Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman
Hard tack, aka ship's biscuit, is too hard to chew without serious risk to the teeth if made to last, but softens if soaked in hot liquid, or can be ground to return it to flour.
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Or pounded into pieces with a rifle butt. Then if you're lucky enough to have bacon fat you can mix the hardtack with water and fry the resulting product in the bacon fat into a sort of cake.
You may ask why you're screwing around with hard tack if you have bacon and the answer is that you don't have enough bacon. Sometimes the US WWI field ration was 16 ounces of hard tack and 12 ounces of bacon. The rest of the time the bacon was replaced with canned corn beef.
Without yummy stuff to fry it in you could still cook the hard tack bits into hot mush
A point in favor of magical hard tack is that it probably comes without weevils which mundane hard tack usually didn't before it started coming in cans. If you had weevils soaking in water or coffee served to drown the weevils.
What the _smart_ mage does is spend a few more pts and learn Essential Food. It's delicious, perfectly nutritious, compact and never spoils. Then you can stay home and make Essential Food for adventurers (or even ordinary travelers).