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THE ARMY RATION
HOW TO DIMINISH ITS WEIGHT AND BULK
SECURE ECONOMY IN ITS ADMINISTRATION
AVOID WASTE, AND INCREASE THE COMFORT,
EFFICIENCY AND MOBILITY OF TROOPS
BY E.N. HORSFORD,1864
We have already seen the great loss arising from the attempt to provide meat for the marching ration, from the existing stores of the Commissary Department. The fresh meat, especially in warm weather, however well cooked, in the course of a day or two becomes unpalatable and worthless. Salt beef, as well as fresh, is bulky and heavy from the percentage of water and inedible substance entering into its composition. It occasions great thirst. Salt pork, though for some reason greatly to be preferred to salt beef, greases everything with which it comes in contact, and sustains a loss of some three fourths when broiled on a stick, as it usually is on the march.
Fresh beef as a source of the marching ration has some advantages. It carries itself. The cattle can be driven; but this advantage is limited. Of what use are live cattle on such an expedition as Averill's, to cut the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad; or Kilpatrick's, in the rear of Lee's army, threatening Richmond? In a forced march the herd of cattle must be some distance in the rear, and the supply of fresh beef irregular. The best cattle in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois, after transportation in cars, with little water, food, or sleep, during several days and nights of continuous travel, and after being driven about, for two or three weeks, with scanty forage, or none at all, furnish as a whole, meager and inferior beef. To preserve the beef the cattle are slaughtered, in summer, early in the morning, and the mat immediately boiled, if conveniences will permit, to prevent its becoming fly-blown. The juices extracted in this boiling are uniformly and necessarily lost. The edible meat is much of it lost in the difficulty and haste of detaching it from the bones. It has no provision against spontaneous decay. It is not always at command when most needed; it is bulky, and yet the actual edible meat, which the soldier derives from an ox slaughtered on the march, is much less than is ordinarily supposed. The advantage of providing it on the hoof is correspondingly small.
In slaughtering, the weight is diminished by loss of blood, the removal of the tongue, heart, and liver, the viscera and offal, and legs to the knee. This reduction, called shrinkage, in good cattle fresh from the pasture, amounts to at least on third. An ox in fair condition weighing 1,500 pounds on the hoof, would lose by shrinkage 500 pounds*. The intestinal tallow would weigh 100 pounds more, the head and hid 100 pounds more, and the kidney tallow and lump fat 50 pounds more. Altogether, the dressed quarters without the kidney tallow and lump fat, weight but half the ox on foot. But the bones, gristle, tendon, connective tissue, and loss of meat in the sinuosities of the back bone and along the ribs, reduce the edible portion to the consumer to three fifths of the weight of the dressed quarters, or three tenths of the weight of the whole ox. Of this three tenths, seventy-five per cent is water.
So that an ox weighing 1,500 pounds yields to the consumer, as ordinarily served up, but about 450 pounds of edible meat with its water, or but one quarter of this, or three fortieths of the whole, of dry nutritious matter, or 112 1/2 pounds, or 6.8 per cent, of the whole weight of the live ox.
In a practical experiment, which came to my knowledge as having recently been made in New York, with an ox weighing 1,200 pounds dressed, and of course some 1,800 pounds on foot, there were found 400 pounds of edible meat, which yielded when dried to fibre some 112 pounds, a quantity amounting to 6.22 per cent of the live ox. Small as this seems, the cattle in the train of an army on the march, yield a much less return. The army rule in regard to beef-cattle is, that when the cattle weigh over 1.300 pounds on the hoof, 45 per cent. Shall be deducted for shrinkage; when below 1,300 pounds, 50 per cent. The fat, it would seem, is assumed to have totally disappeared. But much more has, in reality, disappeared. From the statement of commissary officers having charge of the commissary supplies of some of the regiments of the Potomac army from its commencement, it appears that it requires about one ox and a half to furnish the fresh beef ration to a regiment of 225 men - or about six oxen to 1,000 men. This meat was issued as dressed quarters, which were weighed. So that twenty-four quarters of beef-cattle in the condition in which they are slaughtered in that army, weigh on an average 20,000 ounces, or 1,250 pounds. Assuming the bone, tendon, and gristle to be three fourths of the whole dressed quarters, which is not far from t he fact, there would remain 312 1/2 pounds of edible meat, or 52 pounds to an ox; of which one quarter only is dry nutriment, or 13 pounds to an ox. And this is an average specimen estimated by the commissary officers from whom I have received the information, to have weighed when purchased by the Government, 1,300 pounds, on the hoof. Six of these must have weighed 7,800 pounds and would cost now, delivered at eight cents a pound $624! Seventy-eight pounds out of seventy-eight hundred! One per cent. Only!
