[Origin obscure: perh. from TACK sb.1 10; but cf. also TACKLE sb. sense 8.] Food-stuff; chiefly in HARD-TACK, ship’s biscuit, SOFT-TACK; also gen. stuff, often in depreciatory sense. Cf. TACKLE sb. 8.
1833. Marryat, P. Simple, xxviii. The … steward … came back with a basket of soft-tack, i. e. loaves of bread.
1841. Lever, C. O’Malley, lxxxviii. No more hard tack thought I, no salt butter.
1864. Daily Tel., 5 Nov. Horses stopped to graze, and the men … began quietly munching a hard tack.
1889. D. C. Murray, Dang. Catspaw, 129. He knows Lord Byron from beginning to end, but his head’s that full of that kind of tack there’s no room for anything else. Ibid. (1894), Making of Novelist, 42. I thought the canteen tack the nastiest stuff I had ever tasted.
