Why “Hardtack”?
The name of this app comes from a biscuit. Not an image, not a metaphor: a biscuit of flour and water that fed ships' crews for three centuries, and of which intact pieces still sit in museums.
Flour, water, and nothing else
Hardtack is the plainest baked bread there is: flour, water, sometimes a pinch of salt. No fat, no leavening, no sugar. It bakes long at low heat and comes out almost completely dry, which on its own explains how it kept. Without water mould cannot take hold, and without fat there is nothing to go rancid. For long voyages some batches were baked four times instead of the usual two, and prepared six months before sailing. The trade-off is one word, hardness. Crews soaked it in coffee, soup or stew before eating it.
Three centuries of rations
The Royal Navy standardised its supply as early as 1665, and its 1731 regulations granted one pound per man per day. The US Navy counted fourteen ounces a day in 1818. During the American Civil War it took the shape of a three-inch square. The idea is far older: Roman legions already carried a dry field bread, and in Seville the Gremio de Bizcocheros supplied the ships bound for the Americas throughout the 18th century.
A piece of sailor slang
In British sailor slang, “tack” meant food, so “hard tack” was hard food. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first written use in 1830. Every language kept its own word: ship's biscuit or pilot bread in English, biscuit de mer in French, Schiffszwieback in German, galleta marinera in Spanish. Crews had their own names for it too, molar breakers, tooth dullers, sheet iron.
What is left of it
A Danish maritime museum displays a biscuit from around 1852, reputedly the oldest kept anywhere. The Pensacola Museum of History in Florida holds Civil War pieces. And the biscuit never left the kitchen: the pilot bread baked in Richmond, Virginia, still ships 98 percent of its output to Alaska, where people eat it every day.
Why an app carries the name
Because a pantry inventory has to last without being maintained. Hardtack works with no connection and no account: your items and their expiration dates stay on the phone, and there is no server they could be uploaded to. The app is bought once, nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel. It is built to still be there in ten years, like the biscuit it is named after.
One clarification, since the question comes up: this site sells no biscuits and publishes no recipe. Hardtack is a mobile app for iPhone and Android that tracks a household's supplies, their expiration dates, and how many days of self-sufficiency you actually have.
Going further
The full feature list is on the Features page, and the 25 most common questions are answered in the FAQ. The days of supply calculator gives you a first estimate straight in the browser, with nothing to install.