by Bee Wilson
The response to this problem was a draconian policing system. The philosopher Diderot told a story of a Turkish judge or kadi who described what happened when he heard of a baker who had sold a short-weight loaf. “I went to his bakery. I had his bread weighed and found it light. His oven was still red hot. I had him thrown in, and my business was finished.”59 Parisian justice for bakers was not so summary, though it could still be severe. If consumers thought they had a short-weight loaf, they could rush it to a police commissioner, who would then verify it, and, depending on what was found, summon the baker and fine him. Should he fail to pay at once, he might be jailed immediately. His stove might be dismantled, and his shop walled up for up to two years, or if he sold in a market, he could lose his market stall, and hence his livelihood. In the general run of things, bakers were often intimidated and taunted by the police, who knew they held their reputations in their hands.
A dealer in fraudulent goods at a medieval Islamic marketplace being punished and publicly shamed. From a seventeenth-century Persian manuscript.
Unsurprisingly, many bakers found this system unfair. By law, they were obliged to mark each loaf with its weight. What they were not allowed to do, however, was to use scales to weigh the bread at the point of sale. An amount of guesswork was therefore involved in constructing loaves to the right size, since a piece of dough going into the oven does not weigh the same as the bread coming out. Bread loses weight as water evaporates. To the bakers, it seemed crazy to expect exact weights under these circumstances. In 1743, the bakers of Paris addressed a collective petition to the chief of police pointing out what a very variable process baking was. The existing law seemed to expect them to control the “four sovereign elements” of nature— earth (i.e., flour), air (i.e., the fermenting and proving stage), water, and fire (i.e., the oven’s heat, which could never be depended on to remain absolutely constant). This was impossible. The bakers begged to be allowed to use scales in their shops, and give prices based on that weight, rather than be exposed to “calumnies” and “economic ruin” under the current system. Yet it would be another hundred years before their plea was answered—only in 1840 did a police ordinance order the sale of bread by weighing at the point of sale.60 Until that time, the bakers managed as best they could to avoid ruin.
The chemist Parmentier, the same Parmentier whose essay on chocolate Accum had stolen from the library of the Royal Institution in 1820, took the bakers’ side against the police, insisting that when it came to bread, a “shortage” of weight did not necessarily mean that swindling had taken place. There were, he insisted, a “multitude of accidents that cause weight to vary infinitely from place to place and moment to moment.” Even a scientist such as himself could not ensure that a baked loaf came out at the same weight every time. He observed that prudent bakers, anxious not to be ruined, had been forced to add a “bonus” of extra dough to their loaves, ten ounces extra for a four-pound loaf, double that for a twelve-pound loaf. Moreover, the obsession with the weight of bread could actually damage its quality, since an underbaked, soggy loaf weighed more than a perfectly baked, crusty one.
Thus the fight against swindlers could end by defeating the very purpose it was designed for. There is no question that the general populace was paranoid where bakers were concerned. During the revolution, a Paris crowd threatened to hang a baker who had been denounced for selling at short weight. The people were harder on bakers than on other food-sellers because, while butter and cheese and wine might mean pleasure, bread meant life. Every ounce mattered. Thus while a large degree of wine adulteration was tolerated, the slightest tampering with a loaf of bread was a sign of doom. It was one thing to give short weight; but when the basic ingredients of bread were tampered with, this signalled not just disorder but famine.
Famine Foods
As we have seen, the bread sold by bakers before the industrial revolution was relatively pure. There were always rumours of bread mixed with ashes or sand—and genuine cases of gritty flour, if it had been badly milled—as well as the odd case of bakers pulverizing stale bread and kneading it into fresh dough;61 but generally speaking, in good times, bakers’ bread could be relied upon to be nothing but flour, leaven (whether yeast or sourdough fermentation), salt, and water. At various times in history, however, when food was short, rather than being adulterated by the seller, bread might be adulterated by the consumer for his or her own consumption. Such bread is known as famine bread or surrogate bread.
Since ancient times, famine has led to the desperate consumption of unfamiliar foods. The pattern was generally as follows. First, peasants would eat livestock that were not ordinarily meant to be slaughtered—asses, donkeys, and so on. Then, they would move on to damaged or poor-quality cereals (such as sprouting or rotten grain, the sort of thing that induces nausea). If the famine continued, they would be reduced to chewing on animal food, such as acorns or vetch. Then came the last resort—the last resort, that is, before cannibalism: the consumption of natural products that were not really foods at all, such as leather, tree bark, twigs, inedible leaves. Galen writes of the countryfolk of Asia Minor being forced to eat “twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of indigestible plants.”62
In times of less extreme hardship, the peasantry of Britain were forced to create “breads” from all kinds of substances that would not usually have been put in a dough, such as peas and beans, rice and millet. In 1596, Sir Hugh Platt brought out a book of advice entitled Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies against Famine. The first remedy, insisted Sir Hugh, was prayer. But if that failed—and evidently, it often did—there were all kinds of little tricks to stave off hunger. Sir Hugh recommends making a cheap and savoury bread of pompions (pumpkins) and fashioning sweet cakes out of parsnips. Licorice could be chewed to “satisfy thirst and hunger.” He also mentioned various ancient techniques, including a weird-sounding bread made of the powdered leaves of pear trees.63
For the starving, there is a constant cost–benefit analysis going on in the brain. How low will you stoop to fill the gnawing hole in your stomach? How do you weigh hunger against disgust? How many inedible ingredients do you have to combine before it stops being “bread”? How much strange fodder can you eat before you stop being human and revert to the condition of an animal?