Neither hide, bones, or tallow of any kind, as a general rule, is saved on the march. In a word the dry edible fresh beef derived from cattle on the hoof according to this estimate, costs the Government $8 a pound, or with the three pounds of water $2 a pound, or with the bone, tendon, and gristle 50 cents a pound. But a reduction so great cannot be presumed to be uniform in the Army of the Potomac, though it is known that during the last two winters the cattle got little or no forage from the time they were sent down by boat and the cars to Falmouth, and by cars to Brandy Station, till they were slaughtered. At Hilton Head the loss in flesh was less. At Chattanooga it was greater. Col. Eaton, in charge of the subsistence department at the post of New York, has informed me that the army ration of fresh beef at Hilton Head cost the Government 30 cents, at a time when canned meats of perfect quality, cost, delivered, but 16 cents a pound. Eight ounces of good canned meat may be assumed to be a full equivalent for the fresh beef ration with its bone, tendon, and gristle, and supplied to the individual soldier at Hilton Head. At the present prices of canned meats, of say 24 cents a pound, delivered, the ration of fresh beef at Hilton Head must cost the Government 45 cents. A pound must cost 36 cents, bone, tendon, and gristle included. The edible meat would therefore cost some three to four times as much, say $1.25 per pound, and with its water eliminated, $5 per pound.
A medical officer, whose duties called him to Chattanooga, during the months preceding the battle of Lookout Mountain, has informed me that the cattle furnished to that post were so sick and exhausted from the effects of the transportation from Louisville, and so reduced and emaciated from having had absolutely nothing to eat on the railroad and after their arrival, for weeks in succession, that some of them reeled in walking, and falling or lying down were unable to rise. It is true that the bullocks that thus fell were not eaten, but they indicate the condition of those which had been subjected to the same suffering and deprivations and were actually used as food. What these cattle on the hoof cost the Government I know not, but probably not less than the cattle supplied to the Army of the Potomac, while their value for food must have been less and the cost of the ration of fresh beef correspondingly greater.
It appeared in evidence before the Crimean Sanitary Commission that the cattle supplied to the English army were so reduced by hardships of the voyage and little or no forage, after landing, as in many cases to bee scarcely more than skin and bone. Much of the meat was so tough, that although called beef, it could not be eaten and was rejected by the men.
Now, this enormous expense - enormous if we reduce the estimate by a whole quarter, or even a third - is incurred by Government, and this fearful sacrifice of cattle made by the country, to provide indifferent and frequently deleterious fresh meat, in scanty quantity at the best, for the soldier in active service.
DOES SCIENCE SUGGEST ANY ALLEVIATION?
The Government wishes a light marching ration of fresh meat. It wants it cooked, seasoned, made thoroughly palatable to the soldier, and capable of preservation indefinitely long. Where it is made light by being relieved of its surplus water, bone, tendon, gristle, lump fat, &c., is of no moment. How it is endowed with antiseptic qualities is not material, provided they are healthful. It is not necessary that this ration be prepared in camp. It may be prepared wherever it is convenient to collect numbers of fat cattle.
