Sept. 28, 1912 
FOREST AND STREAM 
391 
nomical way for the Italian baker to utilize his 
stale bread returns and left-overs. For sustain¬ 
ing qualities, these biskots are any time the equal 
of our high-grade pilot hard-tack crackers, and 
superior as plain fare to any fancy biscuit. (Let 
us call these stale bread hard-tacks by the Italian 
name of biskot.) 
And to this day this original biskot has suc¬ 
cessfully endured among the Italian soldiery and 
jnavy and Alpinists. Biscuits as we know 
them are scarcely known in the boot-shaped 
peninsula. 
The biskot is an all-purpose or multi-usable 
biscuit—serviceable alone, or for the soup, or 
with wine or coffee or milk or tea or water. 
HOW ANY CAMPER CAN MAKE HIS OWN STALE 
BREAD BISKOTS. 
Every camper should have a “speaking ac¬ 
quaintance" with these biskots, since they are so 
easily obtainable of Italian bakeries throughout 
our land. Further, any camper can get an idea 
from them to make his own stale bread biscuits 
if necessary. Thus, if having any farmhouse or 
city fresh bread on hand, or that once was fresh, 
which is in danger of molding, or has acquired 
the repulsive confined-air taint, just slice it and 
nicely brown it by toasting, or lightly Dutch-oven 
it to a gentle crisp. This kills any fungus growth, 
or the heat dissipates any foul-air suspicion, and 
your camp-made biskots, properly dried out and 
packed in transparent impermeable tissue paper, 
will stand you in good stead for months for use 
as they are, or as a fine soup stock. Most every 
store sells some wrapped bread. Save those 
wrappers for your biskots, if making any. 
^ ^ ^ ^ 
Good reader, did you ever, when camping 
and returning to camp jaded out of an after¬ 
noon, get a whiff of the fragrance of buttered 
toast? Didn’t it smell good? Well, our friends 
the mountaineers and campers of the Italian 
lakes region, carry their own buttered toast along 
in impermeable transparent paper packages. It 
is in the form of little bread sticks, about the 
thickness of those long and brittle fresh bread 
sticks you see in some restaurants. But these 
buttered toast breads are more convenient to 
handle, being only twenty centimeters long (about 
eight inches). In the making, the pure unsalted 
butter is compounded with the dough, and the 
whole baked in big batches of sticks to a nicely 
browned crisp. This butter content causes the 
cracker or biscuit to be somewhat staining if 
packed away in ordinary paper bags or cartons, 
so wax paper coverings must be used, which can 
be placed in anything—leather wallet, paste board 
case, or paper bag even. 
Conveniences over ordinary buttered toast: 
No waiting, no slicing, no toasting, no knife: no 
butter-can to have to dig out from the duffle 
bag; and freedom from the greasy hands as after 
munching the ordinary buttered toast slices. Our 
hosts of Italian-speaking citizens do not know of 
our American buttered toast slices, but use these 
buttered toast sticklets. All our cities of import 
without exception contain Italian bakeries, and 
all sell biskots—these among them. Due to their 
shape, they are ideal with eggs spooned or eaten 
from the shell, to steep into the yolk. In our 
boyhood days on a Connecticut farm we used 
finger-length cuts of bread for this purpose, and 
called the pieces “fingers.” 
THE world’s ONLY SUN-BAKED BREADSTUFFS 
(CENTRAL ASIA). 
The sun-dried bread-sheeting of Central 
Asia, looking like so much chamois leather, has 
already been noted in this journal, and a frag¬ 
ment of it illustrated. Now we can show a 
regular commercial size specimen of it, for this 
raisin-syrup-compounded sheeting is made in 
pieces up to bed sheet sizes, and is often used 
in the bazars of the caliphates at the stalls, as 
temporary awnings to defeat the caloric-energies 
of old Sol. 
