"Every soldier should make the art of cooking his study: more disease and deaths are occasioned in an army by bad cooking than by any other cause."
Brig. Genl. August Kautz, U.S.V.
The Confederate soldier who marched to war in 1861 expected to live rather well while in the service. As explained by artilleryman Carlton McCarthy in his Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, at the start of the war the equipment of the typical company was generous to a fault:
...each mess, generally composed of from five to ten men...had its outfit, consisting of a large camp chest containing skillet, frying pan, coffee boiler, bucket for lard, coffee box, salt box, sugar box, meal box, flour box, knives, forks, spoons, plates, cups, etc. etc. These chests were so large that eight or ten of them filled up an army wagon...In addition to the chest each mess owned an axe, water bucket, and bread tray. Then the tents of each company, and little sheet iron stoves, and stove pipe, and the trunks and valises of the company officers...so that each company had a small wagon train of their own.
The soldiers' expectations of camp life were further molded by such works as John P. Curry's Volunteers' Camp and Field Book (Richmond, 1862), which promised that each company would be staffed with,
...One cook and two assistants. . ., where bread or biscuit is supplied. [The cooks] make the coffee, bean soup, and cook the meat.
Alas for the men in the ranks, reality turned out to be much different. The mess chest disappeared after a few changes of station, and it was a rare company where full-time cooks prepared the rations (though as late as 1864, Confederate Quartermaster regulations continued to authorize up to four black cooks per company.) Instead, the soldiers themselves were expected to learn to cook the army rations described in our previous installments, using a limited variety of utensils supplied by the government or scavenged from civilian sources.
For cooking purposes, the troops formed small mess groups. Sizes varied; Texan John Stevens described messes in his unit as "...usually five men to the mess sometimes one or two more--often less than five..." [sic] Messes often adopted a name, such as the Texas brigade's "Wigfall Mess."
The resources of the mess began with the gear issued by the Quartermaster Department. Paragraph 78 of the Quartermaster Regulations provided for troops to be issued personal tin cups, tin plates, knives, forks and spoons. In addition, communal cooking gear was issued at the rate of two camp kettles and five messpans for every fifteen foot soldiers. In garrison camps, regulations allowed iron pots or cauldrons to be substituted for mess kettles.
Since camp kettles and messpans are rare in today's reenacting, a brief discussion is in order. The camp kettle was described by Curry as issued in "...nests of five, to hold not less than four gallons, and made of Russia iron...", a hammered iron that resisted rust. According to Union private John Billings, camp kettles were from thirteen to fifteen inches high and varied in diameter from seven inches to a foot. An 1862 Army of the Potomac cook-book states their capacity at four to seven gallons. A company had a mix of sizes so that a set of four or five could be nested together for efficient transportation. The messpan, also of iron, stood six inches high, with sloping sides that widened to twelve inches at the top. It held about six quarts.
Texas memoirs mention the use of camp kettles in the camps established in Virginia in the fall of 1861. And, whatever the hardcore campaign movement in reenacting may think, camp kettles were definitely used in the field. Hood's Division memoirs speak of cooking with the camp kettles in Maryland en route to Gettysburg, and also talk of capturing kettles that were abandoned by the Yankees on the Confederate side of the Rappahannock in front of Fredericksburg after the December 1862 battle.
All one could do with a camp kettle was boil food or bake an occasional mess of beans in a bean hole. Thus messes quickly learned to supplement the camp kettles with more flexible baking and frying equipment.
Probably the most-mentioned cooking utensil in Confederate accounts is a baking tool, the skillet or spider. Despite the fact that today we treat "skillet" as synonymous with "frying pan", this was not the case in the Civil War. McCarthy, for instance, says the average mess owned " ...one skillet and a couple frying pans...," while Virginian John Worsham speaks of "...one 'spider' of biscuits and one frying pan of meat." Texan John Stevens highlighted the difference between the frying pan and the skillet or spider when he wrote in his memoirs that his messmates mixed up a certain dish in the skillet, "...then put the lid on, then a fire both on top and under it...."
The skillet or spider of the Civil War was akin to today's Dutch oven. Made from heavy cast iron, it had legs, a handle, and a cast iron lid on which coals could be piled for even baking. A closeup photo of this utensil appears on p. 215 of Echoes of Glory: Arms and Equipment of the Confederacy. The same page has a view of a Texas Brigade mess that features both a spider and a messpan (the latter apparently in use as a washtub).
The spider could function as an oven, producing biscuits, cornbread or even white bread. A popular dish from a spider was a pot pie of pork or chicken. Stevens mentions "...cooking fowls, baked, stewed, fried, roasted, smothered...." Perhaps his most appealing spider recipe was for beef's head:
...You have no idea what fine eating there is on a beef's head. We would take the head and skin it nicely and chip the meat off in pieces--two, three, or four inches in diameter and usually a half an inch thick, put it in a skillet, and fill the skillet with water, then put the lid on, then a fire both on top and under it. First it was a stew, and then a bake. It was very fine to our soldier appetites.
