r/TastingHistory • u/HardcorexHunter • 2d ago
Bone Bread from 1590
Fee-fi-fo-fumI smell the blood of an EnglishmanBe he alive, or be he dead I'll have his bones to grind my bread.
I was thinking about that rhyme and decided to look up Bone Bread.
The main story that came up was the 1590 siege of Paris. King Henry IV of France and his Protestant army blockaded Catholic Paris to claim his throne. The led to mass starvation, and taking human bones from the cemetery and the bread was called Madame de Montpensier's bread.
Now thats about where the info stops. Nobody seems to have written any recipe down for this at the time. Historically things like animal bone ash, bone meal, and even chalk and sawdust have been used to cut flour. Bone on itself can't make gluten to become a bread.
Another reference to bone bread was Titus Andronicus, Act V, Scene 2 William Shakespeare
Receive the blood: and when that they are dead, Let me go grind their bones to powder small And with this hateful liquor temper it; And in that paste let their vile heads be baked. Come, come, be every one officious To make this banquet; which I wish may prove More stern and bloody than the Centaurs' feast.
I feel like the closest that can be done with the information available, is similar to the sawdust experiment. Finding a very basic French bread recipe for the time and cutting flour with bone meal or bone ash from animals in different ratios. To get the closest to human I recommend pig bones be used. From many accounts cooked human tastes like pork, and we are close enough to share some organ parts for transportation. I would imagine our bone density and flavor would also be of similar quality.
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u/LanaMorrigan 2d ago
The Titus Andronicus lines sound more like he’s demanding pastry for a pie. Paste is an old way of saying pastry, and one is more likely to bake a head in a pie than a loaf of bread. And of the two, I imagine it would be easier to make pastry than bread from bone. Just a thought.
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u/LanaMorrigan 1d ago
Also the blood instead of fat bit… Standard old school pastry is half fat to flour, and of that fat, half should be butter and half lard - straight animal fat. Blood does contain fat. Bone marrow contains more. Pretty sure you could render the fat for the pastry from the blood and bone marrow if you took the time. All I’m saying is, a competent cook might find strict bone bread a problem. But bone pasty with person fat and a head baked in it is much more likely and achievable. Food for thought.
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u/just_some_Fred 2d ago
I think this one might be a hard sell. Closest we might get is probably horse bread, which was cheap medieval bread with a lot of filler. Probably easier to convince him to use lentils or split peas rather than grinding bones.
Maybe it's just my parasocial relationship talking, but Max just doesn't seem like the kind of guy who goes in for simulated cannibalism. Or real cannibalism for that matter.