What we know of the diet of 17th-century sailors comes from written records — log entries, diaries, and journals. Most accounts say that it was pretty bad.  Now, Grace Tsai, a Ph.D. student specializing in nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, wants to investigate sailor’s grub, by recreating the food as accurately as possible. Ms. Tsai and her team have been working to prepare salt beef, ship’s biscuit, cheese, beer and wine as they were made and stored in the 17th century.  In August, Ms. Tsai and her team will embark with their period rations on a simulated three-month voyage on the tall ship Elissa in Galveston, Texas. The food will be sampled every ten days for nutritional and microbial analysis over a period of three months.

The ship’s biscuits are being made from an old recipe of flour, salt, water and a bit of yeast, twice cooked. The beer is a close approximation of a 17th-century brew.  The salt beef was more of a challenge. They located a Devon, the specific breed of cattle used in the period, but had to experiment on the proper size and type of cut to be salted.

The vittles will all be stored in casks or bags modeled those used on an English galleon, Warwick, which sunk off the coast of Bermuda in 1619. The Warwick‘s stand-in, the iron-hulled Elissa was built in 1877, so the storage conditions may be dryer and more sanitary, but should be close enough for the study.  The goal is to monitor the nutritional value of the food and how well it holds up over the three month period. The team does not intend to actually eat the biscuit or hard tack, although there has been some discussion of drinking the beer.

To learn more see: Solving the Nutritional Mystery of Historical Food at Sea