Combined foods/energy bars

[zimmerstutzen]

When I was very young, I remember my grandmother, a very old school PA Dutch cook, making a raised bread that had all kinds of stuff in it. It was dark in color with molasses, a bit of cocoa, browned loose sausage crumbles, raisins, dried apples, oat meal and other things kneaded into the bread. It was baked into small loaves about 2 inches wide and 6 inches long. It was what she made when my grandfather and dad went hunting for several days.. I hadn't thought much about it, until I recently read a story about a dog sled race about 1910 and something similar was mentioned. I also read that early travelers in the Canadian Northwest carried a mixture of meat and beans with some sweetner that was cooked in advance and put into thin long cloth bags for trail meals. It could be eaten cold or heated on a fire. Rooster Cogburn had his bag of corn dodgers. The Indians had a mix of dried meat, dried berries and fat that they carried. Lewis and Clark took along a "portable soup" We assume frontiersmen carried dried meat jerky and some other foods. perhaps similar to what Indians used. However, I wonder whether there was a sort of energy bar food more like what my grandmother made.

 

[blackhorse]

I do not know about the early history of "energy bars" but all the things you mentioned were used. Pemmican, of course was an energy source, I never made portable soup as I thought the process took way too long. There has always been rice and beans,,,,,, I am going to try to make the recipe your Grandmother made. I do bake bread and like doing so, I believe I can do something with the ingredients you mention. I believe that there are many historical breads out there that were heavy and dense that are good to take in the field.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Other than pemmican, the other pretty universal trail food was pinole, aka rockahominy, which is parched corn, ground down, and as you pointed out, jerked meat. From that you can eat that wet or dry or you get Johnny Cakes, though corn meal was often also used.

From wheat you get ship's biscuit, though most folks make them today out of whole wheat flour from hard red wheat, and thus they are like hockey pucks to consume. The proper flour is whole wheat pastry flour these days, with some bran added.

The Scots made (make) bannock out of oat meal, or cut oats, which is really a sort of large, oat, johnnycake.

They carried raisins, and dried apples from time to time as well.

They carried chocolate often too, but as a beverage... and if we ate it today without melting it into water, we'd call it unsweetened baker's chocolate. Cocoa wasn't separated from the "cocoa butter" until 1828 in the Netherlands, and it would be a few years before Dutch Cocoa arrived here.

Bread would take hours to rise with the yeast they used, and although sodium carbonate was found in 1791 and called soda ash, the real baking soda and thus baking powder, for quick bread wasn't a common thing until the late 1840's.

So basically what your grandma was making was an "all in one" bar...which was pretty smart.

If you look at some of the inventories of frontier trading posts you see a lot of what was in your grandma's bar was sorta already there...the folks simply carried them apart and ate them.

LD

 

[tenngun]

Métis made a living producing pemmican.
Horse bread was common in the late Middle Ages and I doubt people stopped making it after the term fell out of common use.
What we know for sure was high energy light foods were carried, mostly corn meal jerky fat and some sort of sweetener, often maple sugar.
A pudding with all sorts of mixes keeps well, light and full of energy. I make a a hunters pudding I carry in the woods. Sliced and fried in butter.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Horse bread was common in the late Middle Ages and I doubt people stopped making it after the term fell out of common use

You might be surprised in the American Colonies. IF the Royal Navy was making ship's biscuit out of "ship's stuff" flour, and no pea meal or other grains was in ship's biscuit, then there was a lot more wheat available than in medieval times. IF "thirds" was made with three grains, but without legume meal, and if troops of some states in the Continental Army were going hungry rather than eating rice..., then the stuff may have fallen out of knowledge due to disuse.

I have a "Maine" cookbook, with a forward by Kenneth Roberts, and in this book it talks about frying up minnows whole, salting them and eating them hot....today they are merely bait, and not a food source. And they are supposed to be quite good, and a very dense source of calories as it was a favored cold weather food.

LD

 

[Gun Tramp]

frying up minnows whole, salting them and eating them hot....today they are merely bait, and not a food source

In these parts they're called Smelt. Delicious, though the wimps take the guts out before frying.

 

[Gun Tramp]

Sorry guys, off-topic with that one. More to zimmerstutzen's point, an older (than me) neighbor gal recalled incorporating the cracklings from lard rendering into pancakes as a "trail food" for her hunting menfolk. I do render lard but don't end up with the cracklings often described so I'm going to try her idea, using crumbled bacon instead.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Dough Gods - "Take 2/3 cupful of flour, 1 small teaspoonful of baking powder, 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, and a slice of fat bacon minced fine as possible. Mix thoroughly in your bread-pan and add water slowly, stiffing and working till you have a fairly stiff dough. Flour the loaf, top and bottom, flour your hands and pat the dough into a couple of big cakes about half an inch thick. Bake in the ashes, or in the frying-pan … This is the old way of baking with bacon instead of rendered grease or lard, used by men who carried nothing they could do without, and whose only food staples were flour, baking-powder, and salt." (Edward Cave)
Camping and Woodcraft by Horace Kephart p. 352

Not sure if the bacon in this recipe wasn't dry cured bacon...,

LD

 

[kansas_volunteer]

Although not an old timey thing, Logan bread comes close to matching Granny's bread. Recipes are online. Try to find the original version. Some people take short cuts.

