**Exploring Heartache: A Civil War Staple**

Greetings my beautiful lovelies, it's Emmy welcome back to another hard times war times episode where I explore food and recipes from times of hardship and war. Today, I'm going to be tackling heartache, the staple of many wars. So, I researched several recipes for making heart attack, including Towns and Sons, which I make a very authentic version of. I'll put a link to their video down below so my recipe is going to be adapted from one that I found in The Washington Post from a book entitled "A Taste of War: A Culinary History of the Blue and Gray" written by William C. Davis and in it, he describes how Union soldiers actually described heartache as jawbreakers or worm castles, delicious.

**What is Heartache?**

Heartache is basically very thick kind of hard crackers that were consumed just dry but oftentimes dipped because they were just so hard. It was relatively thick because it needed to have some structural integrity in terms of like portability you didn't want just a pocket full of crumbs so it needed to be hard and solid. It was made very, very simply usually of three ingredients: flour, salt, and water.

**Making Heartache**

So, let's go ahead and get started. First thing I'm going to do is grab a mixer now this is not what they would have had circa the Civil War but this is what I have and that's why this is an adaptation. I'm really more interested in the taste test portion although the making is quite interesting. I really want to know what this tastes like using a little bit of modern technology, I think is excusable. Five cups of flour this is just all-purpose flour so I've actually had a modern version of heartache it's called pilot bread and it's still eaten in Alaska I tasted in my Emmy Eats Alaska video and I'll put that link down below and up above if you want to make heart attack yourself I'll put the recipe amounts down below.

**Tasting Heartache**

Okay, let's try taking a bite now that the piece is a little bit smaller here we go. Eat... vacuums winston. I'm sure you're everywhere so yeah that actually doesn't taste bad it just tastes very very very plain there was only a half teaspoon of salt in that entire batch of heart attack so not very much seasoning whatsoever so not surprisingly this just tastes like flour the texture as you heard is pretty hard but that is a way of preserving this right removing water from something keeping something dry keeps things from going moldy and keeps things from growing bad that's why we have desiccant packets in beef jerky and snacks and treats because we want to remove as much water as possible because mold and bacteria grow in nice and moist environments.

**Eating Heartache with Coffee**

We want it to be nice and hard because we want it to travel well if we just had a bag of flour of course that would make a mess if we had crunchy thin crackers that would make a mess as well. Heart attack is all out of practicality so heart attack doesn't taste terrible it's just not very tasty there's not a lot of flavor there's not a lot of seasoning there's not much going on here except some calories from the flour. From what I read the most common way to eat heart attack particularly during the Civil War was with a cup of coffee and I'm just gonna dip this in there I'm gonna hold that in there for a while this is just black coffee no sugar no milk nothing just coffee.

**Conclusion**

Okay let's try it now there you go so if you break the heart attack and expose a cut edge to it and then stick it into your coffee and allow it to absorb the coffee it's much better it's much more absorbent. This outside has been kind of baked dry so it's really difficult to get the coffee inside but once you do and then you take a sip it's actually not bad I'm just missing a little bit of sweetness I'm sort of habituated to have cookies with my coffee so having something plain like this is kind of strange in terms of flavor. It's similar to a saltine cracker minus the salt the texture as you heard is very hard and crunchy not a light crispness by any means very hard and difficult to get through but this is a recipe that was invented out of necessity and practicality after all so you know things like taste were sort of a luxury right. Thank you guys so much for joining me I hope you guys enjoyed that one I hope you guys learned something if you want to make heart attack yourself I'll put the recipe amounts down below share this video with your friends follow me on social media and I shall see you in the next video take care bye coffee burp

