Wallpaper paste, potato peelings and tree bark – everything that could be considered even conditionally edible was added to the bread.
Bread is the head of everything. We have remembered this proverb since childhood. But now for us it’s just food. At any time, you can go to the store and buy any: with seeds, bran, vegetables, gluten-free, from corn flour …
And the generation of our grandparents has a completely different attitude to bread – anxious. People who survived the Great Patriotic War know the value of every crumb. Bread was often the only food that front-line soldiers and residents in the rear could afford. But even for him, the name “bread” was rather nominal, because the amount of flour in the composition with each war year became less and less. So what was that bitter bread of war made of?
The Germans destroyed the conquered territories cleaned up, destroyed the mills, took the harvest. Unsurprisingly, the cultivation of grain and the production of flour fell several hundred times. At the same time, almost everything that could be grown in these difficult conditions went to the front. However, this does not mean that the soldiers ate delicious white bread, no.
The front-line bread was literally bitter – this is not a figure of speech. It consisted of about 40 percent of rye wallpaper flour. And the rest 60 – what was not there. Bakers had to look for at least some nutritional supplement. For the bread, they took soy flour, beet cake, malt, bran, seed meal. Often sawdust also fell into the dough – the cooks had to work right in the trenches during the fighting.
Life was not easier for those who remained in the rear. They literally ate scraps, because all the products went to the front. The Moscow Technological Institute of the Food Industry then developed a special bread recipe.
It included potatoes, bran, cake, flour from herbs that were conventionally considered edible: nettles, quinoa, even from birch branches. Bread was baked in molds, greased with anything: there was no sunflower oil, technical ones were used, from which they made emulsions for lubrication.
However, such a recipe was practically a delicacy. Often a kind of bread was baked from potato peels, acorns, pine needles, bark of young trees, stump dust, wallpaper glue, and the flour was replaced with black starch with a musty smell. Such bread ached stomachs, but it helped to withstand at least one more day. At one time, even cellulose was added to the bread for bulk. But there was more harm than good from such food.
And even such recipes were kept in the strictest confidence. First, the invaders could not be allowed to take away the last that remained from the people. And secondly, one could assume that you still eat bread, although only the name remained from it.
They had their own special bread in besieged Leningrad. However, it was difficult to call it bread in the usual sense. The recipe, which was once created in the Central Laboratory, included everything that was in the city at the moment. Estimates of flour collected from the walls of workshops, shaking out of sacks, wallpaper flour, husk, cake, cellulose, even birch buds … At different times, the recipe could contain from two to six flour substitutes. And if you also spread it with mustard, salt, and pepper – this already turns out to be a “blockade cake”.
What was practically not there was real grain and ordinary flour. Already by September 12, 41, five days after the start of the blockade, there were a little more than a month of these reserves in the city. And there were long 900 hungry days ahead….
But even such bread was catastrophically scarce. The daily bread ration was reduced five times. 250 g for workers and 125 for everyone else – this was the minimum ration. A small block that could not satisfy the constant agonizing feeling of hunger. This rule was in effect for a month, from November 20 to December 25, 1941. And only during this time at least 50 thousand people died of starvation in the besieged city.