[Sca-cooks] Another bread question - bakeries

[Bronwynmgn at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/3/2004 11:39:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
aellin at earthlink.net writes:

<<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?>>

Yes to the above :-)  Well, except for one of you being mistaken.  You are 
both right in a sense.
One of the feudal disabilities in some rural areas was a prohibition against 
having your own oven (or your own mill, for that matter).  If you fell under 
those rules, you had to use the mill and oven provided by the lord and pay a 
fee to do so.  

In towns, there were professional bakers, from whom you could buy loaves of 
ready-made bread.  However, you could also take your own bread, pies, or 
whatever that needed to be baked to the baker and negotiate a price for him to bake 
it for you.  In fact, one of the old dodges for a dishonest baker was to hide 
an apprentice under a counter with a small trapdoor in it and, while the baker 
and customer were haggling the price, have the apprentice open the door and 
steal some dough from the bottom of the customer's loaf that was sitting on the 
counter.  The customer paid to have, say a 2 lb loaf baked, but got back a 
shortweight loaf, and the baker got free dough to use to make loaves to sell.

Brangwayna