hardtack

plural hardtacks · alternative hard tack

1. countableuncountablenauticalA large, hard biscuit made from unleavened flour and water; formerly used as a long-term staple food aboard ships.

   Meronym: reefer's nut

   2 more examples

   Philander went into the next room[…]and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.

   1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

   Bread and fodder had to be brought up over longer and longer distances, it was more difficult all the time, transport was lacking, the army had already eaten two-thirds of its hardtack, exhausted men were marching in baking heat along sandy roads into emptiness!

   1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 71

   Synonyms: pilot biscuit, pilot bread, sea biscuit, sea bread, ship's biscuit, ship biscuit, ship bread, Anzac wafer