[Sca-cooks] On Beyond Pretzel

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

About the farthest back I've gone is the 9th century, in scenes embedded in 
 illustrated initial letters. I've found what look like torpedos - or short 
 baguettes - in a few, and others which appear to be leavened flat bread 
(which  would usually have been made at home under the coals). One researcher 
supposedly  found a Merovingian bread in a dig and I've seen one Gallo-Roman 
bread (possibly  from our period) that was a disk about an inch and a half 
deep. Some mosaics too  show flat hemispheres incised with a cross.

But the round loaf was  certainly common. I don't know that that's 
necessarily because of regulation,  which came fairly late and at any rate would not 
have applied to the household  breads often show in meals, just the fact 
that, when you've been rolling dough  around in your hands for a while, it's a 
fairly intuitive shape to use. But as  of the twelfth century, a long list 
of breads is mentioned in records in France  and some at least were probably 
different shapes. Also, records in Alsace talk  of breads that could reach 
a man's knee when set against his feet and these  would almost certainly 
have been at the least long; I would imagine roughly  rectangular.
 
Jim  Chevallier
www.chezjim.com

Newly translated from Pierre Jean-Baptiste  Le Grand d'Aussy:
Eggs, Cheese and Butter in Old Regime France  

 
In a message dated 2/20/2013 10:34:52 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
lilinah at earthlink.net writes:

as i  search earlier and earlier it gets harder because there are no still 
lives or  genre scenes,