[Sca-cooks] Re:17th century French breadmaking

[Stephen Bloch]

>>--- Robin Carroll-Mann <rcmann4 at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>>>The Fons Grewe website has an interesting text for those who read 
>>>French. The 1661 edition of
>>>"Les delices de la campagne" by Nicholas de Bonnefons has an 
>>>entire chapter on making various
>>>kinds of bread.  All of them begin with the mixing of a starter 
>>>the night before, containing
>>>leaven

to which William de Grandfort replied:

>>'leaven'?  That wouldn't be referring to an addition of non-wild 
>>yeast, would it??  :)

and Bear added:

>Most French breads were made from continuous use starters.  Until 
>this century, there was a law in France that prohibited the use of 
>yeast.  The law was rescinded primarily because you need yeast to 
>produce those extremely light and crusty baugettes.  I assume that 
>the term used in the original text is "levain" (if I remember the 
>right spelling) which in the context of 17th Century France refers a 
>ball of dough (around 10 pounds or so) the baker maintains to seed 
>the sponge for a batch of dough.
>
>Yeast is never added to the levain or (presumably) to breads made 
>from the levain.  Yeast is used strictly for specialty breads.

I'm not sure what distinction Bear (or the French government) is 
drawing: a "continuous use starter" won't work to raise bread unless 
it contains yeast.  Now, whether it contains dried or compressed 
yeast from a company like Fleischmann or Red Star, or the baker's own 
years-old culture of yeast and other microorganisms, or yeast from 
ale barm, is another story.  (BTW, Thom Leonard mentions the same 
French law, but he doesn't explain clearly exactly what was outlawed.)

I'm also not sure what distinction William is drawing.  ALL yeast is 
"wild" in origin, differing only in how long and under what 
conditions it's been domesticated.  What I collect in the middle of a 
forest on a ball of dough made from sterilized flour can, I suppose, 
be called "wild", and what I get out of the packet from the grocery 
store is "non-wild", but in between there's a vast grey area.  What 
would I collect on a ball of dough in my kitchen, where I've used 
many a package of dried or compressed yeast?

Anyway, the description Robin quotes is consistent with the two-stage 
life cycle Thom Leonard describes: maintain a "chef" of fairly stiff 
dough with its resident yeast culture, and make a "levain" from it 
before each baking run (but no more than about 24 hours before).

BTW, I used to live across the street from where Old Man Fleischmann 
built his mansion in Queens.  His house has been replaced by an 
apartment building, but his daughter's, built in the same style but 
smaller, is still there; we used to describe it as "the mock-Tudor 
prairie pagoda".

-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu