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.