To facilitate the transportation of the marching ration, it is desirable that the bulk and weight be reduced to the lowest practicable limit; and food made imperishable. The great enemy to preservation is water. It facilitates the molecular interchange upon which decay depends. The water beyond the limits of ready preservation must be expelled. The dried buffalo meat of the Indians on the Western prairies, common jerked beef and venison pemmican, Appert's dried meats, and the desiccated meats now prepared for long voyages, are illustrations of the protection against decomposition which removal of the water secures. But the drying should not be carried beyond the point which permits the ready restoration of the juices of the meat in savory condition. This may be done at temperatures from 110o to 125o . Fah. To insure its preservation, if not dried, the oxygen of the air should be excluded from it. Cans are on many accounts suited to this purpose. Perhaps the only objection to them is that they are liable to injury in long or hurried transportation, and the puncture of a can, however slight, especially where the water has not been materially diminished, is quite sure to be followed with deterioration of the meat.
What expedient is there which fulfils all these requisitions? They are all fulfilled by putting the meat in the form of...
SAUSAGE.
The German has reduced this manufacture to its simplest elements. He makes sausage from every edible part of the animal, including the liver and even the blood. The cleaned intestine is his costless but perfect can. Smoke, heat, dry air, salt, and fragrant herbs and spices are his antiseptics.
The healthfulness of the sausage, its quality as a relish, the variety of forms in which it may be served, and its antiseptic qualities, combine to commend it for the soldier's marching ration of meat. It is well known that when the soldier gets his pay, he repairs at once, if in camp, to the sutler to purchase sausages, and continues to enrich his fare from this source so long as his money lasts. In some regiments, no pork has been drawn for a month after pay-day.
Can the sausage system be carried so far as to include the dressed carcass of the whole ox??
Let us suppose a supply of live cattle in their individual best condition - in Illinois, for example - and an establishment on an adequate scale, for economizing the nutritive value of the animals to be slaughtered. There should be mincing contrivances, facilities for boiling by steam, baking or roasting, digesters, evaporating pans, drying apartments, hot air, smoke pyroligneous acid, gelatine, bisulphite of lime, &c.
The mincing apparatus would reduce the meat to fineness; the steam or baking apparatus would boil, or bake, or roast it; currents of heated air would dry it; evaporating pans might perform the same office, at temperatures so low as to preserve in palatable form all the juices of the meat; and Papin's digesters would resolve a large part of what is now utterly lost on the march - soft bone, gristle, tendon and connective tissue, into most nutritious food, to be incorporated with the minced meat or used as stock for soup.
The different kinds of meat, and the tongue, heart, brain, and concentrated soup stock might, for particular purposes, if desirable, be disposed in different sausages. But for army use, the whole might be resolved into homogenous sausaged meat.
The deficiency in sausage-cases might be supplied by sewing cotton or linen into tubes, overlapping the seams, or weaving or knitting tubes, like hose, dipping them in gelatine, and if necessary afterward, in tannin, to make a leathern sheath. Or the dried sausage material, cooked by steam, or less dried and roasted, might be compressed into cakes, and varnished with gelatine derived from the scraps of the hides.
The efficiency of dry air in removing the water, of the kreosote, of smoke and pyroligneous acid in coagulating the albumen and forming an impermeable and quite insoluble envelope, of a varnish of gelatine and solution of tannin, in making leather, are well known. The bisuphite of lime would also coagulate the albumen, and besides arrest the oxygen of teh air that would otherwise produce decomposition. I have preserved beef perfectly fresh for a period of seven years by sprinkling it with dry powdered sulphite of lime, packing it in glass vessels, and covering with a stopper of plaster of paris. At the end of this period, the beef was as fresh and bright as when it was laid down. The intestine should be saturated with a solution of bisulphite, and then thoroughly rinsed, before using.
Transcribed from the original by Paul Calloway. Thanks to Justin Runyon for retaining a copy of this document on his hard drive during the recent crash.
Source:
The Army Ration. How to Diminish It's Weight and Bulk, Secure Economy in it's Administration, Avoid Waste, and Increase the Comfort, Efficiency, and Mobility of Troops.
By: E.N. Horsford, Late Professor in Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Published By: D. Van Nostrand, 192 Broadway, New York. 1864. pp 19-25.
