[Sca-cooks] Re: Fwd: Oven temperature

[Christiane]

A book that I read awhile ago, "Bitter Almonds," the biography of a woman who had been raised in a lay convent in Sicily, describes how the novice girls would have to prepare the convent's wood-fired ovens for a day of baking. The building they were in was a medieval one, but I don't know when the ovens dated from.

To determine whether the oven was hot enough for baking bread, the girls would scrape a long, dried stalk of fennel along the floor of the oven. If it immediately produced sparks, it was hot enough.

Gianotta