[Sca-cooks] A Dublin Archeologist Tries to Recreate Medieval Bread

[Johnna Holloway]

https://dublininquirer.com/2019/02/06/a-dublin-archeologist-tries-to-recreate-medieval-bread?fbclid=IwAR1RrdHrxrgcmFUtOyuo4llXk3dMZRLRM_p68Azjhcgo7SW7OOraAm3h-qQ <https://dublininquirer.com/2019/02/06/a-dublin-archeologist-tries-to-recreate-medieval-bread?fbclid=IwAR1RrdHrxrgcmFUtOyuo4llXk3dMZRLRM_p68Azjhcgo7SW7OOraAm3h-qQ>

L’Estrange is doing all this as part of a PhD in archaeology. The focus of her research is on food of the Middle Ages, particularly bread. She wants to understand how it was produced in Ireland.

The oven L’Estrange is reconstructing is based on one found at St Audeon’s Church, near Christ Church in Dublin. It was excavated by the archaeologist Franc Myles within the last couple of years.

L’Estrange thinks it could have been a community oven.

“If my theory is correct, this oven would have been too big for just a family. So it might have been for a group of houses, and they used this as their bread oven. That’s what I’m hoping,” she says.

She’ll test her hypothesis when the replica oven is ready. She says it will be a hemispherical, clay-domed, open-air oven.

Because post holes are often found nearby in the archaeological record, she believes such ovens were protected by additional structures. “So I’m going to put a sloped roof over it, protecting it.”

Johnna