The Grisly Truth Behind Bread
In Ratatouille, bread is the symbol of good food. As Colette instructs Linguini, the hopeless chef who hides behind the prowess of his little rat friend, it is not the look or the smell that signals quality, but the sound. Though bread is made up of a few ingredients, the factors needed to help it reach that perfect crissssp note are complex. The French understand this - the English, not so much.
Supermarket bread continues to reign supreme across the UK. Large cities have overseen the death of independent bakeries, as giants such as Greggs or the Lidle bakery section have cannibalised much of the profit. And, when a GAILS’ sourdough loaf sets you back £6, it’s not hard to see why.
A yearning for the past tinges all packaging around bread. Even the cheapest brands play into the aesthetic of old grain mills and abundant, golden wheat fields. Supermarket giants realise that Brits still want to feel they’re consuming quality, which is why they bake year-old frozen doughs ‘fresh’ each day. The aroma is still, to most of us, irresistible.
Like most reactive yearnings, the wish to live Theresa May’s childhood of frolicking through a wheat field is based only upon a small segment of reality. Bread wasn’t always good. In fact, it was often worse.
For a Medieval baker, life was rough as a three-day old baguette. A typical baker would arrive at 2pm to get the oven ready. Sounds like a cushty lie in? Wrong.
From 3pm-11pm the dough was tended to, with midnight striking the time for some hefty kneading. Of course, the dough still required proving - around three hours was about right. At 4am it was ready to be baked, but there was no time for napping. The oven required close supervision, so a lot of poking and prodding of wooden sticks was necessary. By 7am the bread was ready to be sold. The baker’s 3pm-7am shift helps put two things into perspective; the first that a 9-5 job perhaps isn’t so awful, the second that the industrial age, which brought with it gigantic machines, perfect for mass producing bread, did help ease a baker’s burden.
The quality of a loaf can depend on many factors, but rarely is a manufacturer plagued with fears that a bad bout of rain will ruin a year’s crop. For the pre-industrial labourer, grain was susceptible to disease aplenty. Memoirs from the 18th century note how bread was so damp, a spoon would be needed to dig it out, with wet summers leading to a loaf cobwebby in texture, black and stinky. Wet conditions could lead to the sporing of bacteria which would survive the baking process, leaving farmers and peasants with food a dog wouldn’t sniff at.
So, whilst papery, ready-sliced isn’t quite the same as a golden pain au beurre you ate that one year in the Algarve, just be thankful that you’re not chowing down on the pre-20th century stuff. To summarise its quality, I shall leave you with a not-so-famous Karl Marx quote, that Londoners:
‘knew well enough that man is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat in his daily bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles… without counting alum, sand, and other ingredients’.
Toastie, anyone?
