[Sca-cooks] White Flour, White Sugar

[Terry Decker]

As you say, fine white flour was available.  Today, bleaching is used to
remove the xanthophylls which cause the yellow color in fresh flour.  In
period, the flour would be stored and the xanthophylls would oxidize
naturally.

Flour contains grains of varying sizes straight from the mill.  The large
particles are removed by bolting and finer flour is obtained by successive
bolting with finer weave bolting clothes.  The best bread was made from
twice or thrice bolted flour.

The key difference between period and modern flour is the germ is removed in
the initial stage of modern roller milling where it remained in period
flour.  King Arthur's White Whole Wheat Flour in the equivalent of the
finest of period flour.  There is very little visible difference between it
and a standard unbleached flour.

Since the judge appears to be complaining about the lack of middlings in the
bread, the judge is obviously a peasant and should be treated as such.

Refined white sugar has been available since at least the 5th Century and
probably earlier.  Since it is refined by successive cookings and
strainings, white sugar was labor intensive and therefore expensive. The
more molasses in the sugar, the less expensive.  A number of grades of sugar
similar to what we have today were available.

Beet sugar is no earlier than the 18th Century.  Date sugar appears to be a
relatively modern creation.  When people spout off about beet sugar of date
sugar, just ask, where's the documentation?  We can document cane sugar in
period, but I have yet to see one shred of evidence for beet or date sugar.

Bear


>WHITE FLOUR
>
>On our local cooks guild list, someone posted that white flour was
>not period, and that she was told this by a judge in a Kingdom food
>competition (i wish i knew who!) that she should be mixing white and
>whole wheat half and half.
>
>My recollection (i don't bake so i haven't studied this as deeply) is
>that flour was bolted by the kitchen staff to make fine and very fine
>grades (such as for Manchets), so fine white flour was indeed
>available, and people of our station (according to the SCA) could
>very well be using white flour.
>
>Can someone please present a more reasoned account of flour so i can
>dispell this myth?
>
>I personally buy unbleached flour. I know that freshly milled flour
>is yellow and that it lightens with age. Was flour bleached in
>period? (i suspect not, but i am ignorant)
>
>I know that sometimes it was adulterated, although there were laws
>against this...
>
>WHITE SUGAR
>
>Did they have white sugar, either in the Muslim or European world "in
>period"? From my reading it seems to me that the Muslims, at least,
>had white sugar or something very close.
>
>Or is piloncillo really the closest kind to the sugar used "in period"?
>
>How close are demerara or turbinado in character to "period" sugar?
>
>Someone else (who got a laurel for cooking) implied that date sugar
>would be more suitable for cooking in the Andalusian cookbook. This
>seems to me to be in error, since in have read that the Muslims were
>growing sugar cane in Spain.
>
>I prevail upon the collective wisdom to dispel the clouds of ignorance...
>
>Anahita
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