Lembas - Elvish Waybread: a real-world recipe (2024)

Here's a recipe I put together for Lembas bread. Didn't know I could bake, did you? Well, I can, and I'm pretty durned good at it when I want to be.

Note: Okay, this isn't exactly directly related to OD&D, but we all know that there is a relationship between OD&D and Middle Earth, and this makes for a good holiday treat, or a nice, filling and fairly healthy snack at the gaming table.

Here's how it came about: we were doing a Lord of the Rings marathon at my buddy Mike's house when the RotK extended edition came out. Mike has a 42" widescreen and a really kick ass surround sound system, so we got together at 9:00 AM on Saturday and watched all twelve-plus hours of the epic trilogy back to back. It was awesome.

Anyway, I wanted to contribute something so I started searching for recipes for Lembas bread. My efforts that year were futile, but flash forward to last Christmas. I got the hankering to try again, so I looked up some recipes online. This time I was successful in finding a bunch, but was wildly unhappy with the vast majority of them. It seemed stupid to me that everyone puts orange peel or citrus fruit into Lembas, when elves lived in a temperate climate in England.

So I set about to make my own, based on what we know of Lembas bread. Here's what Tolkien says about Lembas:

They contain honey (or at least they "remain sweet for many days" and are reminiscent of, and better than, "the honey-cakes baked by the beornings.")
they are cream-colored on the inside with a light brown outer crust
they are thin and regular-shaped (mine are rectangular).
they are hearty and healthy. One cake is supposedly enough to sustain a man for a full day's march.
They contain the "fruit of the Mallorn Tree" - a fictional plant from Middle Earth, but the "fruit" is described as a nut with a silver shale.

Some other things we can guess, just based on what Lembas is: It is likely it contains fruit and flower-water or juice of some sort. Since elves live in a temperate climate, apples or berries, perhaps strawberries or blueberries, are a good bet. The type of fruit used will change the flavor of the bread. I am going with apples due to the fact that Tolkien says Lembas is golden on the outside and cream-colored inside; berries would color the bread dark inside, while apples will not have this effect.

In addition, Lembas should contain some kind of finely ground light-colored nut for protein (recall that the "fruit of the Mallorn tree" is actually a nut with a silver shale). I use walnuts, but peanuts, almonds, cashews, pistachios, or even chestnuts would work well, too. Some have described the Mallorn fruit as being similar to acorns, though due to the dangers of consuming improperly prepared acorns, this isn't recommended for us mortals.

It's likely that nourishing flour, such as whole grain, would be used. I use half wheat flower and half white. My original attempt used all wheat flour but resulted in a very heavy, very dry cake. Using pastry flour for the wheat portion also makes for a lighter cake.

A final note: the addition of vanilla and cinnamon to my recipe was originally done to help offset the somewhat floury flavor of the final cake, and it worked out brilliantly. However, as an added bonus, there are in fact health benefits to both vanilla and cinnamon, so they fit in well with the overall recipe! It is, however, unfortunate that cinnamon and vanilla are both tropical plants, so their inclusion does remove the recipe somewhat from the realm of probable accuracy. I'd be interested in hearing any suggestions for replacing these two spices with some that are indigenous to Europe in the U.K. region, which would work well with a sweeter bread such as this.

So without further ado, here it is: my recipe for Lembas. I am constantly tweaking this recipe; this is the most recent version and I am transcribing it here having just pulled a batch out of the oven not ten minutes ago. The final consistency of these is somewhere between a bread and a cookie, not unlike a shortbread.