The eighteenth century saw several shifts which, taken together,
brought bread much closer to today’s than to what had come before.
These included the use of a softer dough, a preference for long over
round breads and, closely related, a taste for crust. Other changes
were more subtle, or behind the scenes, if you will. Notably,
economic milling, a more efficient processing of grain, arose and the
middlings –
This century was also the first great century of documentation,
with near-manic efforts to put even the most banal facts down on
paper. Ultimately, this resulted in Diderot’s
,
which remains today one of the prime sources on numerous trades.
Where in the past these had often been recorded incidentally, or at
best for practitioners, now they were methodically studied and
recorded in accounts made available to anyone with sufficient means
and education. A number of such works preserved useful details on
period bread-making. But two writers in particular gave it careful
attention: Malouin and Parmentier. Malouin's work was by far the most
detailed. But Parmentier, who was Malouin's
effective successor, wrote several works whose importance has
endured. Malouin in particular left such a highly detailed account of
bread-baking that even specialists today would be hard put to absorb
it completely. This means that any brief summary of eighteenth
century bread-baking necessarily omits a wealth of material available
in the period.
These two admirable and even endearing men did not always agree
and their disagreements have an important place in bread history. But
they shared not only a passionate interest in the problems around
creating the best, most flavorful bread, but a very real concern for
those who often had no bread at all.
Over the centuries, royal taxation had also made salt – a native
French product – dauntingly expensive. As a result, by several
accounts, French bakers now used it less. Though opposing evidence
exists, the overall impression from period texts is that French bread was often viewed as
bland because it was so often made with little or no salt.
Yet Malouin boasted of, as in previous centuries, the superiority
of French bread:
A number of famines occurred in this period. The aristocratic
monopoly on hunting prevented most of the poor from hunting their own
meat, which at any rate had become impractical for residents of
growing cities, as had foraging or farming, and so bread became
central to the diet of the poor. The central importance of bread
meant that “famine” typically was synonymous with a shortage of
grain. In a time of increased research and experimentation, one
side-effect of these shortages was to push figures like Parmentier to
seek out alternative products, such as potatoes, for making bread.
Controversies over key ingredients
Salt, water and yeast are all simple, even elemental products, yet
in this early modern century the use of each of these in bread was
more or less controversial.
Yeast had become established in French bread-baking in the
previous century (though sourdough remained the more common leavening
method). Often, per Malouin, yeast and sourdough were used together:
Fermentation is not a
simple dissolution,
it is not a simple extraction; it is a more intimate division and at
the same time a combination, from which a new composition always
results: it is why to make good bread, one must use a leavening which
successively produces these effects which are neither too prompt nor
too slow; it is according to this principle that the bakers of Paris
are accustomed to tempering the vivacity of yeast by mixing in sour
dough to make softish bread, and to animate sour dough with yeast to
make half-soft bread.
But he also wrote: “Today we have returned to the old feeling
against yeast, and it is agreed today that it is even better to do
without it in making bread.” Parmentier shared the older scholar's
reservations about the use of yeast, yet adopted a more resigned
tone:
Although I am certain that yeast rarely makes good bread,
and that it would be desirable that its use be banned in Baking, I
nonetheless cannot refuse to dedicate an article to this artificial
leavening....; because, well-founded as my reasons are (as admit
several Bakers enlightened by experience), I do not flatter myself to
be able to turn around spirits decided on this subject; but what
matter, useful truths must always be presented; there comes a time
when the clouds which cover them dissipate.
Mercifully for Parmentier, he did not
live to see the increased, not reduced, use of yeast in French bread.
And yet even some artisan bakers today share his distrust of yeast.
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The role of water
Parmentier seems to have been particularly frustrated by the
long-standing idea that the type of water mattered when making bread.
In vain has it been claimed that rain water is the best
for making dough rise, because being lighter than that of the
fountain that of river and fountain, it better worked its way into
the bits of flour mixed with leavening, than hard and cold waters
which had trouble warming, not being suited to bread, and that the
variety of this food came from the diversity of waters used in it:
this opinion is absolutely unfounded, we must see how ridiculous and
abusive it is.