HOW TO DIMINISH ITS WEIGHT AND BULK
SECURE ECONOMY IN ITS ADMINISTRATION
AVOID WASTE, AND INCREASE THE COMFORT,
EFFICIENCY AND MOBILITY OF TROOPS
BY E.N. HORSFORD,1864
We have already seen the great loss arising from the attempt to provide meat for the marching ration, from the existing stores of the Commissary Department. The fresh meat, especially in warm weather, however well cooked, in the course of a day or two becomes unpalatable and worthless. Salt beef, as well as fresh, is bulky and heavy from the percentage of water and inedible substance entering into its composition. It occasions great thirst. Salt pork, though for some reason greatly to be preferred to salt beef, greases everything with which it comes in contact, and sustains a loss of some three fourths when broiled on a stick, as it usually is on the march.
Fresh beef as a source of the marching ration has some advantages. It carries itself. The cattle can be driven; but this advantage is limited. Of what use are live cattle on such an expedition as Averill's, to cut the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad; or Kilpatrick's, in the rear of Lee's army, threatening Richmond? In a forced march the herd of cattle must be some distance in the rear, and the supply of fresh beef irregular. The best cattle in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois, after transportation in cars, with little water, food, or sleep, during several days and nights of continuous travel, and after being driven about, for two or three weeks, with scanty forage, or none at all, furnish as a whole, meager and inferior beef. To preserve the beef the cattle are slaughtered, in summer, early in the morning, and the mat immediately boiled, if conveniences will permit, to prevent its becoming fly-blown. The juices extracted in this boiling are uniformly and necessarily lost. The edible meat is much of it lost in the difficulty and haste of detaching it from the bones. It has no provision against spontaneous decay. It is not always at command when most needed; it is bulky, and yet the actual edible meat, which the soldier derives from an ox slaughtered on the march, is much less than is ordinarily supposed. The advantage of providing it on the hoof is correspondingly small.
In slaughtering, the weight is diminished by loss of blood, the removal of the tongue, heart, and liver, the viscera and offal, and legs to the knee. This reduction, called shrinkage, in good cattle fresh from the pasture, amounts to at least on third. An ox in fair condition weighing 1,500 pounds on the hoof, would lose by shrinkage 500 pounds*. The intestinal tallow would weigh 100 pounds more, the head and hid 100 pounds more, and the kidney tallow and lump fat 50 pounds more. Altogether, the dressed quarters without the kidney tallow and lump fat, weight but half the ox on foot. But the bones, gristle, tendon, connective tissue, and loss of meat in the sinuosities of the back bone and along the ribs, reduce the edible portion to the consumer to three fifths of the weight of the dressed quarters, or three tenths of the weight of the whole ox. Of this three tenths, seventy-five per cent is water.
So that an ox weighing 1,500 pounds yields to the consumer, as ordinarily served up, but about 450 pounds of edible meat with its water, or but one quarter of this, or three fortieths of the whole, of dry nutritious matter, or 112 1/2 pounds, or 6.8 per cent, of the whole weight of the live ox.
In a practical experiment, which came to my knowledge as having recently been made in New York, with an ox weighing 1,200 pounds dressed, and of course some 1,800 pounds on foot, there were found 400 pounds of edible meat, which yielded when dried to fibre some 112 pounds, a quantity amounting to 6.22 per cent of the live ox. Small as this seems, the cattle in the train of an army on the march, yield a much less return. The army rule in regard to beef-cattle is, that when the cattle weigh over 1.300 pounds on the hoof, 45 per cent. Shall be deducted for shrinkage; when below 1,300 pounds, 50 per cent. The fat, it would seem, is assumed to have totally disappeared. But much more has, in reality, disappeared. From the statement of commissary officers having charge of the commissary supplies of some of the regiments of the Potomac army from its commencement, it appears that it requires about one ox and a half to furnish the fresh beef ration to a regiment of 225 men - or about six oxen to 1,000 men. This meat was issued as dressed quarters, which were weighed. So that twenty-four quarters of beef-cattle in the condition in which they are slaughtered in that army, weigh on an average 20,000 ounces, or 1,250 pounds. Assuming the bone, tendon, and gristle to be three fourths of the whole dressed quarters, which is not far from t he fact, there would remain 312 1/2 pounds of edible meat, or 52 pounds to an ox; of which one quarter only is dry nutriment, or 13 pounds to an ox. And this is an average specimen estimated by the commissary officers from whom I have received the information, to have weighed when purchased by the Government, 1,300 pounds, on the hoof. Six of these must have weighed 7,800 pounds and would cost now, delivered at eight cents a pound $624! Seventy-eight pounds out of seventy-eight hundred! One per cent. Only!
