Simple Living: The Parable of Pilot Bread

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8 Responses to Simple Living: The Parable of Pilot Bread

  1. John and Mary Helfrich says:

    Please !!!!! When you get the recipe for the “pilot bread”, please pass it on here. We will make it and think of our wonderful trips to the homestead a few years back.
    All the best and Happy New Year!
    John and Mary

  2. Jessie says:

    I have never heard of pilot bread, but I just looked it up online. I wonder if it’s more expensive now because it appeals to the “prepper” crowd. Looks like it has a very long shelf life.

  3. Mark Zeiger says:

    Interesting, Jessie! I don’t know that other preppers would be very interested in pilot bread, because, as a white flour cracker, it has little or no actual food value. For me, it’s mostly a comfort food. But, just the fact that you had to search it indicates that it’s becoming less well known. Which is not to say the higher price would be justified….

  4. Mark Zeiger says:

    John, I can’t wait to send that to you, because you’ll find it very funny–almost all the recipes I found are hard tack recipes, mostly from re-enactment groups striving for authentic inedibility! I’ll pull my notes together and send it to you via private email.

    But, it makes me wonder: we didn’t actually feed you pilot bread when you visited, did we? Hopefully, we stuck to healthier fare–except for my homemade wine, of course!

  5. Angie says:

    The closest product to Pilot Bread that we had in the east when I was growing up was Uneeda Biscuits, which are basically an obese saltine without the salt, which is also how I think of Pilot Bread. As you say, no nutritional value whatsoever, but comforting as only pure carbohydrates can be. I don’t even know if they still make Uneeda Biscuits, for that matter, bu you can aways describe Pilot Bread to an Eastener of a certain age as “It’s like a Uneeda Biscuit, only more so.”

  6. Mark Zeiger says:

    Angie, I’ve seen those! I remember wondering, as a kid, if the name was an intentional promotional pun, or just a coincidence. “An obese saltine” says so much about these crackers, does it not?

  7. Angie says:

    Mark, it was an intentional pun. The product is (or was?) over a hundred years old, and I THINK it was the first packaged biscuits on the market, predating Saltines.

    The 1950’s musical “The Music Man” (a gentle love-letter to small-town America, circa 1910) opens with a song called “Rock Island,” where traveling salesmen on a train lament modernity and the vanishing 19th century. “The Uneeda Company put the Uneeda Biscuit in an air-tight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete, obsolete!” (Take THAT, Saltines!)

    FYI, There is no “Uneeda Company”: It was a product of the National Biscuit Company, aka Nabisco.

    And if there’s a more-fitting description than “obese saltine,” I’ll start using it.

  8. Mark Zeiger says:

    I knew I’d heard the name somewhere before! Heaven knows, I’ve seen The Music Man often enough!

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