He then goes on at some length to
describe the ways in which people would blame water for problems in
baking without considering all the other elements in making it and
reports his own experiments with the same flour in areas with
different water. But the idea that the quality of the water affects
the quality of the bread has never entirely disappeared.
Salt.
Malouin complained about the reluctance of period bakers to use
salt:
It is by economy that most
bakers abstain from putting salt in the dough; and it is a false
economy, because not only does the salt give the bread a better
quality which makes up for the expense of salt; which is small, when
it is used properly; but also because because salt making more water
come into the dough, also makes more air come in, and so increases
the quantity of bread.
According to Le Grand d’Aussy, the royal tax on salt (the
gabelle) had made its use less popular in bread:
Before the gabelle
had made salt as expensive as it is today, the general custom in
France was to salt bread. … This is the custom of almost all the
nations of Europe; and this is why when foreigners come to Paris,
they at first find our bread insipid, even if in actuality it is
better that that made where they come from.
(Note the stubborn French chauvinism
at the end.) This may have been less of a problem for luxury breads,
whose buyers did not consider cost. But it seems that ordinary French
bread in this time was made with little or no salt.
Other grains
Le Grand d’Aussy points out that other grains, such as barley,
had been used by the ancients and questions why French bakers had
come to use their talents mainly on wheat. In regard to barley, he
writes:
How has it happened that this grain, so known for its
restorative qualities, that this grain which inspired from
Hippocrates an entire book of praise, that this grain finally from
which the Greeks drew not only their best porridges, but further
these fine and nourishing drinks which they called tisanes, is
only intended among us for the fattening of poultry, for making beer,
and sometimes gruel? By what lack of skill have we come to make of it
a bread that only the most unfortunate of peasants dare to eat, and
when, after the famous winter of 1709, the people found themselves
reduced to it, it was called famine bread...
But the century’s famines made
some neglected grains, if not popular, necessary. In 1709, Madame de
Maintenon had oat bread made for the poor and said that if oats were
properly made, they could yield a very good bread. A great deal of
rice was brought in from abroad in the same year; it was used again
in 1768.
Gruau
In the eighteenth century, a shift occurred which would have
profound implications for luxury breads. Millers had long discarded
the middlings, or fed them to animals. In French, these have the same
name as gruel:
gruau. As a result, one has to be very careful
in reading French texts to consider the exact date of the usage. Even
for part of the eighteenth century,
gruau, when it did not
mean “gruel”, referred to what was considered an inferior
by-product of milling. Almost overnight however it came to refer to
the finest type of flour. Here is one account (which however, like
many such tales, should be regarded with caution):
During the shortage of 1709, a miller of Senlis, named
Pigeaut, very profitably exploited a process known in his family. Towards 1725, a certain Marin went to set up a mill in Nangis, began
to gather the fat bran which bakers did not know how to use, and to
sell a flour which soon gained a reputation. This is not surprising:
the reground gruau [middlings], yielded precisely what we call
bread of gruau, the most nutritious and the most succulent of all,
when it is sincere and well-worked. The fortune made by Marin awoke
his competitors. For a quarter of a century, skilled people, calling
themselves bran merchants, spread out around Paris: they bought the
remains of bakers' sifting to profit from it, and as Messieurs of the
Parlement began to recognize that the grutum is not a
dangerous poison, the police closed their eyes to the violations
which the new trade involved.
(Bord, Histoire
du blé en France)
Economic
milling
The
recuperation of middlings for a new and superior flour helped make
possible what become known as “economic milling”.
In
1760, many millers in the Paris region began to use this technique.
The details are unlikely to interest anyone who is not actually
studying the history of milling itself, but the gist of the method
was to clean and sift the grains and flour as the milling occurred.
Here is how Bouquet sums up the operations in economic milling:
The first is to clean and sift the wheat before it falls
into the mill’s hopper: the second, to mill it so that it cannot
heat, nor contract any odor or other bad quality, nor yield too much
waste or evaporation: the third, to bolt while the millstones work,
to separate the different qualities of flours and middlings: the
fourth, to remill the different middlings, to get a new flour from
them.
