Tag Archives: Civil War

“Like the Genuine Moca”: Ersatz Coffee and Confederate Nationalism during the American Civil War

By Anne Sarah Rubin

Coffee, I must have coffee,
and if anyone wants to give me a treat,
ah!, just give me some coffee!

Although written by J.S. Bach and the librettist Picander in the 1730s, the Coffee Cantata’s homage to the world’s favorite stimulant certainly rang true in the Civil War South. Recipes for coffee substitutes pepper the pages of Confederate newspapers and reminiscences. Elite white women wrote down their personal formulas and debated the virtues of one concoction over another, while scientists weighed in on the chemical composition of different tinctures. Coffee, because it was entirely imported, was one of the first commodities affected by the Union blockade of Southern ports.[i] Doing without coffee, or cheerfully drinking an ersatz variety, became a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, like wearing homespun or a palmetto hat.

“Good Coffee Sweet Potatoes” reads the heading handwritten on the back of a Confederate $100 bond. We can imagine the writer, probably Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, at her home in Charleston during the war, following the steps she carefully enumerated. More likely it was one of the three Black women the DeSaussures enslaved who did the work: first peeling the sweet potatoes, and slicing them into strips, 3/8 or ½ inch thick, then cutting the strips “into squares so as to average the same size.” The squares then had to “dry in the sun three days,” before they could be bagged up. The final step was to “parch a good brown, grind and make as you would coffee berry.”[ii]

A group of Black freedpeople stand, with hoes, over a field of sweet potatoes. Another group sits on the ground beside them, sorting the crop.
Fig. 1. Freedpeople planting sweet potatoes on the Hopkinson plantation, Edisto Island, SC, April, 1862. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010651644/

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In fact, Confederates turned to almost anything that could be burned, ground, and steeped to make a bitter brown liquid. Some, like rye or chicory are still used today; others, like okra seed, acorns, cotton seeds, or sorghum fell by the wayside after the war. Each had their champion. “To see the earnest face with which each lady discussed her own particular mixture, and her great delight when some courteous old gentleman smacked his lips, and declared, he ‘had not tasted anything so like the genuine moca [sic.] for years, Madam,’ was most edifying,” recalled one Confederate matron.[iii]

An etching depicts a white woman in voluminous dress kneeling and praying in an outfitted cave
Fig. 2. This depiction of a white Southern woman living in a cave during the siege of Vicksburg prominently displays her coffeepot, a touch of home in uncomfortable surroundings. Adalbert John Volck, “Cave Life in Vicksburg,” in Confederate War Etchings, Creative Commons image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/421364

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Of course, people could simply have done without. No one ever died for lack of coffee, and the vegetable and grain varieties all lacked caffeine, so they didn’t provide much physical stimulation. In fact, one advocate for acorn coffee noted that he no longer suffered from headaches, not realizing that he was no longer suffering from daily caffeine withdrawal.[iv] Psychologically, though, there was something to the ritual of drinking something hot, brown, and slightly bitter. It represented a moment of normalcy, a chance to offer some hospitality, to warm up, to momentarily forget one’s troubles.

When the war ended, coffee returned to the South. Freedmen’s Bureau and US Army rations (distributed to both Black and white Southerners in the months after the war) sometimes contained rye coffee.[v] Southern cookbooks published after the war trafficked heavily in nostalgia for antebellum abundance and rarely mentioned harder times. Maria Massey Barringer did include a recipe for Blockade Coffee (made of rye) in her 1867 Dixie Cookery, billed as “a practical cook-book for southern housekeepers,” but few other regionalists did the same.[vi] In fact, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book tartly noted that “those who are not particular as to quality, but only want something that looks like coffee” could try “roasted acorns, chick peas, beans, rye, cocoa shells, burned wheat bread, dried and roasted turnip, carrot and dandelion root,” but pointedly did not recommend any of them.[vii] Mentions of ersatz coffee became staples of nostalgic reminiscences, about hardships overcome without interrogating real struggles and hunger. They were given with almost a wink and a laugh—suffering for coffee was funny, actual starvation was not.

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[i] Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront, Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 72-73. Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 14.

[ii] The receipt book was donated to the Museum of the Confederacy by Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, the wife of South Carolina Brigadier General Wilmot Gibbs DeSaussure. It appears to have been compiled sometime after the Civil War. Frances M. Burroughs, “The Confederate Receipt Book: A Study of Food Substitution in the American Civil War,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 1 (n.d.): 31–50. The recipe is on p.6 of the book, pp 44-45 in the article. The number of enslaved people is from the 1860 slave census. Porcher describes sweet potato coffee as “used on several plantations in lower Carolina.” Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, 400.

[iii] “What the Confederates Ate,” by Clara Minor Lynn VHS, 2.

[iv] [No Title], Arkansas True Democrat, January 9, 1862.

[v] Orders for Rations Issued, 1865, Governor Sharkey, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

[vi] Barringer, Dixie Cookery; or, How I Managed My Table for Twelve Years. A Practical Cook-Book for Southern Housekeepers (Boston, 1867), 108.

[vii] M. E. Porter, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book and Companion for Frugal and Economical Housekeepers (John E. Potter & Company, 1871), 379.

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Anne Sarah Rubin is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was the 2016-2017 Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She was also the Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center from 2017-2020. Her most recent book is the co-edited memoir, The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Dr. Rubin’s first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy (UNC, 2005), received the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the most original book on the Civil War era. Her study of the place of Sherman’s March in American culture and history, entitled Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March in American Memory was published in September 2014 by UNC Press. The project also has a multimedia component, which can be found at http://www.shermansmarch.org. She is currently working on a project called A Mouthful of Nothing: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1860-1868.

Teaching Schoolchildren with Historic Recipes

By Amanda Moniz 

Last February, I visited the Washington Middle School for Girls, a Catholic school serving girls from underprivileged backgrounds in Washington, D.C., to make cookies from the first African American cookbook, published by Malinda Russell in 1866.  In this post, I’d like to reflect on what I learned about the challenges and possibilities of teaching history in schools through hands-on cooking programs.

First a little background about Malinda Russell.  Born in Tennessee around 1820, Russell lived most or all of her life as a freewoman.  At age 19, she intended to migrate to Liberia, but her plans were stymied.  She married and had a son, worked as a washerwoman, and, in time, learned to cook.  After her husband’s death, she kept a boarding house and then opened a pastry shop.  During the Civil War, she was attacked and robbed for supporting the Union and fled to Michigan.  In 1866, she published her cookbook to raise funds to return to Tennessee, where she hoped to recover her property.

Malinda Russell cookbook photo

The Washington Middle School invited me to explore the life of this determined woman and make one of her recipes with the school’s 35 fourth and fifth graders.  I chose Russell’s recipe for jumbles – a cookie made with rosewater, mace, and caraway seeds.  The school has no kitchen, so we agreed we would prep, but not bake, the cookie dough in the lunchroom.  So that the students could try the jumbles, I would bake the cookies at home and bring them in.

So on a bitterly cold day at the end of February, I found myself nervously unloading grocery bags at the school.  I had taught children before, but never 35 of them.  I wasn’t sure if I knew how to present either the history or the baking lesson in a school setting.

After I set up, the teachers ushered the kids in.  I started by asking the girls what they knew about slavery. They were able to speak knowledgably about slaves’ experiences.  Then I asked what they knew about the lives of free African Americans in the antebellum era, and the answer was just about nothing.  I explained that Malinda Russell was a free African American who had lived when most African Americans were slaves.  I outlined her story and talked about obstacles she would have faced.

It was time to make the jumbles.  I had students read the recipe aloud and identify ingredients.  Next I assigned tasks.  Then, we got to work and this is where things went somewhat awry.  While waiting for ingredients to be passed around, the kids jostled each other and got a little noisy.  I found it challenging to maintain order with the girls.  We got four batches of the dough made, however, and the kids rolled or shaped it into balls or double rings.  Finally, we sampled the jumbles – and they were a hit.

So what did I learn?  Most important, I recognized that teaching history through recipes to elementary and middle school students (and, surely, high school students too) critically depends on K-12 educators who know how to teach schoolchildren and can anticipate their needs and interests in ways that a visitor like myself could not.  I had thought through every step of the recipe and how to make it work even though we weren’t in a kitchen, but the lack of a kitchen turned out not to be a real issue.  Instead, the fact that some ingredients had to be passed from table to table created downtime for the girls to become antsy.  I wanted the kids to measure out ingredients themselves – this is what cooking is – but I should have put, for instance, some flour into a bowl on each table and let the girls measure from it, rather than have to wait for the 5 pound bag to come to them.  An experienced K-12 teacher would not have made that and similar mistakes.

K-12 teachers are paramount in educating our children about history, but academic historians and institutions such as the American Historical Association (AHA) have key roles in broadening our children’s educational experiences too.  Russell does not find a place in elementary, middle, or high school curricula – although she can be fit into the study of the Civil War – and here is where academics can make a contribution.  Scholarly interest in food history is going gangbusters.  Historians would do well, I think, to collaborate with elementary and secondary school educators to identify usable primary sources that can be related to curricula.  The AHA’s K-12 workshop at the upcoming annual meeting in New York, in January 2015, will do just that: The workshop will explore teaching the history of World War I through food.

What worked?  The students loved the opportunity to cook at school.  They were eager to answer my questions and to read aloud from the cookbook.  But the chance to take ingredients and transform them captivated them.  And it created openings to teach history.  The girls at the Washington Middle School, and likewise, the students at the Oakwood Friends School in Poughkeepsie, New York, who I spoke with by Skype last February, wanted to know more about foods in the past.  The ingredients – something they could relate to but perhaps had not thought about as having pasts – sparked their historical curiosity and imagination.

Did I do everything right?  No.  Can we use historic recipes to teach history?  Absolutely.