At the caravansaries of the inland Asiatic 
marts it is much esteemed by the coffee drinkers; 
and if a layer of the apricot-fruit-sheeting is 
sandwiched between, this constitutes the chic 
“fruit-cracker" of the feminines of the caravan¬ 
sary harem 
One of the most puzzling forms of hard-tack 
outing and recreation biscuits is the singular 
pulley-wheel-shaped cracker represented by the 
group of three specimens depicted in the cut. It 
is known that the hole through the center is for 
convenience in stringing and carrying, but why 
the pronounced pulley-wheel-like groove on the 
periphery or rim is a mystery. Briefly, the 
origin is not known. I never found an Italian 
baker who could explain, either here or on the 
Mediterranean. But there, they are usually liter¬ 
ally the submerged tenth in ignorance. Most 
bread forms have some raison d’etre or signifi¬ 
cance. Thus, in works-on phallic-worship we read 
of the origin of the shell-shaped morning rolls 
which are brought to the guest at continental 
hotels and restaurants. In remote ages, when 
bread was made in nunneries, the nuns molded 
the bread shell-shaped as an offering to the gods, 
as exemplifying what they regarded as all that 
was most sacred to themselves physiologically. 
RUSSIAN BISCUITRY. 
The huge Russian dominions, extending from 
the Baltic to the Pacific—some 8000 miles right 
across—still see to-day a vast amount of posting 
travel. By this is meant per horse conveyances 
from stancia to stancia. To meet the require¬ 
ments of commissariat travel, all the travel food 
conveniences of Europe and Asia have been 
drawn upon; and for small-arms and tools, al¬ 
most every American idea has been appropriated 
that was worth while: the goods made whole¬ 
sale in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but labeled 
with American lettering as if made here, and of 
course the United States makers never find it 
out. No sooner is our bulky weekly official 
Patent Office Gazette published, than copies are 
dispatched to regular pirating firms in the chief 
manufacturing cities of Russia, and often the 
counterfeit goods are selling on the Russian mar¬ 
kets months before they are here! I saw evi¬ 
dence enough of this during a couple of years’ 
meanderings over the Russian domain. 
So if Americans appropriate a few Russian 
ideas in travel-bread conveniences, it will be but 
a “mutual exchange.” 
TINY RING BISCUITS USED AS WEDDING RINGS. 
There is a class of Russian small hard-tack 
ware known as the fit-the-mouth begl. It is al¬ 
ways circular, like a ring. The center bore is 
for stringing. Indeed, instances have occurred 
where this bread ring—although clumsy for the 
purpose—has been actually utilized as an extem¬ 
pore ring for marrying poor peasants with whom 
the gold ring was lacking (just as door keys 
have been utilized occasionally for marrying poor 
couples). I never saw the ceremony performed, 
but my friend Franzi Taormina, who knows all 
about these biscuits, has thus repeatedly informed 
me. 
This begl is cleanly to handle, and there is 
never any waste due to breakage. It is much 
appreciated by the Russians with their tea drink¬ 
ing. In the bazars it is often used by the petty 
merchants ignorant of the three r's as a make-do 
abakus, or counter—a lower string of one unit 
(10) serving for kopeks and an upper row of 
the same number representing rubles. 
CHESTNUT FLOUR BISCUITRY (ITALY). 
The chestnut flour bread of the Italian penin¬ 
sula is a great standby of campers, mountain¬ 
eers, fisher folk, campaigners and smugglers. It 
is the only breadstuff in the universe which is 
1—Macaroni hard-taqk crackery, available as biscuit or as a soup stock. 2— Oat-bread (fragment), famed in 
Celtic pastoral communities. 3—Fit-the-moutn begl crackers of Slav regions (sometimes dubbed in the ver¬ 
nacular "wedding rings,’’ because marriages have actually been performed among the indigent peasants with 
these small biscuit rings). A great standby of Slav excursionists as a clearly portable, loose-in-pocket travel 
cracker. 4—Pulley-shaped crude appearing hard-tack biscuits of South Europe—a standby of the Sicilian 
smugglers and fisher folk. Origin unknown. 