The
most important result was that one got far more flour from a given
amount of wheat, which Bouquet insisted would help eliminate
shortages. While more than milling was necessary for that, this new
method did improve the yield overall and became the standard one. The
older method, with more separate steps, became known as “rustic
milling” and continued to be used in the countryside for a long
time.
Types of dough
For centuries, bakers had used what the French called “hard [or
firm] dough” (
pâte
ferme). But by the eighteenth century, they had begun to use what
was called “bastard dough” (
pâte
bâtarde),
which was softer than
pâte
ferme but not as soft as the
softest
(pâte
mollet).
Malouin gives an overview of these types of dough:
There are three sorts of dough in regard to consistency,
that is, soft dough, hard dough, and bastard dough. Soft or sweet
dough is that in whose composition the most water is used. Hard dough
to the contrary is that in which the least is used. Bastard dough is
neither hard nor soft, it has aspects of the soft and the hard: more
water and less flour is need to make bastard dough than to make hard
dough, as more water and less flour is needed make soft dough than to
make bastard dough.
There is also brié
dough which is the hardest of all, and on which one climbs, that is,
it is kneaded with the feet.
Malouin said that far less breads were made with hard dough in his
time and that most bread was made from partially soft (bastard) or
soft dough. One incidental effect of this change was that it became
harder to follow the requirement that one stamp bread with one's
assigned mark. It was also true that larger breads were more likely
to be made with hard dough, whereas softer dough was required to make
the smaller loaves.
Types of bread
The bread of Gonesse had replaced the
bread of Chailli as the best by the seventeenth century; but by the
late eighteenth century, the bread of that name was made nearer to
Paris; Le Grand wrote: “Today very little [bread from Gonesse]
comes to Paris. That sold under this name is made in the suburbs of
Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin”.
The old distinctions of color still applied. The
three basic sorts of breads were still made, with the middle quality,
once
pain bourgeois,
now called
pain
de ménage
(household bread) and the
worst simply called
pain
bis (dark bread).
Malouin references these as, for white bread, the former
bread of Chailli (the
siligineus of the Romans); for
dark-light, the old coquillé bread (
secundarius); for coarse
bread, pain bourgeois (
acerious) and finally dark bread, once
fetis or brode bread (
furfuaceus). “One can even distinguish
different sorts of bread by their various forms: there is round
bread, long bread, horned bread, bread in
bourrelet, bowed
bread (called
hemicycleus, he says, by the Latins).”
Formerly more round breads were made than long breads: today, it is the reverse, because the crust is preferred; in households where there are a lot of people, more three pound loaves are even taken than six: thus one can eat it fresh.
In regard to the whiteness of bread, the usage, at least in Paris, is to make dark breads of twelve, eight and six pounds, and always round: white-dark breads of twelve, of eight, of six and of five, and also all round.
The
word
miche has had a
varied history in French and
most often refers to the most common large loaf in a given time
and/or region. Malouin defines it in his time as a small bread of one
to two pounds.
Le Grand says that most of the fancy rolls in varied shapes from
the seventeenth century –
pain de Gentilly, pain à
la Montauron, etc. –
had fallen away “because others have succeeded them, and in Paris
everything is fashion” but went on to say that butter, milk, salt
and yeast were all still used in finer breads (though
such breads were banned during famines such as that of 1709). In
general these sorts of bread weighed
from a quarter to half a pound. Malouin
describes
pain à
la Reine, pain
à
la Segovie,
pain
caffé
and
pain cornu
as examples of such breads in the eighteenth century; he also shows
artichoke bread (with square “leaves”) in his images. As
in the seventeenth century, these
rolls were not subject to
price regulation, and so bakers could set the price they chose.
Breads were also known by how
they were used: coffee bread, soup bread, pottage bread (today
literally also
"soup bread", but then different).
Pain
de mie – crumb
bread – was then used to produce crumbs for breading meats, for
instance (today the term applies to white breads in the American
style). Table breads were essentially rolls, included as part of the
table setting.
Meanwhile, the most important
change in standard breads was related to a change in taste.
