[Sca-cooks] Bread Labor

[Stanza693 at wmconnect.com]

In a message dated 10/30/2007 10:57:17 PM Mountain Daylight Time, Johnnae 
writes:


> Having grown up on a farm, I suppose I look at questions like
> this in a different fashion, but why would you suppose that
> the farmer raising the grain, the miller grinding the grain into
> flour and the baker would have been the same person?
> Didn't most bakers buy their flour?
> 
> Johnnae
> 
> 
Here's some info on Spanish ladies and bread.  It's from Heath Dillard's 
book, "Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100-1300".  
I read it from the online version which has the hardcopy page numbers 
interspersed.  You can see it on The Library of Iberian Resources Online.

libro.uca.edu/dillard/dr6.htm

p. 151

"On other occasions they would carry grain to a water mill to be ground into 
flour, ...  

The townswoman's grain was either grown in a family plot outside the walls or 
purchased in the municipal market.  Once it was ground, she made the family 
bread at home with the flour and the massa she kept for leavening.  Usually she 
took her loaves to be baked at a municipal oven.  ..."

p. 158

"Bread, among other staples of the municipal diet, was one of the main items 
produced and sold by townswomen who mixed it at home but would commonly have 
it baked in a municipal oven."

He mentions that there was an official that would fine the bakeries for 
insufficiently baked loaves or for wheat flour loaves that were adulterated with 
other kinds of flour.  There was also apparently a problem with underweight 
loaves.

I got a little off topic there, but my general point was that in Castile, at 
least, even if the women weren't doing it all themselves, they were still 
spending time taking it to have it done by the ones who did the milling and the 
baking!!

A sus ordenes,
Constanza Marina de Huelva   </HTML>