paris had an agent in NYC well before the war; ADC in Newburgh, NY, and one other that probably has a nifty name buried in NARA, but I haven't unearthed it as of yet. The kicker with the latter mystery veggie provider is their cakes were 12" in diameter. Yes, a round MV cake. Were the tins packaged in pairs as was the case with the former two? Dunno.

The gelatin coating remains a mystery. I know what period gelatin was, and have to wonder if it became rancid over time. Did the gelatin make the cakes stick togther, or did it facilitate removal from the tins?  Another blank, but somewhere between the covers of Kilburn's may be the answer.

A sample of period federal issue coffee recently went through The Horse Soldier in G'burg, and this confirmed a few things.  I'm still looking for the long lost desiccated veggie sample in the QM Museum at Fort Lee. Even if the sample is from the 1920s, it would still provide some answers.

Thank you David. I've got a dehydrator but I'm not sure about the freezer containers. Everything I've ever dehydrated called for it to be prepared as thin as possible first to facilitate evaporation--maybe the oven and a casserole dish will be better.

I'll give 'er a shot and let ya'll know how it turned out.

Charles,

If memory serves, one of your experiments involved "Old Whitey" sitting on top of a tray of dissapointing veggies?  

Naw, that was Holly the Mule \../. And she didn't sit on it....she...

Quote :

If memory serves, one of your experiments involved "Old Whitey" sitting on top of a tray of dissapointing veggies?

Bill,

No, but you can bet some ignoramus has sat around the campfires long enough spouting this BS that it is accepted as gospel.  One of Bob Tolar's pards in the 18th NCT used to achieve acceptable results with the pickup truck in the driveway mode of production 10-15 years ago. Like most mixed vegetables (a period term for desiccated veggies), the percentage of certain vegetable types wasn't always as close as it could be to the originals, but they were edible.

The most bizarre concoction to date was from a fellow who fell in with the 1997 155th NYVI LH at Pamplin Park. He had covered his slab with that brownish Elmer's Wood glue to simulate the final gelatin coating. It looked pretty darn good, IMHO.  That was a display only item, but we could have probably broken it up, and boiled it into a fine meal.

Some of the soldiers liked these vegetables, and some didn't. From what I can tell, there wasn't a heck of a lot of middle ground. It's funny to read the reports of officers stating how the men enjoyed the dried veggies, and then read the letters of the men themselves saying something different.

Of the three types of DVs, the Type III, or round (12" disks) seem to be the least common. Just why that is, I don't know. You'd think a round tile in a round tin would be about right for manufacturing and transportation, but the square tiles in square tins held out until the 1920s.

The conflicting descrïptions of curried cabbage still has me scratching my head, but I prepared one of the two varieties at Marmaduke's Raid, and they went over surprisingly well.

I did make a quart of USSC pickled potatoes once. That is a lifetime supply x 2. Perhaps the soldiers rolled barrels of pickled potatoes off piers for a good reason.  

Quote :

Charles Heath wrote :   Bill, No, but you can bet some ignoramus has sat around the campfires long enough spouting this BS that it is accepted as gospel.   Of the three types of DVs, the Type III, or round (12" disks) seem to be the least common. Just why that is, I don't know. You'd think a round tile in a round tin would be about right for manufacturing and transportation, but the square tiles in square tins held out until the 1920s.

Charles,

I might have been one of the ignoramuses who sat around telling the story. A lot more funny than the truth!  

Actually the square tins makes sense. Back when I was gainfully employed, we used to talk about shipping air. With a round tin, you'd be shipping a lot of air.

I just posted something about the difference between Condensed and Evaporated Milk. I may well be the only reenactor in the Hobby who didn't know there was a difference.  

Quote :

Actually the square tins makes sense. Back when I was gainfully employed, we used to talk about shipping air. With a round tin, you'd be shipping a lot of air.

Bill,

The postwar army spent time recording field practices to reduce "empty volume" aka "wasted cubes" in transportation, be it wagon, railroad, or waterborne transportation. Some of their concerns are still valid to this day.

Speaking of boxes(these aren't subsistence, but quartermaster),  just yesterday I came across this contract listing, #452 with S. R. Courtney, Philadelphia, December 24, 1863:

"All the packing boxes that may be required at the Schuylkill arsenal from January 1 to December 31, 1864, at prices following:  "W" boxes $1 73 each ; bootee boxes, $1 50 each ; mess-pan boxes, 98 cents each ; knapsack boxes, $1 75 cents each ; common tent boxes, $1 54 each ; wall tent boxes, $1 56 each; camp kettle boxes, $1 63 each ; hat boxes, $1 20 each ; drum boxes, $2 75 each ; spade boxes, 95 cents each ; canteen boxes, $1 40 each ; forage-cap boxes, at $1 each ; and camp color boxes, at 97 cents each..."

Just thought it was interesting to note the things that came in boxes.  So far I've also seen barrels for oil and kegs for nails.

Okay fellas, I followed Dave's recipe but what came out looks more like pot pourri. Do I need to smush things down to get the bricks? While my whole house now smells of cooked cabbage, and the vegetables certainly are both desecrated and desicated, I'm not sure that they're what they're supposed to be.

Any suggestions?

Is the water out?

Yessir. It's dry.

The cabbage has turned a dark brown, almost black color. It is very flaky, like large pieces of extremely dark filo dough. The root vegetables are visible as small, sad little dark chunks too and the whole conglomeration falls apart when you pick it up out of the pan. I had to use a spatula since the bottom stuck. I was expecting something along the lines of a brownie recipe before you cut it but this is more like coarsely shredded cardboard. I'd still eat the stuff if it was thrown into a stew or such but I don't think it looks 'period.'

That can't be right, can it?