Samwise Gardner's Birthday by Lindariel

Posted on 1 August 2020; updated on 1 March 2021

Part 2

"There is no record of the Shire-folk commemorating either March 25 or September 22; but in the Westfarthing, especially in the country round Hobbiton Hill, there grew up a custom of making holiday and dancing in the Party Field, when weather permitted, on April 6. Some said that it was old Sam Gardner’s birthday, some said that it was the day on which the Golden Tree first flowered in 1420, and some that it was the Elves’ New Year."
-The Return of the King, Appendix D, "The Calendars"

Part I of this article touched on some foods that might be served at Fourth Age picnics celebrating April 6 in the Westfarthing. Rabbit stew, fish and chips, and mushroom ketchup are appropriate for the celebration of Sam Gamgee Gardner, a Hobbit cook. This article, however, focuses on a food more suited to honor and remember Sam the Elf-friend, his mallorn tree, and the New Year of the Elves, to wit, lembas.

The lembas we know from The Lord of the Rings was given to the Fellowship by Galadriel at the time they left Lothlórien to serve as traveling rations. Galadriel's gift of mallorn leaf-wrapped lembas fed the whole Fellowship throughout their adventures, but it was instrumental in keeping Sam and Frodo nourished when they had no other sustenance. In the land of Mordor Sam shorted his own rations to keep Frodo fed, making Sam the member of the Fellowship whose survival owed the most to the sustaining powers of lembas. Galadriel's gift to Sam of a mallorn seed is unexpectedly personal, indicating that she sees eye to eye with Sam on the topic of gardening. One could argue that she, having looked ahead to a time when Lothlórien would pass from her stewardship, passes to Sam the future of the mallorn species in Middle-earth. That Sam had been born on the Elves' New Year is remarkable enough, but for the plant that sprung from her gift to blossom first on that day as well must surely have been viewed as an extraordinary favor granted to Sam. Sam's very life is so tied to his encounters with Galadriel, her lembas, and her mallorn grove that it makes sense to connect them all in this simple yet significant Westfarthing festival. And no doubt Sam the cook would have been curious about how lembas might have been made, just as he had been curious about how the hithlain rope of the Galadhrim was made. It is easy to imagine him handing out sweet biscuits to importunate Hobbit children and telling them this was the Elven bread he ate on his adventures.

When he first saw it, Gimli thought lembas to be "a kind of cram, such as the Dale-men make for journeys in the wild."¹ After he tasted it, he declared it "better than the honey-cakes of the Beornings, and that is great praise, for the Beornings are the best bakers that I know of." ² From the moment lembas is introduced into the narrative, we are presented with the similarities among the travel rations of Elves, Men, and Beornings.

Lembas, cram, and the honeycakes of the Beornings all share certain characteristics: they are readily portable, they have a long shelf life, and they will sustain life for a long time. That gives us a lot of directions to jump, depending on how related we think the food products lembas, cram, and the honeycakes of the Beornings might be, whether culinarily in Tolkien's mind or as subcreations in his world. Tolkien fans interested in the question are going to answer it in different ways depending on which part(s) of the description may seem most important to the individual. For example, most of the fan "waybread" I've encountered has been in the form of rich fruit-nut breads similar to stollen or teacakes. Bread like this definitely satisfies the "can sustain life" part of the description of lembas, but it's manifestly not the thin flat crisp food substance Tolkien describes, nor does it have the lengthy shelf life of lembas. Here below is my take on lembas. If it doesn't suit you, strike off in your own direction and subcreate your own take! It's all good.

What We Know about Lembas

The first lembas was a Valinorean product sent to Middle-earth by Yavanna in order to sustain the Eldar on their long Westward journey. After the Eldar reached Valinor, the baking of lembas was taught and restricted to specially trained Elf maidens called Yavannildi, and it was called coimas, "life-bread." ³ lembas is its Sindarin name. It was made from "a kind of corn which Yavanna brought forth in the fields of Aman." ⁴ Corn, in Tolkien's British English, means wheat (Triticum spp.), so lembas is first and foremost a wheat product.

The lembas dispensed by Galadriel to Frodo and his companions was described as "very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream." ⁵ Tolkien's phrase "[f]rom the ear [of grain] to the wafer," ⁶ further characterizes the cakes. Often in The Lord of the Rings a whole cake of lembas is referred to as a wafer. ⁷ We also know it is crisp; ⁸ Frodo and Sam are sometimes said to "munch" lembas,⁹ as is Gimli on one occasion. ¹⁰ The only other use of the word "munch" in The Lord of the Rings describes eating a very crunchy food indeed. In the song Sam sings in the Trollshaws, "Troll sat alone on his seat of stone/And munched and mumbled a bare old bone." ¹¹ As wafers, lembas could very well have been crunchy as well as crisp.