Erbswurst, the iron ration of the Prussian army, is a dried pea soup packed hard in sausage casings. Nowadays it's in paper tubes with labeling on the outside. I haven't found a domestic source. I get mine from Germany via ebay. I like pea soup and find the erbswurst satisfying.

Fruit bread is a pretty potent baked good.

 

[tenngun]

Townsend does a vid on his cooking channel where he makes a peas pudding. Boiled green peas mashed then bagged tight and done a tight bag for a final boil. Then sliced in the field.
It’s high calorie and light weight but very plain. I added chopped bacon and onion, with a bit of garlic salt pepper and mixed dried spices.
Sliced and fried it’s pretty good stuff.
Pea, could mean what we would call bean today and I bet this would work with whatever your favorite bean was.

 

[Grenadier1758]

I've made Dog's Body, pease porridge with bits of smoked shank cooked together. As the peas cook down, to about a mashed potato consistency or a little stiffer, its good to serve then. Since few like the notion of eating the light green mixture I often have leftovers. Those I make into little cakes to be either fried up in a pan or wrapped up in linen to be eaten cold later. Makes a good trail food.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Townsend does a vid on his cooking channel where he makes a peas pudding. Boiled green peas mashed then bagged tight and done a tight bag for a final boil. Then sliced in the field. It’s high calorie and light weight but very plain. I added chopped bacon and onion, with a bit of garlic salt pepper and mixed dried spices.

JA das ist Erbwurst !

It was a German military ration from before WWI.
I've made some too, packed into a paper tube and I used a lot of beef suet. Quite hard, (much harder than the Townsend video product) when cooled and keeps rather well.
A small portion dissolved into water makes a pretty tasty pea soup.


"Erbswurst is a German "sausage" made with pea flour, bacon, fat and onions.
It reportedly was invented in 1867 by Johann Heinrich Grüneberg in Berlin and has been made and sold in Germany ever since.
(It may be that Grüneberg came up with a mass production method, at a time when the Wehrmacht was looking for a ration,
and he won the contract)
It was the basic military ration in WWI."


Ingredients (metric measures too for chaps in Europe):

3/4 lb. sliced smoked bacon (340 g)
1/2 lb, beef suet hard fat ( 250 g)
1 lb. Pea flour (450 g )
3 tsp Salt (18 g )
1 tsp ground black Pepper (2.0 g)
1/2 tsp Marjoram (1 g)
1/4 tsp Nutmeg (0.3 g)
1/2 Onion ( about 30 g)

Instructions

1. Dice smoked bacon* into 1/4” cubes.
2. Grate raw suet and remove any membrane.
3. Mince up the onion.
4. Fry bacon on low heat until gold, stirring often. Then melt in the suet.
   
5. Fry onion in the fat until gold. Don’t brown the onion or the sausage will be bitter.
6. While the fat and bacon and onion are still very warm, start adding pea flour stirring continuously. Add spices; keep on stirring.
7. Keep it very warm or hot so it does not harden, but be careful when packing into the tubes.
8. Stuff firmly into butcher paper tubes, made with the shiny side inwards. One end should be closed with a wire tie. When full close the other end with a tie.

3 ounces of Erbswurst mixed with three cups of water will makes a delicious pea soup...add water or erbwurst depending on how thick you like your soup.

LD

 

[tenngun]

Oh that sounds good, or yah, dat swonds goot. I see that going to a camp we’ve giving it a try soon

 

[Gun Tramp]

Thanks for posting the recipe, LD. Can you recommend a source for the Pea flour?

 

[Loyalist Dave]

https://healthyflour.com/product/organic-sprouted-green-pea-flour/

OH and y'all just be CAREFUL.... the stuff is tasty but it's also a "fiber" source, and ifin you are not used to a good amount of fiber in your diet right now, a sudden addition of it, while being healthy, will have sudden consequences.

Plan accordingly.

LD

 

[Gun Tramp]

Thank you, LD. I look forward to trying your recipe.

 

[NeilMacleod]

Mother used to make these Oatmeal/Nut/Blackstrap mix and then slow cook in oven in a tray. Once chewy they were cut into strips.
Very yummy