[Sca-cooks] Another bread question - bakeries

[Carol Eskesen Smith]

Thanks . Bear!

Regards,
Brekke

----- Original Message -----
From: Terry Decker
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 7:34 PM
To: Cooks within the SCA
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Another bread question - bakeries

You are actually speaking of several different cultures and at least two
occupations, bakers and oven-keepers.

Bakers prepared dough, baked bread and specialty cakes and would rent oven
space to customers (for baking their dough) during the baker's baking.
Baker's thrived because they offered a better product than most people could
produce.

Ovenkeepers either owned ovens or were licensed to run a communal oven.
They collected fees for baking bread for people who had no oven.  Communal
ovens were (and still are) more common in rural villages, where the village
owns the oven and the ovenkeeper is an employee of the village.  There are
still some ovenkeepers in rural France and Italy (and probably other
places).

Since ovenkeepers were often paid in kind and sold the excess bread they
received, they came into conflict with the bakers.  Over time, most of the
ovenkeepers were subsumed into the baker's guilds.  You can see some of this
in the history of the whitebakers and brownbakers in London.

Large households in England tended to hire a baker at the profit fixed under
the Assize of Bread and the baker was then responsible for purchasing
materials and preparing the household's bread.

Just how things were done depends largely on time and place, economics and
the regulations in effect.

Bear


>While we're discussing bread... I was talking about baking  in period
>with someone a while ago, and a question arose.
>
>I was under the impression that bakers made all or almost all  bread, as
>a general rule, from scratch and by their own recipes, and people simply
>purchased it.
>
>The person I was speaking to believes that the individual household
>would prepare their own loaves, and then bring the risen loaves to the
>baker to bake. A communal oven, so to speak, but not a single baker.
>
>Of course, I'm looking mostly at later period, urban situations... and
>she has looked largely at somewhat earlier, more rural settings,
>villages, rather than large cities - would that be the difference? Or is
>one of us mistaken? Or is this just another case of that messy word
>"period" - covering a thousand years and an entire continent (with
>extras,) of course there are differences?
>
>I'm interested in this... Bear? *G* Anyone else?
>
>AEllin


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