Neither hide, bones, or tallow of any kind, as a general rule, is saved on the march. In a word the dry edible fresh beef derived from cattle on the hoof according to this estimate, costs the Government $8 a pound, or with the three pounds of water $2 a pound, or with the bone, tendon, and gristle 50 cents a pound. But a reduction so great cannot be presumed to be uniform in the Army of the Potomac, though it is known that during the last two winters the cattle got little or no forage from the time they were sent down by boat and the cars to Falmouth, and by cars to Brandy Station, till they were slaughtered. At Hilton Head the loss in flesh was less. At Chattanooga it was greater. Col. Eaton, in charge of the subsistence department at the post of New York, has informed me that the army ration of fresh beef at Hilton Head cost the Government 30 cents, at a time when canned meats of perfect quality, cost, delivered, but 16 cents a pound. Eight ounces of good canned meat may be assumed to be a full equivalent for the fresh beef ration with its bone, tendon, and gristle, and supplied to the individual soldier at Hilton Head. At the present prices of canned meats, of say 24 cents a pound, delivered, the ration of fresh beef at Hilton Head must cost the Government 45 cents. A pound must cost 36 cents, bone, tendon, and gristle included. The edible meat would therefore cost some three to four times as much, say $1.25 per pound, and with its water eliminated, $5 per pound.
A medical officer, whose duties called him to Chattanooga, during the months preceding the battle of Lookout Mountain, has informed me that the cattle furnished to that post were so sick and exhausted from the effects of the transportation from Louisville, and so reduced and emaciated from having had absolutely nothing to eat on the railroad and after their arrival, for weeks in succession, that some of them reeled in walking, and falling or lying down were unable to rise. It is true that the bullocks that thus fell were not eaten, but they indicate the condition of those which had been subjected to the same suffering and deprivations and were actually used as food. What these cattle on the hoof cost the Government I know not, but probably not less than the cattle supplied to the Army of the Potomac, while their value for food must have been less and the cost of the ration of fresh beef correspondingly greater.
It appeared in evidence before the Crimean Sanitary Commission that the cattle supplied to the English army were so reduced by hardships of the voyage and little or no forage, after landing, as in many cases to bee scarcely more than skin and bone. Much of the meat was so tough, that although called beef, it could not be eaten and was rejected by the men.
Now, this enormous expense - enormous if we reduce the estimate by a whole quarter, or even a third - is incurred by Government, and this fearful sacrifice of cattle made by the country, to provide indifferent and frequently deleterious fresh meat, in scanty quantity at the best, for the soldier in active service.
DOES SCIENCE SUGGEST ANY ALLEVIATION?
The Government wishes a light marching ration of fresh meat. It wants it cooked, seasoned, made thoroughly palatable to the soldier, and capable of preservation indefinitely long. Where it is made light by being relieved of its surplus water, bone, tendon, gristle, lump fat, &c., is of no moment. How it is endowed with antiseptic qualities is not material, provided they are healthful. It is not necessary that this ration be prepared in camp. It may be prepared wherever it is convenient to collect numbers of fat cattle.
