For about three centuries, the Royal Navy ran on this. Royal Museums Greenwich describes ship’s biscuit as “stone-ground flour, water and salt, which were mixed into a stiff dough, baked in a hot oven for 30 minutes and then left to harden and dry”. Ships at the time of the Armada had a theoretical allowance of a pound a day. Samuel Pepys later wrote that pound into the navy’s rules as “good, clean, sweet, sound, well-baked and well-conditioned wheaten biscuit”.
By the 1830s it was made by machine. The victualling yard at Gosport, built in 1828–30, had nine ovens and machinery by Thomas Grant, and Historic England calls it “one of the first large industrial food processing plants in the country”. Soft bread did not become a navy issue until the mid-1850s, and then only to tell it apart from biscuit, which official papers had simply called “bread”.
The reason was keeping. A US museum curator puts it plainly: “biscuit kept dry and clear of pests could last for years”. Royal Museums Greenwich still holds biscuits from 1784 and from Parry’s Arctic expedition of 1821. Whether it was usually eaten crawling with weevils is argued over. Greenwich says biscuit was often “mouldy, stale or infested with weevils” by the time it was eaten. The same curator calls the weevil tales “mostly the concoctions of civilian authors writing from the comfort of their land-locked desks”.
This is not a snack. It is barely food on its own. Sailors softened it in the liquor of boiled salt meat, or broke it into stews, and that is how to use it now. Grose’s 1811 dictionary describes lobscouse, the sailors’ ancestor of scouse, as salt beef, biscuit and onions stewed together. Break one into a pot of scouse, a soup or a stew for the last ten minutes, and it thickens the pot the way it did at sea.
This follows the Royal Museums Greenwich recipe.
- Heat the oven to 215°C (190°C fan, gas 7).
- Mix the flour and salt. Add water slowly, about 200 ml in all, until you have a very stiff, dry dough that only just holds together. Far stiffer than bread. Too much water and you have made a cracker, not a biscuit.
- Leave it to rest for half an hour.
- Roll it out thick, about a centimetre, and cut rounds or squares. Prick each one all over with a fork.
- Bake on a greased tray for about 30 minutes, until hard and just colouring.
- Leave them out on a rack to dry right through as they cool. They harden as they dry.
Store them dry and airtight. We will not put a number on how long yours will keep: the sailors’ biscuits were baked and dried industrially, and a domestic oven is not a victualling yard.
Makes about 12.