There has always been a need for compact forms of food that you could stuff in a pack for times when you were cut off from resupply and had to make do with only what you had on you, or what you could find locally. The Germans apparently approached this with erbswurst…a compressed ration of pea meal and other things that, when dissolved in a canteen cup full of hot water, allowed the user to make a soup. Personally, it seems rather unappealing to me but I suppose if your stuck in Stalingrad watching your comrades eat dead horses, it might not seem too bad.
Today, of course, we have MRE’s, freezedrieds, and even simple off-the-shelf soup products that are leaps and bounds ahead of the technology that brought us erbswurst. But… it’s an interesting concept. If a person had access to on of those consumer-grade freeze driers you could make some pretty impressive fare. Here are a couple videos on the subject:
It’s not too hard to imagine the plethora of items found in a modern supermarket that might lend themselves to this sort of thing. The trick is to keep the main principles as the fore: compactness, longevity, and nutrition.
This was actually addressed in a product that came out of WW2 …MPF…a fascinating product with a fascinating backstory: A nalgene bottle full of that stuff would probably duplicate (or exceed) the nutritional value of erbswurst and be a tad more versatile. That MPF, by the way, can be replicated at home.
For running out the door on your way to the boogaloo, a bag of a few days worth of freeze drieds takes virtually no weight and very little space. The more hidebound might go with a few tins of meat and that sort of thing. But wandering around a supermarket sometime, with a careful eye, might reveal some interesting choices for the ‘iron rations’ to keep in your gear. But…the Germans did it first, apparently.
A Omar Bradley once said ‘Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics’ which is why the first thing taken out by an smart general is ports, railways and bridges to choke off supplies. Rommel was a superior military mind but lost Africa when he out ran his supply line.
Napolean knew an army marches on its stomach and was successful because he focused on a blitzkrieg type of warfare and made getting food to his military a top prioity. If you can’t feed ’em they ain’t going to be around long.
Interesting this stuff is considered ‘shelf-stable’. Won’t the pork fat go rancid in several weeks? I’ll give it a shot.
The old form of this is pemmican(dried meat mixed with fat and berries) was used by native americans and voyagers(french fur trappper/traders) who were known for extreme physical feats of endurance (paddling/portaging cargo canoes thousands of miles with hundreds of pounds of furs and supplies).
Those pea soup tabs also had ham as part of the mixture. They were still available until about five years ago. They military vet who owned and operated Repro-Rations broke the bad news to us that these were no longer available. They were issued with hard bread and coffee as part of the daily diet of the German soldiers in both World Wars. Referred to as iron rations. Napoleon was correct in his understanding of logistics. An army marches on its stomach. Well fed troops can fight better and longer. He knew this and ordered experimentation with forms of food preparation and preservation. One was the use of wine and champagne bottles to preserve food.
If it weren’t for the winter before the gates of Moscow he might have met his goals of domination of Europe. His army of invasion that entered Russia was the largest ever assembled in those times. The number that came back to France was about ten percent of what he left with. The invisible ally of Russian armies saved Russia.
Then came the Winter War of 1940 and the Finns. Perhaps the best winter fighting troops ever. Reference: Simo Hiya. Finn sniper. One of the few times the Russians met their match or betters in winter fighting.
pemmican, hard tack, parched corn. light, nutritious, long lasting, cheap, eat on the go. sometimes the old ways are best.
While not nearly as good as almost everything else listed here in the comments, for Iron Rations I just go with parched wheat. Good enough on a frugal budget. And for when Old Age gives you a limited diet.
Don’t forget hardtack. I’ve eaten my share of that. Made a lot as well. Essentially a thick Square biscuit resembling a thick cracker. Made by several commercial bakeries in the north. Once these had set a few months and hardened up they made it to the battle front. Fresh made it isn’t bad. But most units bake it in the fall. Then commit the crackers to a box and leave them in the garage over the winter. That’s when they become “tooth dullers”. Sheet iron crackers. And if some stories are believed sewn into vests to make them impervious to the rifled Minnie bullets of the day.
Add some bacon, salt pork or salt beef. Some dried peas, rice and of course coffee beans(green) to be roasted in your small fry pan life wasn’t bad. But the fresh baked bread loaves that were made by the field bakeries were better and hard to beat. The Union Army of the Potomac had bakeries that baked 75,000 loaves a day. Each man received a loaf of bread that was to last two days.
I’ll go with my favorites, thanks – fruitcake and peanut butter.
Fruitcake is the original lembas bread or cram IMHO. Shelf stable, no cooking required, my favorite hiking food. I’m the only one in the extended family that likes the stuff, so until diabetes told me no, I got everyone’s Christmas fruitcakes.
