[Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

[James Chevallier]

Just to be clear, "by the seventeenth century" doesn't mean right at the start of the century, but within that century. And of course by no definition is that medieval.

One you already know about: Markham. Then in France there's Nicolas de Bonnefons' Lesdélices de la campagne(1655/1662), which includes several recipes for bread. La Varenne (1655) describes how to make pain benit, which was somewhat finer than normal bread:

https://books.google.com/books?id=gqdwAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA90&dq=inauthor%3A%22la%20varenne%22%20pain&pg=PA87#v=onepage&q&f=false

I believe there's a Spanish recipe as well, but I don't have that at hand.

Trades may have had their "mysteries" in the sense of rites, etc (like the Masons), but there was nothing secret about making bread; not least because in some regions people still made their own dough and brought it to be baked.

 
jC

 

Jim Chevallier
www.chezjim.com

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Johnna Holloway <johnnae at mac.com>
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at lists.ansteorra.org>
Sent: Mon, Feb 1, 2016 11:05 am
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Bread Puzzles

In your blog  http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2015/09/french-bread-history-making.html

"This is not surprising; no medieval bread recipes survive at all for most of Europe* nor do many details on how it was made. Still scattered data does exist, at least for the French side, allowing the committed historical baker to narrow the parameters of what they make as “medieval bread”."

But below you state "But by the seventeenth century there were already published  recipes for bread…"

So there are no medieval bread recipes but by 1600 we have published bread recipes???? How many? Where?

I am sure those of us interested in the subject would like to know where those recipes appear,  books,
authors, details, etc.

Johnnae


On Feb 1, 2016, at 11:52 AM, JIMCHEVAL at aol.com wrote:


> But by the seventeenth century there were already published  recipes for bread 
> and in the eighteenth century (when the guilds/corporations  were at the 
> height of their strength) whole works appeared on how to make bread.  
> 
>