[Sca-cooks] flatbreads and breads

[johnna holloway]

Forgive my abruptness before but
I am still under the weather and the headache
today has been very bad. The one thing that
Elizabeth David's book points out is that many
of the regional breads, cakes, and rolls of England that
are now made with the baking soda/baking powders
were at one time yeast raised. A significant number
in the past were also unraised or made without any
aerating agents at all. Once you get the chemical leavening
agents then you start seeing these sorts of cakes,
scones, and others incorporating the chemical agents for
lightness, and I suspect to make the process quicker.
This may have had as much to do with the increasing
workload of the housewife as it did with the availability
of the new fangled chemical agents and their marketing.
Another really classic English text for these early breads
is Eliza Acton's The English Bread Book of 1857. It was
reprinted in 1990.

Johnna Holloway  Johnnae llyn Lewis

Bear wrote:
You will find that chemical leavens start entering the picture in the
18th Century.  There may have been some earlier (consider the debate
over
hartshorn), but the evidence is inconclusive.  Chemical leavens
depend on the reaction between base and acid to create gas which in turn
lightens the dough. snipped----
The evidence is also inconclusive about why they were adopted, but I
think you will find chemically leavened breads are mostly related to
earlier quick breads which were unleavened or leavened with yeast.
snipped  ---Bear
--------------------------
johnna holloway wrote:>
> This is why one buys a copy of Elizabeth
> David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and reads
> it and then keeps the volume on the shelf for
> reference. ....For flatbreads there is the
> excellent award-winning Flatbreads & Flavors
> by Alford, Jeffrery & Duguid, Naomi which
> came out in hardcover in March 1995.
> Johnnae llyn Lewis  Johnna Holloway
-----------------
> A F Murphy wrote:>
> > You know, I've been curious about that. Did the whole wide variety of
> > baking soda breads, muffins, biscuits etc. just magically appear when
> > someone refined (or whatever) soda?  Anne