Ironclad Apple Duff: Exploring Recipes from the American Civil War

By Jessica Eichlin and Amanda E. Herbert

USS Monitor crewmembers cooking on deck, in the James River, Virginia, 9 July 1862. Photographed by James F. Gibson, courtesy of Wikipedia.
USS Monitor crewmembers cooking on deck, in the James River, Virginia, 9 July 1862. Photographed by James F. Gibson, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Food rations during wartime do not have the reputation for being delicious, fresh, or even edible, and this was especially true during the American Civil War.  Fought from 1861-1865, the war disrupted supply lines across the United States, making food difficult to acquire for soldiers and citizens alike.  When Union (northern) and Confederate (southern) troops were receiving rations, these usually included hardtack, salt pork, flour, and cornmeal; when soldiers were lucky, this rather grim diet was supplemented by small amounts of condiments such as molasses, salt and pepper, and sugar; beverages such as milk, coffee, or tea; and vegetables such as rice or hominy, dried beans or peas, and “fresh” (although frequently desiccated) vegetables.  And whenever they were able, soldiers and sailors foraged for food, or traded with locals – both free and enslaved – in order to survive.

Finding and issuing nutritious, reliable rations was made even more difficult by the new military equipment that was developed during the Civil War.  Although European countries had begun developing ironclad ships in the late 1850s, American shipbuilders were not prompted to create this innovative type of ship until the American Civil War.  The South was the first to construct their ironclad (the CSS Virginia), followed quickly by the North.  The Union’s USS Monitor, designed by John Ericsson, was ironclad as well as semi-submersible: it was the first ship with its living quarters and engines entirely below the waterline.  The ship was nicknamed “Ericsson’s Folly” and “cheesebox on a raft” as no one thought it could float, let alone sail into battle.  Because the sailors lived almost entirely underwater, provisioning them and keeping them healthy proved to be a difficult undertaking.

Primary source documents written by the sailors on board these ships help to reveal important details about the history of Civil War food.  George Geer, a First-Class Fireman from Troy, New York who was stationed aboard the Monitor, corresponded with his wife Martha throughout the war, describing skirmishes, interactions with other sailors and officers, and especially the food on board ship.  Prior to enlisting, Geer had been unemployed and in debt: as he and his wife had two children, it is perhaps unsurprising that many of his letters focused on food.  But if Geer thought that joining the Union navy would keep him well-fed, his hopes were soon dashed.  His letters are full of funny, sarcastic comments about sailor’s rations.  In regards to the rock-like hardtack crackers, which were a staple of their diet, Geer said that the sailors could “eat as many crackers as [they] may wish which for me is usuly one.”  When the men were given pork, Geer was dismayed that “it is of the Lardy kind and no body pretends to eat it…the balance [is] given to the Fishes.”  Discussing bean soup, which the sailors consumed three times every week, Geer noted wryly that he was “tempted to strip off my shirt and make a dive and see if there realy is Beens in the Bottom.”

George S. Geer, First-Class Fireman, USS Monitor. Image courtesy of the Mariner's Museum, Newport News, Virginia.
George S. Geer, First-Class Fireman, USS Monitor. Image courtesy of the Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia.

Geer’s colorful discussion of the food on board the USS Monitor did not stop with mere description.  In his letters, he sometimes provided his wife with recipes for the foods that made up the sailors’ rations.  In order to make navy-style tea, he told his wife to take “abut three times as much of black Tea or Grass as you would take to make a cup of Tea for you and me and about a tea cup full of that muscovada shugar that has such a bad taste.”  The most detailed recipe inscribed by Geer was for a dessert called Apple Duff.  Duff was a steamed or boiled pudding which was consumed frequently in the nineteenth century.  It was simple to make and contained cheap ingredients, usually just flour, water, and a handful of fruit.  Geer told his wife that he would “give you the recpt and you can try it.”  He told her to “take ½ lb Flour to each person and wet it until it is a thick paste then put in one ounce [o]f Dride Apples to each person.”  The apples, he noted, included “cores and dirt” and his wife should add them to the dough “without cutting them up or Washing them.”  This mixture was to be put “in a Bag over night and boil then in the morning until it is about half done through then cut it up with a knife so as to make it as heavy as poseable.”  The resulting lump of half-cooked dough was hard to digest, but it was filling – for although most puddings “will be apt to work out of your stomac in the course of time,” Geer joked, “this Duff is wanted to stay.”

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Interested in the sources used in this post?  You can find them here:

  1. “What Did Civil War Soldiers Eat?” Civil War Preservation Trust, accessed 13 April 2014. http://www.civilwar.org/education/pdfs/civil-war-curriculum-food.pdf
  2. “Duff,” in The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 259.
  3. “Letter No 2,” George S. Geer Family Papers, 1862-1995, MS010, The Mariners’ Museum Library, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia.
  4. A.A. Hoehling, Thunder at Hampton Roads (New York: Prentice Hall, 1976).

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Jessica Eichlin is a senior History Major at Christopher Newport University.  She found these documents while working as an intern at the Mariner’s Museum and Mariner’s Museum Library, both in Newport News, Virginia.  Jessica is on Twitter @jesseich