Ingredients:

• Hardwood shavings
• Leavening

Directions:

As unconventional as these dishes seem today, they pale in comparison to Bread Made of Wood. This recipe was discovered in the Farmers’ and Emigrants’ Handbook, 1845. The tome was “dedicated to John Jacob Astor of New York, an Emigrant from the Rhine.”

In times of great scarcity, and where famine threatens, it is well to know how to prepare a nutritious substance, which may go under the name of bread, from the beech and other woods destitute of turpentine.

Take green wood, chop it into very small chips, or make it into shavings, which is better. Boil these three or four times, stirring them very hard during boiling. Dry them, and reduce them to powder if possible; if not, as fine as you can. Bake this powder in the oven 3 or 4 times and then grind it as you would corn. Wood thus prepared acquires the smell and taste of corn flour. It will not ferment without the addition of leaven. The leaven prepared for corn flour is the best to use with it.

It will form a spongy bread, and when much baked with a hard crust is by no means unpalatable.

This kind of flour boiled in water and left to stand, forms a thick, tough trembling jelly, which is very nutritious, and in times of scarcity may be used to restore life, with perfect confidence.