Sometimes, eating famine foods led to total loss of mind. Piero Camporesi has written of the “collective stupefaction” among medieval Italian peasants resulting from eating famine foods, a kind of “narcosis induced by adulterated bread.”64 The wild herbs used to pad out grain sometimes had drugging effects. Bread made from darnel, for example, induced a strange drunkenness in those who ate it, a dazed state in which people became either intoxicated or desperate, banging their heads against walls.
Famine “breads” have been made, and still are made, wherever in the world there is famine; Russian peasants were particularly ingenious manufacturers. Because Russia remained an agrarian country for longer than other European countries, the use of surrogate breads in times of food shortages continued well into the twentieth century. A study done at the University of Kazan in the 1890s found evidence of all these “breads”: straw, birch and elm bark, buckwheat husks, pigweed, acorns, malt grains, bran, potatoes, potato leaves, lentils, lime leaves, cow parsley.65 Also added sometimes were chaff, straw, and clay. Usually, they were combined with whatever ordinary flour was left, but as shortages got worse, the percentage of the additions crept up, often as high as 50 percent. Sometimes, things got so bad that these “foods” would actually be bought as well as gathered: pigweed might retail for twenty to seventy kopeks a pound.
There are accounts of the vile effects of these “breads” on the human body. Take pigweed bread, for example. Pigweed, or amaranth, is a common weed, growing often in vegetable patches. It is still sometimes eaten as a green vegetable by wild-food enthusiasts, and its taste in this form has been described as “mild.” As a bread, though, it was said to be unpleasantly insipid. Ac
cording to the Russian peasants, pigweed bread gave them a terrible thirst: barely nourishing, it caused pain in the arms and legs, leaving them too weak to do their usual amount of field work. Yet still they ate it, since the alternative was death.66
Another revolting Russian “surrogate” bread was husk bread (pushchnoi), common in the Smolensk province in the 1880s. A contemporary observer, A. N. Engl’gardt, who lived in Smolensk, reported:
Husk bread is made from unwinnowed rye, in other words, a mixture of rye and chaffis milled directly into flour and bread is made from this in the usual way. This bread is heavy and doughy and full of tiny needles of chaff. Its taste is not bad—about like ordinary bread. But its nutritional value is, of course, less. But the main drawback is that it is hard to swallow, and if you are not used to it you will simply find it impossible to swallow, or if you do swallow it, it leaves an unpleasant sensation in the throat, and makes you cough.67
If you were in any way frail, you would not be able to digest this turgid food.
Compared to this, a sturdy loaf of baker’s bread made from real grain, whether short weight or full weight, must have seemed like manna from heaven. But food can provoke many different kinds of hysteria, and the thought of what could happen to bread during shortages was capable of provoking all sorts of unease, even when the shortages were mild and the bread still good. Sometimes the panic was based on objective concerns and needs. Fear would have been an entirely rational response, for example, to the problem of leaded wine; if anything, consumers did not panic enough about this.
Often, however, legitimate concerns about the food supply mutate into a kind of collective madness, creating an environment where the wildest accusation becomes suddenly plausible. The legitimate concerns vanish beneath the frenzied alarm. It has been said that true “food scares” are the preserve of the last twenty years, being the histrionic indulgence of “the healthy, wealthy, comfortable middle classes” whose world is so free of plague and war that they have to fabricate imaginary problems for themselves.68 This is not true. It may have taken longer for these fears to travel in the time before newspapers, but they existed nevertheless, even in communities that were well acquainted with real hunger.69 In Britain, there were periodic outcries that bakers’ bread was not pure, which came to a head in the events of 1757.
The Great Bread Scandal of 1757–58
The year 1756 was a bad one for British wheat. Too much violent rain just before harvest was said to have levelled the wheat to the ground. The crop was smaller than usual and of much worse quality than the previous year. People complained that this soggy wheat wouldn’t grind well, and the flour produced wouldn’t bake well.70 In response to the shortage, Parliament authorized a “Standard” bread to be made, stamped with a capital letter S. This was made with more bran than was customary, to extract more nourishment per penny, and it baked up darker than the standard loaves customers were used to. It sold cheaper too. To modern tastes, this bread sounds wholesome and good, if a little worthy. But it wasn’t popular then. People associated bran-rich bread with poverty. They wanted bread that was whiter than white. As Hogarth wrote in 1753, “They eat no Bread of Wheat and Rye, but . . . as white as any Curd.”71 The rage for white bread was silly enough at the best of times, but in times of bad harvest, as in 1756, it was unrealistic in the extreme. The only way bakers could make curd-white bread from poor flour was by adding alum to the flour. This particular year, some bakers seem to have overdone the alum, which provoked an unprecedented series of attacks on their trade.
