[Sca-cooks] Re: Another bred question — bakeries

[Christiane]

In English manor houses, the custom grew to have ovens and kitchens in separate buildings from the house. Pennsbury Manor in Pennsylvania, built in the English fashion in the 17th century, has a separate kitchen building and a "bake and brew" building where large-scale baking and brewing took place.

In Philadelphia, very few homes there were built with ovens, archeological surveys have confirmed this. Women or their maidservants would take their pies, cakes, and breads and other baked dishes to the baker to have them cooked.

Now, the above two examples are out of period and out of the continent, but the colonists seem to have been following customs long set in England. 

In medieval Sicily, very few homes had ovens. According to Clifford Wright's research, most of the kitchen implements in household accounts were ones used for open-hearth cooking. Mr. Wright doesn't mention if people brought things to the baker to be baked or if they just bought bread. But nuns and lay sisters found a way to support their convents in a specialty niche that the general lack of ovens provided — the large-scale baking of cookies, cakes, and sweets. 

Gianotta