What’s truly amazing is that zombie bones actually contain gluten and make a pretty good loaf.
Seems a lot of quibbling. My recollection is not that the giant says ‘I’ll grind your bones to make my bread without the addition of any other ingredients.’
I think we can all agree life would be better were giants required to disclose their recipes.
FDA labeling requirements were much more lax in those days, so I suppose the English rules might have been too. If it were today, then for sure he’d have to include a complete ingredient list and nutritional label.
Today, we have a big stink about all those hamburgers with the horsemeat mixed in. Back then, though, you could have mixed horse bones (even non-English horse bones) with British human bones, and ground them all together and gotten away with it.
In Tibet, they do make a sort of bread from human bone meal. It’s for the purpose of “sky burial” where they dispose of corpses by feeding them to birds. After cutting all the flesh from the bones, they grind the bones into meal, make them into bannock-like cakes, and set them out for the birds.
Seems like alternative versions lumped together. Anyway, just a note that “coffin” was the word for any hollowed out baked good/pastry/pie that was pre-baked (today sometimes called “baked blind”) to be filled with another food and baked again or served up. Shakespeare’s play on the two meanings of the word is clear (as well as the one on paste/pasties).
It’s considered S.'s first play. It has not much going for it except its extreme goriness. Don’t even ask what this meal was in retribution for.
I too have experimented with novel things-that-look-like-flour baking experiments. I once shook a huge amount of talcum powder in the tub and let the water mix in to see what happens.
I’m embarrassed to say at what age as an adult I did this.
Two things:
- As other posters have noted, the giant is making a chilling threat, in rhyming poetry no less. That’s not the place to seek literal interpretations (as much fun as that can be.)
- Here’s my recipe for the giant’s threat: People have been known to dig up mass graves (like, from battles or epidemics), grind up the skeletal remains, and use the result as fertilizer. I.e., they ground up the bones to raise grain, which they then processed as normal to make bread. All of the gross, icky steps happen before the mill, kitchen, and bakery.
Bon Appétit!
Perhaps he was selling bone meal and using ‘bread’ to mean his monetary income. This usage has been around a long time. The term ‘bread’ as we use it now for the concoction made from flour, water, salt, and yeast was evident in the 10th century. Use of ‘bread’ meaning money is recorded in the early 1700s:
While the line from Jack and the Beanstalk and it’s predecessor tales first appeared in writing just a few years earlier in 1711.
Maybe not the most likely explanation, but coulda happened. Just sayin’
Dog biscuits are/were commonly made with a mixture of bone meal and grain flours; so it’s definitely possible to make something resembling baked goods using bonemeal as an ingredient. I think if you try to make it the main ingredient, it’s likely to be somewhere on the spectrum of success for gluten-free breads. Somewhere quite near the low end of that spectrum, I would say.
Ah. A Native American giant, then, one of those dudes renowned for using every part of the Englishmun.
1.) I recall reading about how unscrupulous bakers used to add things like marble dust to the bread dough in order to make the bread whiter. This was back in the Bad OLd Days, before there were health inspectors.
2.) In times of stress, people apparently HAVE made bread of bones. At least partly:
The website author then proceeds to make bread from bone meal
With pictures!
When I think of fairy tales and bone bread, I think of Jack Gilford, starting at 5:25