The lembas wafers given to the Companions by Galadriel were wrapped in mallorn leaves. The Elves who learned to produce it in Middle-earth would not always have had access to mallorn leaves, as those trees are not known to have grown outside Lórien and the Shire. The lembas Melian gave to Beleg Cúthalion in The Silmarillion, for example, were "wrapped in leaves of silver," tied with thread secured with her seal. ¹² Given the link between lembas and Yavanna, it is likely that leaf wrappings were a requirement of the process but that one could use whichever local leaves were most appropriate.

We know that lembas is magical in some way. "Lembas does put heart into you," Merry comments after eating some broken pieces during his escape from the Orcs. ¹³ While chasing the Orcs, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas "could eat of it and find new strength even as they ran"¹⁴ while chasing those same Orcs. In Mordor it sustained Sam and Frodo in a yet more extraordinary way:

The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind. ¹⁵

Tolkien made it clear that the virtue of lembas did not inhere in the ingredients from which it was made: he wrote "[n]o analysis in any laboratory would discover chemical properties of lembas that made it superior to other cakes of wheat-meal." ¹⁶ The Company (with the likely exception of Legolas) would have perceived the power of lembas as the result of Elf-magic rather than ingredients.

Gimli compares lembas to two other foodstuffs in The Lord of the Rings. Before he tastes it he thinks it is just some type of cram,¹⁷ which was the "biscuitish" travel food prepared by the Men of Dale that Bilbo and the Dwarves ate in The Hobbit.¹⁸ cram is most likely a wheat product; it is glossed as a "cake of compressed flour or meal (often containing honey and milk)." ¹⁹ (I imagine cram to be a lot like emergency rations, the shrink-wrapped bricklike stuff I keep in my earthquake kit.) Both lembas and cram are expressly described as originating with wheat, and the words "bread" and "biscuit" are also associated with them.

However, after he tastes lembas Gimli compares it favorably to the honeycakes of the Beornings, the people of Beorn who live in the eaves of Mirkwood. ²⁰ The honeycakes of the Beornings (I just love to say/think/write that, it's like one long word in my brain) are less well described from the perspective of ingredients. The preparation is presumably the legacy of Beorn, more or less the same as the cakes Beorn provided Bilbo and the Dwarves during the Quest of Erebor. The recipe for those cakes was Beorn's secret, but they were "twice-baked," contained honey, and "made one thirsty." ²¹ If they contained enough honey to make one thirsty, they must have been sweet. They are never called bread, or anything other than cakes.

Interestingly, although the food cram is a product of the Men of Dale, the root word of cram is in neither Khuzdul nor a Mannish language. Quite surprisingly, it's Elvish. The root "KRAB- press. N cramb, cram cake of compressed flour or meal (often containing honey and milk) used on long journey" appears in The Etymologies,²² an Elvish linguistic work Tolkien compiled right around and after the year The Hobbit was published. Although it is identified "N" for Noldorin origin, evidence from other words labeled "N" in The Etymologies suggests, as Christopher Tolkien says, that "Noldorin (>Sindarin)." ²³

Accordingly, at some point in the past, the ancestors of the Men of Dale must have had contact with Elvish waybread (or something like it). This contact might come directly via their nearby neighbors the Elves of Mirkwood, who were of Silvan and Sindarin origin. Less likely, but still possible, perhaps some Dwarves at Khazad-dûm preserved the knowledge of lembas after the fall of Eregion and transmitted the idea of lembas/cram to their descendants in other Dwarf kingdoms, including Erebor; subsequent friendly relations between the Men of Dale and the Dwarves of Erebor could have led to the Men of Dale producing cram without even being aware of its source as an Elvish food.

While there is clearly a relationship between lembas and cram, the relationship of either of them to the honeycakes of the Beornings is much less clear. cram could be produced with honey, while the honeycakes presumably always were. But the descriptions of the two products made by Men, cram and the honeycakes of the Beornings, offer us clues to process as well as ingredients. cram is said to be "compressed," while the honeycakes are "twice-baked." These are two very different approaches to biscuity/cakey products. In European historic baking terms, twice-baked cakes would be like biscotti, zwieback, or mandelbread. Compressed cakes would be more like moulded gingerbread, speculaas, springerle, or tirggel.

European traditions in various places produce moulded gingerbread in several different sizes and shapes. All of them rely on pressing dough into a scooped-out mould and then unmoulding it for baking. Speculaas are moulded spice cookies, traditionally made in the Netherlands. Springerle are German, and they are stamped rather than moulded. They are traditionally bone-white, i.e., not allowed to color in the oven, and are flavored with anise. Tirggel are Swiss, sometimes stamped and sometimes moulded, and they are spiced but less so than gingerbread. Tolkien could easily have encountered tirggel during his walking tour of Switzerland, and recipes for tirggel have most directly informed my work on a lembas recipe.

