[Sca-cooks] Period Pretzels, yet again...

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Sun Feb 17 22:21:55 PST 2013


Beer drinking countries tend to use brewer's yeast, wine drinking countries 
don't.  However, there are places in France (the village of Gonesse for one, 
supposedly as early as the 13th Century) where brewer's yeast has been used 
as leavening for centuries.  La Varenne records the use by pastissiers of 
yeast rather than starter to make lighter pastries.  Parmentier opposed 
using brewers yeast and was against using salt (obviously not understanding 
its use in controlling the ferment).  Serious use of brewer's yeast in 
French bread didn't occur until 1840 when a Prussian officer opened a bakery 
in Paris with Viennese bakers.

Brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is a top fermenting ale yeast. 
The active fermentation, the ale barm, occurs at the top of the brewing 
vessel where it can be dipped out and used as a combination of yeast and 
liquor to make and leaven bread.  This is the method the Gauls used that was 
described by Pliny.  It is precisely the same method of barm fermentation 
that was used for roughly the next 1700 years until commercially processed 
yeast became available.  Gallic bakers brought the technique into the Roman 
Empire.

I believe I'm up to seven European bread recipes from between 500 and 1600 
CE.  The majority of these are manor recipes prepared by cooks rather than 
bakers.  There are a number of bread recipes(?) that can be winkled out of 
Greek and Roman pre-collapse texts and there are quite a few recipes after 
1600.

The Romans created professional bakers and the strictures they placed on 
bakers created the basic guild structure.  Like most guilds of the Middle 
Ages, the bakers kept their "mysteries" secret transferring them from master 
to apprentice, then honing their skills as a journeyman (often and itinerant 
baker's assistant) until being offered the opportunity to present a master 
work and become a master.  One of the master works I've seen described in a 
tertiary source was a village, complete with people and animals, consisting 
of various types of bake goods.

Bear


> Presumably Northern European here means Germanic and Scandinavian (which
> would include the not so northern Austrians)? The French did not use ale 
> barm
> for bread until the seventeenth century (even if some Gauls used a crude
> version  of it before the Romans).
>
> Otherwise, I don't know how this works on the Germanic side, but in France
> bread recipes tend to be rare, simply because bread was produced by bakers
> (who  learned by apprenticeship). This doesn't really change until Malouin
> and  Parmentier in the eighteenth century.
>
> Jim  Chevallier
> www.chezjim.com
> 




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