Hunger bread

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Thanksgiving box to commemorate the famine of 1816/1817 in Schwäbisch Hall: hunger bread above, ears of corn below

As hunger bread , a baked in times of need is bread called. Sometimes the scarce flour was stretched , and sometimes the size of the loaf was reduced, so that for the previous price of bread you only got a kind of bread roll . The phenomenon is best documented from the year without summer (1816), but not limited to it.

19th century bread recipes

Recipes and ingredients of hunger bread have been handed down. For example, they contained sawdust, which had little effect on the taste, but only satiated for a short time. In Württemberg , squeezed flax seeds were used as a baking ingredient. Others experimented with straw, moss and hay during the hunger crisis of 1816/1817. The purpose of these ingredients, which are worthless for the organism, was to soothe the feeling of hunger through dietary fiber . Because of the addition of fibers (up to 25%), the breads did not rise properly, they were small and hard.

Breads with wild herb seeds

sorrel

A sorrel bread ( syrgräsbröd ) is known from Sweden . For this purpose, the seeds of meadow sorrel ( Rumex acetosa ) were dried and ground with other herbs, sometimes with ground linden bark, and baked with flour and yeast .

Goosefoot

Lev Tolstoy reported a famine in the Russian governorate of Tula (1892):

“The first impression, which confirmed that the situation of the population in this year was a particularly sad one, was brought about by the bread, a third and often even half of which is mixed with Melde and is eaten by everyone, a heavy, bitter black bread , black as the ink. The whole population eats this bread, including children, pregnant women, breastfeeding women and the sick. "

- Lev Tolstoy
During the Leningrad Blockad e 1944, the population was eating this bread from Gänsefußsamen and bran fried with machine oil

Rudolf Virchow brought one of these Russian hunger bread from an anthropological congress in Moscow in 1893 to have it analyzed in Berlin. Grains of the white goose foot ( Chenopodium album ) had been baked in the black, peat-like bread . The bread was poor in starch , but rich in protein and fat, so it was more nutritious than rye bread .

Rind breads

Rind bread as emergency food is known from Scandinavia, especially from Finland. The mostly flat-shaped Finnish hunger bread ( pettuleipä ) consisted of rye flour, stretched with finely scraped bark from young pines, preferably from Pinus sylvestris . Occasionally sorrel seeds, lichens, and floury roots were also added to the dough. People did not find the turpentine-like taste unpleasant, so the bread was baked occasionally even in normal times.

Acorn bread

Acorn bread was an emergency food from the 16th to 18th centuries during the periodic hunger and inflationary crises in Central Europe. Since the Enlightenment , it has also been recommended as cheap bread for the poor, as acorns could be collected for free. The bitter taste was made more bite-sized by mixing it with rye and spelled flour. Poets and historians often presented acorn bread as a Germanic dish , but this is not the case. During the First World War, acorn bread was recommended as a nutritious war bread in Germany and Austria, but the response remained low. Corresponding control measures were not taken during the Second World War.

Acorn bread was also baked in Sardinia in times of need. In order to debitter the acorns , they were buried in the ground or mixed with marl water .

War bread in the First World War

During the famine after the Finnish Civil War in 1918, a family peeled tree bark to make flour from the bast

Potato, barley and turnip bread

As early as the beginning of World War I , bakers had to stretch their products with potato flour. There were two qualities: K-bread (available as fine bread or black bread) contained 10–20% potato flour or potato flakes, KK-bread more than 20%. In January 1915, in addition to potato products, barley flour, barley meal and bran were also approved as additives in K and KK bread. Corn and legume flour were added in May 1916. Corn and pulses soon became scarce and expensive. Only barley flour and meal were therefore of greater practical value for supplying the population with cheap bread. In the winter of 1916/17 the potatoes were also scarce. As a result, flour made from dried turnips temporarily replaced potato flour. In 1915, a coarse bread , similar to Rhenish black rye bread, made from corn, barley and rice flour as well as bran, was invented by the Cologne councilor and later Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . It is said to have not been particularly tasty, but it prevented a major famine in Cologne.

Blood bread

The pharmacologist Rudolf Kobert recommended making a nutritious blood bread from slaughter blood and rye meal, as was known in Estonia . In the German Reich was promoted blood bread, but the majority of consumers declined, although this innocuous names like "Spartan bread" were invented. On the other hand, slaughter blood was not available in large quantities, so that the consumption of blood bread remained a kind of fad in certain nutrition-conscious circles.

Hunger breads as memorabilia

Sometimes hunger bread was kept as a reminder of a time of need. The Basel Historical Museum, for example, owns a Basel two- pound bun from June 1817. Sweden's Museum of Cultural History ( Nordiska museet ) in Stockholm has a collection of emergency bread, especially bark bread. In the church of St. Michael in Schwäbisch Hall there is the so-called harvest box, which contains four bread-like bread from 1816 and ears of corn from the new harvest from 1817.

See also

literature

  • Irene Krauss: souls, pretzels, hunger breads. Bread story (s) from Baden and Württemberg . Jan Thorbeke Verlag, Ostfildern 2007. ISBN 978-3-7995-0222-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hunger bread from the "Year Without a Summer". In: University of Hohenheim. August 4, 2016. Retrieved July 19, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Maximilian Axelson: Vandring i Wermlands elfdal och finnskogar. In: Project Runeberg. 1852, p. 112 , accessed July 19, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Invitation to the media: Public baking campaign - from hunger bread to anniversary bread. In: University of Hohenheim. January 24, 2018, accessed July 18, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Hunger breads remind us of the beginnings. In: Südwestpresse. January 25, 2018. Retrieved July 19, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Max Höfler: Engelbrot (emergency and hunger bread) . In: Journal for Austrian Folklore . No. 22 . Vienna 1914, p. 79 .
  6. ^ Lev Tolstoy: The famine in Russia . 1894, p. 7 .
  7. ↑ Cereal flours . In: A. Juckenack et al. (Ed.): Handbuch der Lebensmittelchemie . tape 5 . Julius Springer, Berlin 1938, p. 183 .
  8. ↑ Russian hunger bread . In: Globus . No. 63 , 1893, pp. 348 .
  9. ↑ H. v. H .: Finnish hunger bread . In: Globus . No. 64 , 1893, pp. 51 .
  10. ↑ https://uwe-spiekermann.com/2019/03/09/eichelbrot-notnahrung-armenspeise-g Bäumenhappen /
  11. ↑ Max Höfler: Angel bread . S. 81 .
  12. ^ Arnulf Scriba: Substitute Products. In: Living Museum Online. German Historical Museum, accessed on July 19, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Bruno Heymann: Outline of Hygiene . 10th edition. Berlin 1927, p. 154-155 .
  14. ↑ Rudolf Otto Neumann: The breads, bread substitutes and bread stretchers used in the war 1914–1918 and recommended for use . Berlin 1920, p. 6-7 .
  15. ^ René Schlott: Bizarre Adenauer inventions: Konrad the bread. In: Spiegel Online . May 1, 2015, accessed August 3, 2018 .
  16. ^ Rudolf Kobert: About the use of blood as an additive to food. A warning about wartime . 4th edition. Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart 1917.
  17. ↑ Rudolf Otto Neumann: The breads, bread substitutes and bread stretchers used in the war 1914–1918 and recommended for use . S. 299–300 (In Westphalia there was the traditional Wöppchenbrot with a slightly different recipe.).
  18. ↑ Two-paw rolls from the hunger year 1817. In: Historisches Museum Basel. Retrieved July 18, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Barkbröd. In: Nordiska museet. Retrieved July 19, 2018 .