More on Bread from William Rubel

This long response from William to all the comments generated by his post on bread in the French Alps simply has to go up as a full post.

“So many comments.

Adam. Yes, in Lithuania they also make a rye bread with boiling water. So, too, in Russia, and etc. When the raw ingredients are cold one can only bring the dough up to temperature by adjusting the temperature of the water — the only fast acting variable. Commercial bread recipes are adjusted daily by adjusting the temperature of the water using a formula that takes into account flour temperature, room temperature, and the friction of the electric mixer to determine the optimal water temperature needed to create a dough of the desired temperature. In the case of Pain Bouilli, they wanted a high dough temperature, and a starter batter, in order to both accelerate the process AND create a desired taste profile. Since the mixing troughs were also communally owned, in order for the village to share the oven’s heat they had to develop a recipe that matured quickly — in 24 hours from start to baking.

2. There is ample documentary evidence for people making bread alone in Early Modern Europe — and firing in their own oven. The communal oven seems to have been more common in some countries than others, possibly reflecting different social/political systems. E.g., in France the bread oven was often communal because feudal laws required it be so — the feudal lord owned it — and that system — but with a different management structure continued after the Revolution. I think — no documentation for this — that wood scarcity also encouraged communal baking as that reduced the wood requirement.

For baking bread at home see, for example, William Ellis’ mid-eighteenth-century book The Country Housewife’s Family Companion (1750). But baking at home is also implied by much of the bread portion of the Maison Rustique in the late sixteenth-century editions in France and the English editions at the turn of the seventeenth-century. So, too, really, in Markham’s English Housewife (Markham, Gervase. Country Contentments: Or, the Husbandsmans Recreations … The First Edition. (the English Housewife.) First ed. London: I. B., 1615.)

3. Certainly, the villagers of the Alps had more in common with each other than with the lowland populations. Their bread, however, as recipe, was pretty much determined by the laws of biochemistry. Wood scarcity led them to a bread production program that maximized bread production for the amount of fuel available. Thus, for example, the cracker-like rye breads of Scandinavia were not possible because they didn’t have the fuel for flat breads.

4. Why unleavened bread in India — and I will add other hot countries? I think this is partly due to the biochemistry of bread dough — the biochemistry of yeast and sourdough cultures. Roughly, yeast and sourdough — and please don’t anyone jump on me for this — I am generalizing — go out of control much past 28C. They also do poorly at low temperatures. Loaf breads also require lots of intense heat to fire the oven and hot places tend not to have large quantities of the type of combustible materials that are best suited for firing bread ovens. In the part of the India where they bake chapti and roti they do so over cow dung fires — thus the straw used is a waste product from the cow. I think if you look at what fires the ovens and griddles in flat bread regions and compare that with what you’d need to fire a bread oven for loaf breads you’d see that loaf breads aren’t practical. Also, there is the problem of staling. In the hot dry climates of Northern India you ‘d soon have a brick, not a loaf.

5. Regarding the wood used to fire the oven. Today, they primarily use logs for the oven and faggots for the boiling water. It is possible that in the past there were more faggots. Trees in fields were being pruned to create faggot wood, and when more people were out and about with their animals I’d think ti likely that there was more tree pruning going on.

I don’t know anything about the land tenure system in the area. There was clearly private land, must have also had commons for grazing, at least on slopes that were too steep for farming, which is most of the terrain.

6. There is a lovely French term that I have forgotten, except to remember that they both have it and that it is lovely — something about lost heat — to refer to the heat that is wasted in firing the oven. As it takes 48 hours or so to fire up a huge oven from a cold start — and only a few hours to reheat it between firings — it is obvious that there is an immense savings in keeping an oven going. An easy calculation– but there can’t a fixed calculation because the mass of ovens differs greatly — as does the degree, if any, of insulation.

7. Boiling water plus cold flour equals dough of about 140F. This is below the temperature that denatures the flour and it is about right for changing starches to sugars. Cornmeal in American cornbreads were often mixed with boiling water, as they were in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cornbreads from Southern France described by Parmentier in his eighteenth-century works on bread and is nineteenth century work on corn.

Furthermore, virtually all Early Modern bread recipes discuss water temperature, and while none use boiling water, they do go up to water that is so hot you can only touch it, but can’t hold your hand in it.

8. No. Didn’t do baking when the oven was warming. They baked when it was at its maximum temperature — and baked while it was falling down to a temperature that would work for a long-baking bread. Bread that bakes in an hour can bake in a hotter oven than a bread that bakes for six hours.

9. Not freeze dried. That is a different process. An industrial process. It froze. When it thawed they cut it into tranches and it dried in the mountain air. I have no guess on how common the practice was outside of mountain regions.

10. Grinding was in a water mill. Standard water mill technology.

All my best,

William

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