Peanut butter is cheap and incredibly nutritious. A plastic spoon to go with the plastic jar, and that 1lb jar has 28oo calories in it. Some fiber powder and a multivitamin for balance, and you’re good to go.
I wrote a story on Fruitcake as a Survival food years back. It was published in Backwoodsman magazine.
Sorry that I could not find that story but I did find this.https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/dec/24/time-isnt-on-fruit-cakes-side-but-taste-sure-is/
Today a similar product, Plumpy’Nut, is commercially available. Designed to treat severely malnourished persons g..d only knows how many calories this stuff has in it! Plus it tastes like Nutella. Personally I’d add a multivitamin as those will decay first. I’m a little surprised at the snowpack out here in western Mt this year (basically none). Hopefully we get some blizzards. Stay safe.
I’ve seen Plumpy’Nut on the news for years and always thought it looked like peanut butter, but nor having the name to look it up. Now I have the name [Thank You] I looked it up, guess what it is peanut butter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
https://www.unicef.org.au/blog/unicef-in-action/this-peanut-butter-has-changed-the-world
Is there anywhere to find out if adding ingredients like the powdered protein used by weightlifters would work? Or powdered cauliflower, broccoli, carrot or kale found at health food stores? I didn’t see any way to contact the S2 guys below the video, and am not the most technologically inclined person.
I see I’m not the only one who’s noticed the S2 Underground site. 😉
Another choice is from the Hudson Bay Company. Their fur traders and later employees had a list of foods and beverage that was/is required for their winter expeditions or flights into the Canadian bush. It included equipment but was all nicely packed in a convenient package till needed.
Foods included Pilot bread, tea bags, sugar, beef and chicken bullion. So tinned meats like Click (Canada’s version of Spam) and other tinned fished packed in oil. Sardines to be sure as well.as other choices.
After watching the In Range video a year ago I attempted to dehydrate pea soup. Worked out rather well. In place of ham I add bacon bits when I rehydrate it. A little hot sauce, some MRE bread and lunch is served!
Make sure you don’t have an allergy to peas before stocking up on this, or being in the position to NEED to eat what you are carrying. You may not notice a problem if you only encounter the few peas found in a soup can, but serious amounts at one sitting could be a real problem. That may also trigger a more sensitive reaction to peas in the future, where you have to fish out those found in a soup or stew.
The poster who said that erbswurst was used by the Germans in Wars One and Two is right, but doesn’t go far enough. It actually dates back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when they called it “dynamite soup” because it came in a package that looked like a stick of blasting powder.
Here’s what Horace Kephart wrote about it in 1885 in Outing magazine. It’s also in his book Camping and Woodcraft, which I read 50 years ago.
“In 1870 there was issued to every German soldier a queer, yellow, sausage-shaped contrivance that held within its paper wrapper what looked and felt like a short stick of dynamite. No, it was not a bomb nor a hand grenade. It was just a pound of compressed dry pea soup. This was guaranteed to support a man’s strength for one day, without any other aliment whatever. The soldier was ordered to keep this roll of soup about him at all times, and never to use it until there was no other food to be had. The official name of the thing was erbswurst (pronounced airbs-voorst) which means pea sausage.
Within a few months it became famous as the “iron ration” of the Franco-Prussian war.
Our sportsmen over here are well acquainted with erbswurst. It is their last call to supper when they have had no dinner and see slight prospect of breakfast. Besides, it is the lazy man’s prop on rainy days, and the standby of inexperienced cooks.
Nobody can spoil erbswurst in the cooking, unless he goes away and lets it burn. All you do is start a quart of water boiling, tear off the cover from a quarter-pound roll of “dynamite soup,” crumble the stuff finely into the water with your fingers, and boil for fifteen or twenty minutes, stirring a few times to avoid lumps. Then let the mess cool, and go to it.
It never spoils, never gets any punkier than it was at the beginning. The stick of erbswurst that you left undetected in the seventh pocket of your hunting coat, last year, will be just as good when you discover it again this year. Mice won’t gnaw it; bugs can’t get at it; moisture can’t feaze it. I have used rolls that had lain so long in damp places that they were all mouldy outside, yet the food within was neither worse nor better than before.
A pound of erbswurst, costing thirty two cents, is about all a man can eat in three meals straight. Cheap enough, and light enough, and compact enough, God wot. However this little boon has a string attached. Erbswurst tastes pretty good to a hungry man in the woods as a hot noonday snack, now and then. It is not appetizing as a sole mainstay for supper on the same day. Next morning, supposing you have missed connections with camp, and have nothing but the third of that erbswurst, you will down it amid tempests and storms of your own raising. And thenceforth, no matter what fleshpots you may fall upon, you will taste dynamite soup for a week.”
The tempests and storms mentioned above are, of course, flatulence, the same you’d get if you ate baked beans for a whole day.