Producing Lembas

Having waded through all that, let us say we are looking to bake lembas that is a thin biscuitish crispy cake made of compressed wheat, honey, and milk. Ideally, pressing the dough into a mould would be preferable, but moulds can be extremely expensive to purchase if you haven't inherited one, as well as very limited in their kitchen usefulness. There is an easier and equally traditional way to compress dough that is less expensive than procuring a mould: rolling it out and using biscuit/cookie stamps. Even if you have no access to such a stamp, they can be procured much less expensively than moulds.

For the purposes of producing some lembas for your next Sam's Birthday Picnic, how about trying some stamped biscuits? Stamped biscuits are made with a simple dough, rolled thin, and pressed with a stamp before baking. Bake up some of these, wrap them in fresh green leaves (not too juicy), and hand them out to your friends as the real deal.

Most of the stamped biscuit recipes I have encountered employ butter instead of liquid milk, and many contain eggs. Most of the ones I saw with honey were gingerbread-type recipes, i.e., very spicy. The perfect recipe has not emerged yet, but I'm still working on it. For now, here's a basic recipe that makes about two dozen rectangular biscuits of about 6x4.5cm, the size of my biscuit stamp. Round stamps will work just as well as square or rectangular ones, as long as you don't mind your lembas lacking corners for curious Dwarves to nibble. You may safely double this recipe if you already are familiar with making stamped biscuits and prepared to undertake a bigger batch.

• 3/8 cup or 120 g clover or wildflower honey (not citrus)
• 3 Tablespoons or 40 g canola oil
• 2 Tablespoons or 31g milk
• 1-7/8 cups or 200 g all-purpose wheat flour or spelt
• a pinch of granulated salt

Whisk together honey, oil, and milk in a bowl. Add flour and salt to bowl. Stir/knead just until uniform in texture. Refrigerate overnight in an airtight container to humidify the dough completely.

The next day, take out the dough and let it warm up for about an hour. It is important that the dough still be cool so it will take stamping properly. You can test its workability by pressing with the stamp.

Roll out the dough on cooking parchment to 1/8" (3mm) thick. Use short incremental strokes so as to not make the dough stick to the parchment.

Spray or brush the stamp surface of your biscuit stamp with oil and wipe smooth; this is especially helpful for wooden stamps. Press firmly but not intensely, and remove carefully. It will start to stick after a while; wipe/spray it again. Cut the biscuits apart. If there is leftover dough, collect it for rerolling.

Chill the cut biscuits briefly before picking them up to put on the baking sheet. That way they'll retain their shape better.

Peel the chilled biscuits off the parchment paper one by one (or use a spatula) and transfer them to an oiled baking sheet or parchment. They won't spread, so they can be put close together.

Bake in a preheated 310F (150-160C) oven for about 20-25 minutes, until they are light golden brown; they will darken a bit and be crisp as they cool.

Cool completely on wire racks. Wrap them in leaves for immediate distribution and/or store them in an airtight container so they don't absorb moisture from the air.

These are very plain (for cookies/biscuits) and taste simply of wheat and honey, which is charming all on its own. But if you feel like seasoning your lembas, some Middle-earth tastes might include bay leaf, thyme, lavender, or rose. Less canonical yet still delicious flavorings include cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, vanilla, citrus peel or, well, the list is endless.

There are plenty of videos on the Internet that show the steps in making stamped biscuits. Most of them involve advertising and product placement, so I won't link them here. But I found this short one on Etsy while shopping for a biscuit stamp last year, and it does a good job of giving you a feel for the method.

Works Cited

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Farewell to Lórien."
2. Ibid.
3. History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, Of Lembas.
4. Ibid.
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Farewell to Lórien."
6. History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, Of Lembas.
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Great River"; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "The Taming of Smeágol," "The Passage of the Marshes," and "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol"; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "The Land of Shadow" and "Mount Doom."
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Farewell to Lórien."
9. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "The Taming of Smeágol," "The Passage of the Marshes"; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "The Land of Shadow."
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Great River."
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Flight to the Ford."
12. The Silmarillion, "Of Túrin Turambar."
13. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "The Uruk-Hai."
14. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, "The Riders of Rohan."
15. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "Mount Doom."
16. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Letter 210 from a Letter to Forrest J. Ackerman."
17. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Farewell to Lórien."
18. The Hobbit, "Not at Home."
19. History of Middle-earth, Volume V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part III, “The Etymologies."
20. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "Farewell to Lórien."
21. The Hobbit, “Queer Lodgings.”
22. History of Middle-earth, Volume V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part III, “The Etymologies."
23. Ibid.