William Joseph Miller of the 12th South Carolina Regiment was born in 1845 in Yorkville, South Carolina and enlisted in the confederate army at age fifteen. Speaking about culinary episode before the battle of Appomattox in Virginia, he says we “stopped at a house in the town and the good woman was cooking corn meal cakes on top of the stove for the hungry soldiers, and they would take them off the stove half done and march on eating them.” Generally confederates soldiers survived on rations consisting of bacon and crackers. The remainder of their food they obtained foraging raiding nearby farms, and as handouts like the corn meal cake in this story. In the fall soldiers often survived on dishes made from gourd like pumpkins and acquired in a multitude of ways.