Bread From the Bark of the Pine
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the bark
Cut down older Scotch fir trees and strip off the bark to collect the soft inner part.
Dry the inner bark by the fire or in an oven until brittle.
Beat and grind the dried bark into a meal.
Soak the meal in warm water to remove the resinous taste.
Shape and bake
Mix the soaked meal with a small portion of oats or moss.
Form the mixture into thin cakes about 1 inch thick.
Bake the cakes until cooked through.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Inner bark of common scotch fir (pinus sylvestris)
- Forms the bulk of the cakes once dried and ground into a meal.
- Oats or moss
- Adds starch and body to the mixture, helping the meal hold together as cakes.
The step that matters
Baking the cakes through. The cakes are about 1 inch thick, so heat must travel from the outside to the centre. Browning the surface does not show whether the middle has cooked, so bake until the whole cake is cooked through.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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