Love of crust and long
breads
Le Grand traces the growing love
of crust (which had once been grated off in the best houses) to the
increased use
of softer dough. Malouin further traces the appearance of
longer breads to the same development:
One can note that in general in the time when hard dough
was preferred, or beaten bread, whose crumb is compact, less crumb
was given to it by making it round or risen in a ball. Whereas when
bread was made of soft dough, it was flattened to have more crust.
And finally today softish bread is made long or "in bourlet",
to give it the most crust possible, in increasing its surface.
And later:
It was at the end of the last
century, that long bread began to be made to have more crust; before,
the taste was to eat bread with the crumb, as today it is to eat it
for the crust. Today more soft bread is eaten than hard bread; the
crumb of bread from hard dough, of beaten bread, is hard, and it has
much more flavor than the crumb of soft bread today, which leads to
its crust being sought and the crumb being left.
Parmentier adds further notes on the same theme:
The round shape is equally abandoned, it is not currently
used in Paris except for bread in hard dough and dark-light bread;
the long form has been adopted, because it is more convenient to the
oven, the bread bakes better and takes on more crust; but this shape
has been abused in lengthening it into a flute, so that it is only
crust rather than bread; these changes in shape and volume seem to be
determined by the consistency of soft dough which succeeds infinitely
better at a less considerable weight and in the long shape.
Parmentier may be the first here to use the term “flute” for
the long loaves which became standard in this era. While the term
“baguette” would not be used for similar breads until the
twentieth century, the shift from round to long breads was already
made in the eighteenth century; the term “flute” would be used
loosely all through the nineteenth century even as more specific
terms were used for the major long breads.
Split breads
Among long breads, another shape now emerged. Parmentier:
It is with [bastard
dough] that one makes the
large long loaves
of four pounds, whose use is so common today in Paris
and which are known
by the name of loaf
à
grigne and split [fendu]
bread, the one being put on couche
and being prepared in stretching the dough and in bringing together
the two sides, in the middle of which is thrown flour, lightly, to
avoid their joining, one sets this dough on the side and on the upper
part of the fold, which is what forms these toothed openings which
are prolonged until the crumb; a similar method is used for split
bread.
The split in the fendu would later be made, not by joining the two
sides, but by pressing the baker’s elbow down the middle of the
dough. In the nineteenth century, this was to become one of the most
common types of loaf.
Bakery personnel
In earlier centuries, the main workers mentioned in bakeries were
the baker him (or more rarely her) self and his or her “boys”. By
the eighteenth century, the staff was more complex. Malouin outlines
the positions in a bakery, notably one with a long and enduring
history, and a virtually untranslatable name:
The geindre is the master-worker who watches over
everything in the bakehouse; he delivers the flour, he pours the
water and he measures it. The geindre determines the quantity and the
sort of bread to be made, and he warns the other workers what they
have to do. It is the geindre who judges the preparation of the
leavenings and the dough; he divides it out and he weighs it. It is
the geindre who heats the oven; then he puts the bread in the oven,
and after he takes it out.
Formerly, it was the geindre who kneaded, and then he was
not in charge of the work of others; it was even through this
function he had formerly of kneading that he was named geindre, from
the word gemere, geindre or plaindre [moan or
complain]. The Master-Bakers like to hear their kneader moan when he
works the dough. When they don't hear him while he is kneading, they
are in the habit of saying: this guy isn't moaning; you can't hear
him any more than a crackling in the kneading trough.
When to the contrary they praise him as a good worker, they say that
he raises the dough well, and he moans well.
Malouin goes on to explain that things had changed now that the
Master-Bakers no longer watched over the work themselves. He gives an
unusually detailed look at the process in an eighteenth century
bakery:
The aide starts at the kneading trough while the geindre
puts the bread in the oven. A short half-hour is needed to put it in;
about an hour to bake it; a quarter of an hour to take it from the
oven; and a half-hour or three-quarters of an hour to reheat an eight
to nine foot oven; which all together makes at least two hours of
hard work, over two and a half hours of fast work.
