One strain of the growing
locavore and Slow Food movements, which I wish I supported more than I do, is a
move away from consuming bread manufactured by industrial processes and towards
products made by local bakers using more traditional methods. Taking this trend to its logical conclusion,
there has also been a recent rise in urban home baking. What these movements are resisting - buying,
rather than making, your bread - is not a new phenomenon, the fact that Baker
is such a common Anglo-Saxon surname attests to that. However, in late medieval and early modern times,
there was profound shift in where most bread was made, - from the home to the professional
bakery - especially in the growing urban setting.
An article that I am
indebted for much of the information in the next paragraph is called “Crammed
with Distressful Bread? Bakers and the Poor in Early Modern England.” It is
written by Dr. Diane Purkiss, historian and English language professor at the
University of Oxford and included in the book Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare. Dr. Purkiss identifies three reasons why many
people stopped making their own bread: first, in London from the thirteenth
century to the nineteenth, there were harshly enforced statues that tried make bread-making
very uniform. (I do not have time
tonight but in the coming days, I will write more about how dangerous it was in
England’s past to be a bad baker.) Second, you need wood to fire an oven to
bake bread and a group of laws call the Enclosure Acts meant that most people
had less access to what was before common land.
Without that access they could not forage for the fallen wood that was
needed. Third, people were doing less home
brewing (another practice that has seen a modern revival) and the by-products
of that process were used as leaven, in place of the yeast that would be used
today.
Consequently, when you read seventeenth-century “cookbooks,”
despite them often claiming to instruct on everything that a cook or housewife should
know, they rarely provide recipes to make traditional bread. One example is The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying,
and Cookery, written by Hannah Woolley and published in 1675. It
is not that she doesn’t mention bread in the book, she uses it in a lot more
recipes than any modern cook would. In
fact see uses it in medicinal treatments.
“For Fits of the Mother” she recommends: “Take a brown Toast of sour
Bread of the neither Crust, and wash it with Vinegar, and put thereto black
Soap, like as you would butter a Toast, and lay it under the Navel.” Her most
common use of bread, though, was to thicken sauces. In her recipe “To Roast a Hanch of Venison”
she writes:
“Let
your Sauce be Claret-Wine, a handful of grated Bread, Cinnamon, Ginger, Sugar,
a little Vinegar; boil these up so thick, as it may only run like batter; it
ought to be sharp and sweet.”
Despite often using bread, the only recipe is for a specialty one: it is for Bisket-bread, which was hard, designed to
last and a predecessor of the sea-biscuit bread that would fuel Britain’s
sailors for months at a time. It would
have a very interest flavour with some pungent spicing, probably thought to
preserve it better. Her recipe reads:
Take
half a peek [a peck, or 2 gallons] of Flour fine, two Ounces of Anniseeds, two
Ounces of Coriander-seed, the whites of six Eggs, a pint of Ale-Yeast, with as
much warm-water, as will make it up into a Paste, so bake it in a long Role;
when it is two days Old, pare it [take the crust off,] and slice it, then Sugar
it, and dry it in an Oven, and so keep it all the Year.
This is not the bread that is so prevalent in her
other recipes and thus, she and her imagined reader would have had easy access
to “normal” bread without making it: she and most of the people she knew were
buying their bread even back in 1675.
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