Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Mar 2026Hash made from pulverized hardtack, salt pork, and vegetables, served with mashed potatoes
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1894Third class, or steerage, on the Titanic was served breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, which was a major upgrade from other ships in decades past. Before this, third class passengers were given their rations, which they had to prepare and cook on their own. Sometimes they had to wait in line to use a stove, and not everyone would get a turn.
This meal hearkens back to that time. The recipe uses ingredients that were included in third class rations, and comes from a cookbook for sailors in 1894. I really can’t recommend making this. It’s … not great. There’s essentially no flavor, and the hash turns into a kind of paste in your mouth with the only texture coming from the onions. If I was really hungry and had no other options, I suppose it would be fine, but you shouldn’t feel the need to make this.
Biscuit Hash. (Cold Meat Cookery)
Ingredients
6lbs. Broken biscuits, steeped
2lbs. Cold salt beef or pork.
1/2lb. dripping.
2 onions.
1 cooked carrot.
1 cooked turnip.
1 teaspoonful pepper.
1 teaspoonful mixed spice.
Method — Chop the meat, onions, and vegetables finely; squeeze the water well out of the biscuits, and rub them through a coarse wire sieve; add all the other ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Put it into a baking tin, and brown in a moderate oven until firm. Cut into squares and serve.
— Cookery for Seamen by Alexander Quinlan and N.E. Mann, 1894
September 10, 2026
Hardtack Hash from Steerage on a Victorian Ocean Liner
QotD: The Victorian Workhouse diet and the modern “wellness” diet
The Victorian workhouse did not feed its inmates badly by accident. It fed them badly on purpose, and the purpose was written into the law.
The principle behind the New Poor Law of 1834 was “less eligibility”. Life inside the workhouse had to be made worse than the life of the poorest labourer surviving outside, or people might actually choose it. Misery was the policy, and the food was central to it.
The diet was built around gruel, bread, and watery broth. Thin oatmeal porridge. Pease soup. A little cheese. Meat, where it appeared at all, appeared in quantities a working man would have laughed at, carefully weighed out on a handful of days a year. Strip a population of meat and feed it on cheap starch, and you get people who are weak, compliant, and grateful for very little. The men with the ledgers understood that completely. They wrote the smallness down, in ounces, and signed it.
Now read that menu back slowly.
Porridge to start the day. Wholegrain bread as the base of every plate. Beans and pulses for protein. Broth-based soups. Dairy in moderation. Red meat cut right back, if you have it at all.
That is the workhouse diet, almost line for line. The gruel that was once the punishment for being poor is now the breakfast of the health-conscious. The near-absence of meat, once an economy forced on people who had no say in it, is now sold to you as the enlightened, heart-healthy choice you are making of your own free will.
They worked out the cheapest way to keep a body upright and dependent, and wrote it down in ounces.
A century and a half later the same menu comes back with a wellness label on it, and this time people pay extra for the privilege.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-06-04.