He only begins kneading when the leavening at the
toupoint stage is ready, and when in his judgment the previous
batch is baked and the oven reheated before the whole next batch he
has to make is ready; he takes about an hour to knead.
The second aide brings the flour, he cleans the cauldron,
he brings the water, he carries the wood, he splits it and sets it to
dry. It is also the second aide who takes the bread off the cloth,
and who puts it on the paddle when the geindre puts in the bread.
The third aide, who is the fourth worker, receives the
bread as it comes out of the oven, and he sets it: it is the third
aide who, when the bread has cooled, brushes it, then ranges it,
and finally takes it to houses.
Malouin notes further that bakers from different regions had
different reputations, those from Langue-Doc, Provence and Touraine
thought good; those from Champagne, Brittany and Picardy to have a
heavy hand. He adds later that that there were then more bakers from
Auvergne in Paris than from any other region.
He also cites an article (XXIII) from the Bakers' Statutes of 1680
stating that
no one can be received as a Master Baker if he is
infected with a communicable disease. To which he adds that
"there are workers whose sweat is so awful, or their breath so
bad, that they spoil the leavenings." If this image is not
off-putting enough, he goes on to say:
Normally those who knead sweat a great deal from the
force of the work, and the sweat falls into the dough, if one is not
careful to give them a rag to wipe themselves; I have sometimes seen
them rub themselves with large flour sacks. In the King's bakeries
rags are passed to the bakers; there is reason to believe they use
them.
Unbelievable as this may appear to a modern reader, in the next
century, this “flavoring” of the dough with the worker's sweat
would be cited as a quality.
Potatoes
Ironically,
Parmentier’s name has most endured because of his promotion of the
potato. But his interest in what became a standard French food on its
own grew directly from his work with bread. Ultimately, in his
comprehensive work on the subject, he said firmly that it was NOT
economical to make bread with potatoes, but that the food by itself
was a promising and nourishing one. Still, he said, “some men must
absolutely have bread, and if the food is not presented to them in
this form, they do not think themselves fed. The people, in this as
in everything else, are more attached to the form, than the reality,
above all in times of trouble; they want their fundamental and
habitual food, in the familiar shape, whatever the substance of it.”
And so he presents several recipes for bread and even biscuits made
with potatoes, with or without grains.
He was right to
believe that potato bread would not displace wheat bread, even in
hard times. Luckily, his pessimism about the French eating potatoes
alone proved unfounded, and soon the French were eating them in a
variety of forms and a variety of places. But this had little impact
on their demand for bread.
Conclusion
As the Revolution
approached, French bread had effectively moved into modernity. The
distinction of bread by origin (Gonesse or Chailli) had faded. The
long breads which would become the baguette were firmly established,
even if darker, coarser bread continued to be sold in round (though
not often spherical) shapes. The hard dough of the past had been
firmly replaced by the softer “bastard” dough. A good crust had become one of the desirable qualities in a loaf. The split bread was
now familiar, if not as common as it would be. Economic milling was
well on its way to being the standard method, as
farine de grau
was to being the standard flour for finer breads in the next century.
The nineteenth
century would brings its own significant changes, but only after the
brief and dramatic interlude of the Revolution.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy,
Histoire De La Vie Privée Des Français: Depuis l'origine ...,Volume 1, Issue 1, 1782
Denis Diderot,
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Tome
second, Azyme-Cezimbra / par une société de gens de lettres
1751-1765
Denis Diderot, L'Encyclopédie. [45],
Artisanats au 18ème siècle : [recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux et les arts] 1751-1780
Paul-Jacques Malouin,
Description et détails des arts du meunier, du vermicelier et du boulenger, avec une histoire abrégée de la boulengerie et un dictionnaire de ces arts, par M. Malouin, 1779
Antoine Augustin Parmentier,
Le parfait boulanger, ou Traité complet sur la fabrication et le commerce du pain, par M. Parmentier,... 1778
Antoine Augustin Parmentier,
Traité sur la culture et les usages des pommes de terre, de la patate, et du topinambour, par M. Parmentier, 1789
Gustave Bord,
Histoire du blé en
France: Le Pacte de famine; histoire--légende, 1765