Despite the fact that the spiders were not prescribed in regulations, one Texan mentions a government issue of the skillets in 1861. Another account by a Virginia soldier speaks of buying a spider for his mess from civilians.
Again, the spiders or skillets were also used in the field. Polley speaks of the troops baking bread in them while waiting to advance on Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
In contrast to the cast iron skillet was the lighter wrought-iron frying pan. (An example is also pictured in Arms and Equipment of the Confederacy.) Each mess generally owned one, and the infantrymen preferred to carry it on their person, often lashing the handle of the frying pan to the barrel of a musket. Even officers could be seen toting a frying pan, as in the case of a Lieutenant Colonel of the 5th Texas mentioned by Polley in 1862.
Of course, a variety of miscellaneous utensils were used. Half canteens became improvised frying pans, plates, corn graters and sieves. Pvt. Fletcher of the 5th Texas mentions a coffee boiler, given to him in 1862 by a wounded Yankee, and speaks of cooking a pumpkin in an old tin coffee pot he found dropped along the line of march in the Sharpsburg campaign.
Two foods taxed the ingenuity of the soldiers. One was the flour, which had to be kneaded into a dough. Originally, some messes had had wooden breadtrays for the purpose, but later in the war there are more and more mentions of dough made up on an old scrap of oil cloth, a corner of a shirt or blanket, the bark from a tree, or even turtle shells and pumpkin rinds.
Another challenge was the coveted ration of raw coffee beans. They were toasted in a camp kettle for a minimum of ten or fifteen minutes. The beans were then powdered, either using a rifle butt and a rock, or a bayonet in the camp kettle. The coffee powder was then mixed in a bag with sugar for use on the march. At a halt, the soldier put two tablespoons of the mixture in a pint cup, and heated it over a fire of a few sticks.
Perhaps the best view of what a Confederate infantry company had by mid-war in the way of cooking utensils is found in the Company Book of Co. H, 54th Virginia Volunteers. (The 54th was one of the few Virginia units to serve with the Army of Tennessee, and two of its company books are in the National Archives.) An inventory of camp equipment made Oct. 8, 1863, shows that the 33-man company held seven wooden buckets, seven camp kettles, seven "skillets", three "cast skillets", one "frying pan", and two axes. What the company clerk saw as the difference between "skillets", "cast skillets" and "frying pans" is unfortunately unclear, but it would appear that each mess owned a bucket, a kettle, and a frying implement of some description, with the heavy baking ("cast"?) skillets being shared between the messes, a practice noted in several memoirs.
To transport the heavier cooking gear, a company relied on the regimental "skillet wagons." Val Giles of the 4th mentions that in the fall of 1863, each regiment of the Texas Brigade had two wagons to carry its "...pots, kettles and frying pans...." These wagons accompanied the regiment on the campaign, and Sgt. Polley notes that even on the morning of July 2, 1863, at about 9 a.m.,
...the skillet wagon drove up and unloaded each regiment's share of cooking utensils, fires were built, and skillet lids put on to heat, preparatory to cooking the flour that was to be issued....
Alas for the Texans, Polley reports that before their bread was baked, they were called to fall in for the march that ended that afternoon at Little Round Top.
This sketch leads to several conclusions about our camp appearance. First, the story of the skillet wagon at Gettysburg shows that even a campaign camp can justify more cooking gear than can be carried on the person. However, the dominant cooking gear in our camp consists of cast iron lidless frying pans, with a strong contingent of Jarnigan muckets. In fact, for authenticity we should be using very different utensils. Here's a sampling of sources.
Camp kettles are available from Wendy Osman, 5424 Elliot Ave. South, Minneapolis, MN 55417, and come either singly or in nesting sets of three. While authentic in design and manufacture, these hold a lot of food! Unless actually cooking for a full mess, Jarnigan's "large camp pot", a scaled-down tin camp kettle, may be more practical, but at some cost to authenticity. Osman also offers a sheet iron messpan, while Jarnigan lists a tin messpan he mislabels a "camp basin."
Sheet iron frying pans are available from: Jarnigan; Upper Valley Mercantile, 1607 Washington St., Daven-port, IA 52804; and Frank Ellis, Rt. 1, Box 341, Greenbriar, TN 37073. I have a Jarnigan pan, and it seems too machine-made in appearance when compared to period photos. Ellis and Upper Valley describe their pans as hand-forged, and this might bear consideration.
Wooden buckets can be obtained from: Colonial Woodbenders, P.O. Box 342, Three Springs, PA 17264; Cumberland General Store, Rt. 3, Crossville, TN 38555; and Panther Primitives, P.O. Box 32, Normantown, WV 25267.
So far, I have not found an authentic spider. The closest I've been able to come up with are modern handleless Dutch ovens with legs. These are available in some local stores, and by mail order in a wider variety of sizes from Panther Primitives and Cumberland General Store. Does anyone know a source for the real thing? If so, please contact me.