To facilitate the transportation of the marching ration, it is desirable that the bulk and weight be reduced to the lowest practicable limit; and food made imperishable. The great enemy to preservation is water. It facilitates the molecular interchange upon which decay depends. The water beyond the limits of ready preservation must be expelled. The dried buffalo meat of the Indians on the Western prairies, common jerked beef and venison pemmican, Appert's dried meats, and the desiccated meats now prepared for long voyages, are illustrations of the protection against decomposition which removal of the water secures. But the drying should not be carried beyond the point which permits the ready restoration of the juices of the meat in savory condition. This may be done at temperatures from 110o to 125o . Fah. To insure its preservation, if not dried, the oxygen of the air should be excluded from it. Cans are on many accounts suited to this purpose. Perhaps the only objection to them is that they are liable to injury in long or hurried transportation, and the puncture of a can, however slight, especially where the water has not been materially diminished, is quite sure to be followed with deterioration of the meat.
What expedient is there which fulfils all these requisitions? They are all fulfilled by putting the meat in the form of...
SAUSAGE.
The German has reduced this manufacture to its simplest elements. He makes sausage from every edible part of the animal, including the liver and even the blood. The cleaned intestine is his costless but perfect can. Smoke, heat, dry air, salt, and fragrant herbs and spices are his antiseptics.
The healthfulness of the sausage, its quality as a relish, the variety of forms in which it may be served, and its antiseptic qualities, combine to commend it for the soldier's marching ration of meat. It is well known that when the soldier gets his pay, he repairs at once, if in camp, to the sutler to purchase sausages, and continues to enrich his fare from this source so long as his money lasts. In some regiments, no pork has been drawn for a month after pay-day.
Can the sausage system be carried so far as to include the dressed carcass of the whole ox??
Let us suppose a supply of live cattle in their individual best condition - in Illinois, for example - and an establishment on an adequate scale, for economizing the nutritive value of the animals to be slaughtered. There should be mincing contrivances, facilities for boiling by steam, baking or roasting, digesters, evaporating pans, drying apartments, hot air, smoke pyroligneous acid, gelatine, bisulphite of lime, &c.
The mincing apparatus would reduce the meat to fineness; the steam or baking apparatus would boil, or bake, or roast it; currents of heated air would dry it; evaporating pans might perform the same office, at temperatures so low as to preserve in palatable form all the juices of the meat; and Papin's digesters would resolve a large part of what is now utterly lost on the march - soft bone, gristle, tendon and connective tissue, into most nutritious food, to be incorporated with the minced meat or used as stock for soup.
The different kinds of meat, and the tongue, heart, brain, and concentrated soup stock might, for particular purposes, if desirable, be disposed in different sausages. But for army use, the whole might be resolved into homogenous sausaged meat.
The deficiency in sausage-cases might be supplied by sewing cotton or linen into tubes, overlapping the seams, or weaving or knitting tubes, like hose, dipping them in gelatine, and if necessary afterward, in tannin, to make a leathern sheath. Or the dried sausage material, cooked by steam, or less dried and roasted, might be compressed into cakes, and varnished with gelatine derived from the scraps of the hides.
The efficiency of dry air in removing the water, of the kreosote, of smoke and pyroligneous acid in coagulating the albumen and forming an impermeable and quite insoluble envelope, of a varnish of gelatine and solution of tannin, in making leather, are well known. The bisuphite of lime would also coagulate the albumen, and besides arrest the oxygen of teh air that would otherwise produce decomposition. I have preserved beef perfectly fresh for a period of seven years by sprinkling it with dry powdered sulphite of lime, packing it in glass vessels, and covering with a stopper of plaster of paris. At the end of this period, the beef was as fresh and bright as when it was laid down. The intestine should be saturated with a solution of bisulphite, and then thoroughly rinsed, before using.
Transcribed from the original by Paul Calloway. Thanks to Justin Runyon for retaining a copy of this document on his hard drive during the recent crash.
Source:
The Army Ration. How to Diminish It's Weight and Bulk, Secure Economy in it's Administration, Avoid Waste, and Increase the Comfort, Efficiency, and Mobility of Troops.
By: E.N. Horsford, Late Professor in Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Published By: D. Van Nostrand, 192 Broadway, New York. 1864. pp 19-25.
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