So here is my review of the 2008 MENU No. 8.
Note that I haven´t eaten all of the stuff that came in the package so I´ll continue this thread and add more reviews when I´ve tried most of the food.
First look
The RCIR is a 24-hour ration similiar to the German EPA. It contains enough food and beverage bases to feed one soldier for one day. Unlike the Norwegian rations the main meals (2 hot meals per pack) come in tin cans which are meant to be heated with the included Esbit cooker. The pack contains also different beverage bases like tea, coffee, cocoa or milk, a big pack of crackers, a "hors d´ouvres" side meal, tissues, different sweets, soup and a dessert.
Here´s the RCIR next to an EPA and a MRE pack:
The RCIR comes in a plastic cover to protect it against rain. On top of it is a list with the constituents. Fortunately they´re not only in French but also in English, which makes reading easier. Here´s mine. As you can see the two main meals are "beef ravioli" and "bass filet, pasta and ratatouille".
The opened package:
As you can see there´s a heater included. Unlike the German soldier, the French soldier doesn´t seem to be issued with an Esbit cooker, so there´s always a one-time cooker and a few tablets in each RCIR. Here are the items, which come in the "cooker package": Foldable cooker, 6 Esbit tablets, a civilian pack of matches, a black waste bag, water purification tablets and a small tool that is supposed to help you lift the cans from the heater:
My first tastes of French combat rations
Caramels
Because we already had a warm meal when the package arrived I first tried some of the sweets that come with the RCIR. First, I opened the caramels which come in a small white box. Each box contains 4 caramls á 10 gram. Not that much, but fortunately the caramels aren´t the only sweets in the RCIR. Here you can see both the box and two caramels:
Now the taste: Wow, they were incredibly delicious! A mix of vanilla and caramel taste and the drops just melted in my mouth. Soft, sweet and incredibly delicious! A really good and small treat, especially on a march. The taste stayed quite long but at the sime time I didn´t feel like I had glue in my mouth. Really, really good.
Fruit jelly bar
Another sweet treat which comes in the RCIR is the fruit jelly bar. It comes wrapped in a silver-foil and is one of my favourite sweets in the RCIR. It´s soft, the top seems to be covered in small sugar grains which crunch nicely when you bite off a piece of it and tastes just incredibly fruity. Really delicious!
Chocolate
The French chocolate comes also wrapped in silver-foil and is smaller than the EPA chocolate. It contains 60% cocoa and is therefore dark and more bitter than milk chocolate. It tastes just like the EPA chocolate, which is a good thing, atleast for me, because I really like dark chocolate. Delicious and a good small mood-lifter!
The next things I tried were the crackers. They come in a bigger container, which holds 6 smaller cracker packages, each holding 3 crackers. You get 3 sweet and 3 salty packs of crackers. Since there is no jam in the RCIR I guess you eat the crackers either with the chicken liver pate or without anything on top.
Here´s the box holding all crackers:
Salted crackers
First I ate a pack of salted crackers. They are harder than the MRE crackers, but not as hard as the infamous EPA "armour plates". Their taste is not really salty. Instead you rather taste a small hint of salt. All in all they´re better than the MRE crackers, but don´t really live up their name. I guess you´ve got to eat them with the "Hors d´ouvre".
Sweet crackers
Next were the sweet crackers. They have the same consistency as the salted crackers: Harder than MRE crackers, but not as hard as EPA crackers. They smell rather neutral but once you´ve got a good bite in your mouth they show their really taste. They really are sweet. Whereas the EPA crackers rather have a hint of sweetness they really are sweet. Of course no over-the-top sugar sweetness, but they really taste fine. I guess you can eat them together with a hot milk or chocolate as break-fast and you don´t necesarily need any jam or peanut butter on top of them. Add some chocolate or some fruit jelly bar and you´ve got a nice break fast.
That´s my first part of the RCIR review. I´ll add more in the coming days, when I will have recovered from that massive hang-over I´ll definately have tomorrow. So stay tuned for more!
