I am in chapter 2 and Boddyknock's quest will not advance. When I speak with him there is no dialogue option to further his story. It might be because I did not find the leaven bread recipe in chapter 1. Is this henchmen's quest no longer achievable? Is the item you get for completing his quest very useful or important?

If you didn't complete the quest in chapter 1, the quest doesn't advance because the reward is an item, in Boddyknock's case a ring, which is upgraded everytime you finish the quest, the same goes for all other henchmen. The ring gives charisma and regeneration, nice but not really important.

I found the item quite useful for the regen effect. It was one of the rings I almost always had on.

You can create the base item using the debug options, if you want to advance the quest.

Hello bro.. There are two ways you can finish this quest ( but only no.2 should work)

1.) Sadly there is no chance to recover that quest again by normal means since you cannot go back to chapter 1, after beginning chapter two..

2.) If you're too lazy starting over again yo u can cheat your way out.. Warning: Cheating is bad and it will spoil the fun in game, So try it at your own risk: just do the steps below if you're into cheating..

Step 1: Activate the game's console then type "DebugMode 1". don't copy the quotations just copy the word..
Step 2: Copy and Type This:
dm_spawnitem nw_hen_bod1qt

Step 3: The code will spawn Bodyknock's leaven bread recipe and it will drop on the ground near your character and you have to find it then complete the quest..

Quest artifacts like the bread recipe from the previous chapter will do no good in chapter 2. The hench convos that would provide the quest reward are replaced by new ones each chapter. The only way to avoid the tedium of repeating what you've already played through is to spawn in the +1 ring which acts as a prereq to get the appropriate convo in Ch2 and then that updated version of the ring is required to get the final version in Ch3.

Spawing in items missed due to not understanding how the prereqs work is hardly cheating, just trying to get on with the campaign without getting bored to death. The loss of the convo XP from missing the item should be penalty enough to remind the player in the future to try to complete ALL the hench quests for maximum XP.

And I agree that until another item with regen drops into your lap, that ring can be very handy.