Some Thoughts on Bread in the French Alps
Some random thoughts stimulated by William’s post.
1. I remain fascinated by firing the monster oven or more precisely by the collecting of real logs not just faggots. It’s doubtless all in Maget’s book, but that’s a lot of large wood for peasants. I look forward to reading about the land tenure scheme that gave them these rights?
I’d also love someone to work out the relative energy costs of firing one huge oven versus a number of smaller ones. How was this system thought up and maintained.
And it does point up, by the way, just how luxurious it is today to be able to construct one’s own bread oven in one’s own back yard.
2. Interesting that they did a baking as the oven was warming. You read so often of foods being put in bread ovens after the bread had been removed. But it the main bread of the year was baking for six hours presumably it stayed in until the oven had cooled down.
3. Adding boiling water to icy rye flour is a new one for me. I’m beginning to run out of synonyms for interesting and fascinating.
4. Freeze dried bread all winter–what a neat idea. Makes one wonder how widespread this practice was.
5. I look forward to seeing how the grinding was done.
6. The book by Maget slots into that fascinating period when French intellectuals and city folk were studying their own “peasantry,” inventing myths about the peasant origins of French food and so on. So besides having lots of wonderful data, Maget’s book itself is part of the history of French food. Bears further thinking about.
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William says his blog/web site is in disorder but readers can link to more he’s written on this bread here.
I’m kicking myself for never having come across Maget’s Le pain anniversaire which you can order here.
And here are links to a series of photos of the annual bread baking. Click through to get the whole sequence.
I do sniff whiffs of the folklorico gusting about.
One of the Rye breads I came across in Lithuania was also made by adding boiling water to the flour, so I would imagine it is a widespread practice (I’m sure William knows more of this).
Actually, Lithuania is the first place that I ate Rye bread and really enjoyed it. Delicious stuff. Not sure how I would feel about it after eating the freeze dried stuff all winter.
I still can’t get my head around the idea of a once a year huge firing of an oven for bread. What carbohydrate did they eat for the rest of the year and how did this process develop instead of of these methods (eg. Northern European thin Ryebreads hung up on strings to dry out). Is it a direct result of the French communal structure in the region, rather then a more individualistic pattern?
Interesting post. I am quite fascinated by bread as well. I was thinking about how come some cultures never made leavened bread? For instance, in Northern India, which is a wheat-eating population never made leavened bread. They only made unleavened bread – Roti or Chapathi and later Tandoori Roti/Naan after the Tandoor was introduced by the Moghuls.
Any thoughts?
I’m interested in the fashion of including the mountain people in the peasantry of French culture. At the moment I don’t find a history of the redrawing of European boundaries through the centuries but I wonder if people of the Alps don’t have more in common with other Alp populations than they do with populations in the surrounding lowlands. Should we be looking more northeast for the origins of customs in this part of France? Have a look at this genetic mapping project.
http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/09/drawing_the_genetic_map_of_europe.html
A comment from Diana Buja. African email addresses and this blog don’t mix it seems so I’m posting for her.
Very interesting, and thinking of other traditional baking techniques: In Egypt, large, wafer-thin ‘loaves’ of bread are baked in family ovens – this is done communally, with several women coming to help over the entire day. The bread will last upwards of a month. Women take turns helping each other and its both very hard work but also an important social and information-exchanging event. The ovens are clay, a bit like pizza ovens, and are fueled by corn stover and dried cotton branches.
I don’t think that bread-baking has ever been an individual event until post-industrial technology as made this possible. Even amongst the wealthy, the baking process required a number of people for the process.
I have some great pix from ancient egypt – some from recent excivations – showing the massive ovens and clay baking pots that were used in temples and in estates. Given the extended communal labor involved, it can be expected that at village level baking was a joint effort amongst families, as it is today. And/or, a greater reliance on low alcohol but highly nutritious beer brews.