The Historical Ponderings Society

[EverySongbirdSays]

Following on from the thread "What questions do you have about stuff from History or am I the only one?" Which is here

Ever wondered how we got from the clothes of Cave people to the clothes of today?

Who was the first person to make and eat Cheese? Or cake?

How ideas became widespread

Why the Aztecs didn't have the wheel?

Why Elizabeth I never married?

How accurate historical fiction is?

Then this your thread and we are your people.

PROCEED HISTORY LOVERS

Dried pasta definitely gets weevils too. Modern flour mills have a sieve system that helps break up weevil and flour beetle eggs so you are less likely to get them now. Artisan type pasta with the rough surface is more likely to be infested as it used brass dies to shape it, which don't heat up as much as the modern non-stick dies, so the eggs aren't destroyed as easily. Hand made dried pasta would be at risk as no heating at all. Pasta not as likely to go mouldy as flour though.
I have a book somewhere on good fraud throughout history. Medieval laws on bread and ale production were very strict regarding weight and composition. Bread was graded with ( if I remember correctly) manchet at the top and horse bread at the bottom in terms of desirability. Bakers couldn't make two grades that came next to each other to prevent them adulterating the "higher" grade, so you could make manchet and horse bread, but not manchet and whatever came next.

Stock pots were the same I think steppe keep chucking in new bones and fishing out the older ones, top up with a bit of water. As long as you kept it at a constant simmer there would be no micro risk. It was probably pretty tasty after a few months!!

I've read about the pots also and I don't think they were backaways that far in their most recent use. If memory serves, they were mentioned in a French country context - lower France - from the mid 20th century.

PS - I'm not confusing them with 'daubes' although there may be some connection.

You are right cozie a daube is a recipe in it's own right cooked in a special pot. I have a vague feeling that type the stock generated in cooking the dish is eaten first as a soup, with the meat and veg after as the main course, but I might be thinking of something else entirely!

I have an equally vague feeling of reading about girls being given a 'starter' (from the home pot) by their mothers as a marriage gift - in some instances.

My memory is telling me that they were kept going pretty well indefinitely rather than being scrubbed out after a year or so.

Medieval laws on bread and ale production were very strict regarding weight and composition.

We mostly have 400g and 800g loaves in the UK, which are metric equivalents (roughly) of 1lb and 2lb, and were standard sizes set in 1266. It's only since 2008 that bakers have been allowed to bake loaves of any size, but in reality, most bread facilities aren't going to change their baking facilities and also consumers are used to those loaf sizes, so it's only really fancy deli-type breads where there's been much change, and in the small loaf end of the market (which, as a person who lives by herself, I think is a good thing, that I can now buy half loaves.) Bread rolls not included, obviously.

(There were lots of other acts regulating bread since the middle ages, but a standard loaf size has always been regulated till recently.)

Oh yes, that is where baker's dozen comes from isn't it? It was illegal for bakers to sell loaves which were too small, so when they made rolls, they added the extra one, to make sure the whole dozen was definitely the correct weight.

Bread also doesn't have to comply to the same rules on average weight ( e marking) that other products do. You can do blends and compensations. If a particular run of bread is outside of the T1 T2 rules for average weight it can be blended with another run to make to overall average the stated weight. Or you can do a compensation run, where the scaling weight ( weight of pre-bake dough piece) is increased to give an average weight on the baked loaf of 1.5 times the "loss" on the previous run. This was because it was recognised that bakers couldn't guarantee an exact weight as absorbency if flour varies from batch to batch and can be affected by the weather etc.
In Paris if a baker was found to be cheating customers, his oven was smashed up and he was thrown out of the city!

so the baker has to be honest overall, and if you get one loaf from the smaller batch it is just luck of the draw?
That's interesting!

Yes, that's exactly it steppe . There are limits on how underweight a loaf can be, but more leeway than other products. It's the modern version of the baker's dozen as plant bakeries now are a continuous process ( the one I worked at had one line that made 1.5 million loaves a week and two others that did 800 000 a week each) so you now have automated feed back equipment that will flag up the underweights a so that the scaling weight can be adjusted for a period of time, as you know the loaves per hour the plant is producing.

And if you are doing a compensation run, you have to give back more than the original loss.

So the trick to being a successful plant production manager is to keep the loaves at optimum weight? After all, the easiest thing to do would be to have them all very slightly over the declared weight - but when you multiply that small difference by a million or two.............

And of course, HMRC aren't involved. No 'letting out a whole batch of higher than declared alcohol content' in whisky for example.

Re the pea stew. My mum is from northern Spain, and did a continuous lentil stew on the hob through winter. Lentils, bit of ham to start, other veg and meat thrown in as they came available. It's really very tasty, was always there when you came home from school / college, cheap and I imagine very nutritious. The surprising thing was that it tasted very different on different days.

Yes, you don't want any more giveaway than you have to as there is precious little margin as it is. The only way to make money is to " make water stand up" . Flour and gas are expensive so water is the cheapest ingredient. If you get a very good batch of flour, yield can be 110℅ as you calculate a theoretical number of loaves per tonne of flour. When you get a new batch you check the certificate of analysis and calculate how much water, ice (because the equipment generates heat), yeast and energy input is required for optimum yield.

Fascinating. Is it all done now on a basis of pure numbers? I'm imagining that backaways, it could very well have been done by feel/instinct. (I recall watching some older bakers once and they just carved pieces of dough with a sharp knife. They were always right as well. )

Interesting, Top. Much as I've imagined it.

A traditional baker would still do it that way, but they can charge more, so wouldn't need to do the compensation weights. A plant bakery has miniscule margins and a historical baker would have had a lot more variation in equipment and no analytical service to assess the flour so you took what you had, went by feel and probably after on the side of caution to make sure you weren't done for short weight!
Topcatee did your mother have a range or a fire on the go all the time? I can't think it would make economic sense now when everything is metered, but can understand that the fire was going 24 hours a day for food, heating, hot water etc before mains gas or electric so keeping a permanent pot on the go would make good sense.

It would make good sense if you had people out on the moors/in the fields/hunting etc etc. You could have the pot going without regard to their time of return - and something hot always waiting for them.

That brings to mind my grandmother, Weeds. She was a superlative pastry cook - not one of my strengths - and one morning I decided to hang over her shoulder and pick up some tips.

'How much flour do you use, Granny?'

*Oh - Enough'
*
How much shortening do you put in?

*Oh - Enough to suit'
*
'How much water do you add?

*Oh - As much as is needed'
*
I gave up at that point and decided to stick to soups. I understand soups.

Whisky ( and beer, cider, other spirits) are different because you make it over strength and let it down to the correct ABV when you bottle it. Once a loaf is baked there's not much you can do. Also for alcohol, it's often bottled or canned off site, so fewer road tankers required to transport it if you do the final tweak at the bottling plant.
I make bread and pasty by eye, but cakes need more precision in my experience! Last night I knocked up some biscuits for the festive cheese remains and made it up as I went, but if you tried that with a sponge, you'd be in trouble 😀

I recall working at a bottling plant when they let a truckload of overproofed whisky go down to the docks for loading. Never seen the (normally rather dozy) customs men move so fast!

It wasnt permanently bubbling - got cooked up twice a day and then any other time you wanted to eat it. I do actually miss it...