SC - bean vs. wheat

[Yeldham, Caroline S]

	Bean bread is a bread made partially with bean flour (pea flour
was used similarly).  Certainly by the 15th century it was regarded as a
food of poverty and/or shortage and was not popular - there was pressure
from workers to recieve white wheaten flour (even wholemeal bread wasn't
popular) - see Christopher Dyer 'Everyday Life in Later Medieval
England'.  

	A member of the White Company (Mark Fry who I've copied in on
this) has made it from a recipe by Maggie Black in the Weald and
Downland medeival village cookbook.  I don't have details, and perhaps
Mark would be kind enough to supply them.  I can however comment on the
results.  The bread Mark made was quite white but heavy and dense, which
was not surprising given the lack of gluten in bean flour.  It was quite
salty but worked well with pottage.

	I would suggest that this story is a good example of employers
justifying to themselves why they don't give their workers wheaten bread
which they were requesting.

	Caroline

	Beatrix posted:

> In _How They Lived; 55 B.C. - 1486, W.O. Hassall lists an passage that
> I
> was confused about and was wondering if anyone else had heard about:
> 
> 	Source: Thomas Waleys, Moralitates, c. 1326 -42. Translated from
> extract in Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early
> Fourteenth Century, Blackwell 1960. p.309
> 
> 	 "I heard that a bishop wanted a fishpond to be on one of his
> manors in 
> England. Many peasants were summoned for the job and the bishop
> ordered
> them to be given daily food wheaten bread so that they should work
> with
> more strength and greater will. Within three or four days the work
> began
> to slacken. The bishop noticed and asked one why he was getting slower
> than at the start. He replied that he had no bread and so could not
> work.
> The bishop said he had told his steward to give them wheaten bread
> daily.
> The peasant replied 'That is not bread for the likes of us. I don't
> call
> it bread. Let us have bean bread and then we shall be able to work'.
> And
> so it was, once the wheaten bread was taken away from them.""
> 
> So, what exactly is bean bread, and does anyone have a recipe? I would
> like to see this, maybe at  above/below the salt feast.
> beatrix
> 
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