Sledging Biscuits from the Tomb Raider Cookbook

The next recipe I made from Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide was Sledging Biscuits. A very simple recipe, they're intended as a high-calorie, life-sustaining snack/meal for travel in harsh conditions, namely Antarctica. Lara may well have taken some with her for sustenance during her Antarctica voyage in Tomb Raider III.

The cookbook recommends eating them with butter or cheese, or if you happen to have pemmican and snow, Antarctic hoosh, a stew of those ingredients plus the biscuits, crumbled. I don't know where I could get pemmican near me, and it's not particularly appetizing except in a life or death situation. I instead opted for a tried and true favorite of the Southern U.S.: biscuits and gravy. Normally you'd make risen biscuits with gravy, but I thought, why not try them with Sledging Biscuits? The main difference from more traditional biscuits is their lack of leavening agent.

I'm still trying to master the art of the dough. When I roll it out, it's never in a straight rectangle or circle; it always protrudes out in various directions and I sometimes have to patch over thinner parts. I managed to get ten biscuits out of the batch of dough I made, which is two more than the book says it makes. I wasn't too bothered that they didn't all match up in size, they were about the same thickness, and anyway, imperfect cooking is rustic, authentic. Normally you eat with your eyes first, but in the South Pole you don't care what your food looks like as long as it will fill your stomach and keep you going.

These were very tasty! They have a good snap to them, are well seasoned on their own, and they're shelf-stable, so they'd last a long time in a harsh environment. They paired really well with the simple sausage gravy I made, plus some green beans I took out of the freezer. You have to have some green vegetables, I tell myself (and usually don't eat them anyway. I'm getting better).

If you want to make this recipe for Sledging Biscuits yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide. If you want to make the sausage gravy, the recipe I used was from The Salty Marshmallow, using half beef stock and half light cream. For the green beans, I simply sautéd them in olive oil with a sliced shallot and some garlic.