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engreetings my beautiful lovelies it's emmy welcome back to another hard times war times episode where i explore food and recipes from times of hardship and war so today i'm going to be tackling heartache the staple of many wars so i researched several recipes for making heart attack including towns and sons which i make a very authentic version of hardtack i'll put a link to their video down below so my recipe is going to be adapted from one that i found in the washington post from a book entitled a taste of war a culinary history of the blue and gray written by william c davis and in it he describes how union soldiers actually described heartache as jawbreakers or worm castles delicious so heartache is basically very thick kind of hard crackers that were consumed just dry but oftentimes dipped because they were just so hard it was relatively thick because it needed to have some structural integrity in terms of like portability you didn't want just a pocket full of crumbs so it needed to be hard and solid and it was made very very simply usually of three ingredients flour salt and water so let's go ahead and get started so first thing i'm going to do is grab a mixer now this is not what they would have had circa the civil war but this is what i have and that's why this is an adaptation i'm really more interested in the taste test portion although the making is quite interesting i really want to know what this tastes like so using a little bit of modern technology i think is excusable 5 cups of flour this is just all-purpose flour so i've actually had a modern version of heartache it's called pilot bread and it's still eaten in alaska i tasted in my emmy eats alaska video and i'll put that link down below and up above if you want to see me taste it there half teaspoon of salt so this is going to be a very stiff dough we're only adding about a half to three quarters of a cup of water we're just going to kind of eyeball it we don't want it to be completely dry but we also don't want it to be sticky so once it forms a dough that does not stick to the walls of the mixer then we know that our dough is ready to roll out so here's the dough out of my mixer with an additional quarter cup of water now what we're going to do is on a floured surface here i always pick the best colors to wear when i'm dealing with flour i actually don't own very much white i am a mother of two children so i feel like i should know better now we're going to roll this out to 3 8 of an inch because i'm vertical challenge i'm going to use my little oh yeah i will crush you make a recipe for tack okay i've gotten my dough rolled out to about 3 8 of an inch and it's probably about maybe 14 inches by 14 inches in diameter traditionally these are about three inch squares so i'm going to use a little template here just a little piece of cardboard to cut these out you certainly don't need to do that but i want my hard dock to be square and i'm going to use my bench scraper to cut the squares out now i can take my pizza wheel and cut these all the way through now we're going to dock the dough which just means to prick little holes in it to prevent the dough from rising in the oven we want a cracker after all we're not making a pie anything sharp will do you can use the times of a fork a skewer chopstick whatever you like i'm going to do 16 holes lift this up now we're going to transfer this onto a baking tray and we're going to bake these in a 400 degree oven for 30 minutes other recipes say for a lower temperature about 250 degrees for hours but i like the idea of having a little bit of toasty golden brownness so 400 degrees it is and here is my finished heart attack i put them onto a rack to allow them to finish cooling i had to extend the cooking time on this for about another i would say 20 minutes to a half an hour mine are a little bit on the thick side and i wanted to make sure that these were completely dried out but they look great they have a nice little golden color the bottoms have a little bit of goldenness on them as well they're definitely lighter but they're still quite dense and they sound very hard can you hear that so let's give the hardtack a taste itadakimasu huh so that is very very hard let me try cracking it on a plate these are of course freshly baked so they're a little bit crisp on the outside but imagine eating one of these after they've been sitting around for months and months if not years full of worms sounds terrible okay let's try taking a bite now that the piece is a little bit smaller here we go eat the vacuums winston i'm sure you're everywhere so yeah that actually doesn't taste bad it just tastes very very very plain there was only a half a teaspoon of salt in that entire batch of hardtack so not very much seasoning whatsoever so not surprisingly this just tastes like flour the texture as you heard is pretty hard but that is a way of preserving this right removing water from something keeping something dry keeps things from going moldy and keeps things from growing bad that's why we have desiccant packets in beef jerky and snacks and treats because we want to remove as much water as possible because mold and bacteria grow in nice and moist environments so having said that that probably still doesn't prevent little critters from nibbling on your heart attack also we want it to be nice and hard because we want it to travel well if we just had a bag of flour of course that would make a mess if we had crunchy thin crackers that would make a mess as well heart attack is all out of practicality so heart attack doesn't taste terrible it's just not very tasty there's not a lot of flavor there's not a lot of seasoning there's not much going on here except some calories from the flour so from what i read the most common way to eat heart attack particularly during the civil war was with a cup of coffee and i'm just gonna dip this in there i'm gonna hold that in there for a while this is just black coffee no sugar no milk nothing just coffee okay let's try it now there you go so if you break the heart attack and expose a cut edge to it and then stick it into your coffee and allow it to absorb the coffee it's much better it's much more absorbent this outside has been kind of baked dry so it's really difficult to get the coffee inside but once you do and then you take a sip it's actually not bad i'm just missing a little bit of sweetness i'm sort of habituated to have cookies with my coffee so having something plain like this is kind of strange in terms of flavor it's similar to a saltine cracker minus the salt the texture as you heard is very hard and crunchy not a light crispness by any means very hard and difficult to get through but this is a recipe that was invented out of necessity and practicality after all so you know things like taste were sort of a luxury right thank you guys so much for joining me i hope you guys enjoyed that one i hope you guys learned something if you want to make heart attack yourself i'll put the recipe amounts down below share this video with your friends follow me on social media and i shall see you in the next video take care bye coffee burp contract is hard\n"