Alum—the name given to a group of double sulphates that join aluminium sulphate with another sulphate (potassium or sodium or ammonium)—is an astringent, styptic and emetic with countless uses. From medieval times, it was a vital ingredient in the textile industry, as a “mordant,” fixing dyes to fabrics. It has also been used externally as a deodorant and to staunch bleeding, especially from shaving. The old-fashioned gentleman’s toiletries firm Geo. F. Trumper still sells a “block of alum” for closing nicks and cuts. Alum has also had many culinary uses. It has been used as a preservative, as a firming agent to create extra-crisp pickles and maraschino cherries, to harden gelatine, and as a flour improver and bleach. Bakers have used it in this last capacity since Renaissance times, though only to a significant degree since the eighteenth century.
The use of alum in bread makes sense only if we take into account the prestige of white bread. For a long time, the poor had aspired to eat the fine white manchet of the rich. White bread was seen as gentlemanly, whereas brown bread was yeoman’s bread, marking one out as socially inferior. For this reason, those who had most reason to resent their social inferiority were the most demanding about their bread. Several observers in the seventeenth century describe the poorest classes travelling to market to seek out bread made from the finest white wheat flour, spurning rye bread as beneath them.72 Almost no one wanted to be the sort of person who ate brown bread. There would always be the odd voice of wisdom in favour of wholemeal bread. A nonconformist vegetarian, Thomas Tryon, in 1683 spoke up for wholemeal bread as a natural food, good for digestion. He attacked the taste for white bread as “inimical to Health, and contrary to both Nature and Reason.”73 No one much listened. The taste for white bread continued, and with it the use of alum.
White bread was always more expensive than brown bread, because the bran was wasted and because the bread had to be made from wheat rather than the cheaper barley and rye. The only way to make white bread cheaper was to make it from inferior flour. But in this case, the bread would come out greyish and heavy rather than white, which ruined its potential as a status object. Hence, the use of alum, which could turn second-rate white flour into a light, white, porous loaf, at a low price. By the eighteenth century, the use of alum seems to have become more prevalent, apparently reaching a peak in 1756–57. Given the poor, sour grain, bakers used more alum than usual, which resulted in a “harsh” crumb and acrid taste. “The smell is raw and disagreeable and the taste has nothing of sweetness,” said one unhappy customer.74
Faced with this bad bread, especially in the cities, disgruntled consumers came to see British bread as profoundly adulterated. So unpleasant was it, they thought, it must surely contain all kinds of shocking ingredients in addition to alum. Published in 1757, Poison Detected or Frightful Truths was the first, anonymous, baker-bashing tract (probably written by a Dr. Peter Markham, who went on to publish several other attacks on bread). The author claimed that “our bread, the universal basis of the food of all ranks and ages of people, is mixed with the most noxious and morbiferous matter.”75 He petitioned William Pitt, the prime minister, to prevent the “once venerated men of England” from being poisoned by bad bread.76 The wickedness of bakers, in his view, caused more harm than the worst natural disasters: “Run over the gloomy roll of horrors; earthquakes, inundations, tempests, famine, lightning, fiery eruptions, venomous or savage animals, and deleterious plants; they will be found less baneful to human existence than . . . the secret craft of impetuous avidity.”77
Alum, he argued, was a seriously hazardous substance whose frequent use “closes up the mouths of the small alimentary ducts and by its corrosive concretions, seals up the lacteals, indurates every mass it is mixed with upon the stomach, makes it hard of digestion, and consolidates the faeces in the intestines, so as to bind up the passages.” In addition, alum caused heartburn. But what could you expect from a substance that the author of Poison Detected declared was actually “an extract from human excrement”? “Even the most stertorian stomach fastidiates the nastiness of a food made up with such a disgustful mixture.” This was not all. The author also insisted that bread was poisoned with chalk and lime, which gave its crumb a “putrid alkalescence” on top of the “acrid acrimony” it received from the alum. The worst was yet to come. “There is another ingredient, which is more shocking to the heart and if possible more hurtful to the health of mankind”—“sacks of old ground bones,” raked from charnel hou
ses.78 In other words, bakers were creeping around at the dead of night stealing dead men’s bones. “Thus the charnel houses of the dead are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” Another attack on bread of 1757—The Nature of Bread Honestly and Dishonestly Made— by a Dr. Manning also accused bakers of using bones, in the form of bone ash, to increase the weight of their flour, though he claimed that bones were stolen from dunghills rather than charnel houses.79
Needless to say, this last charge against the bakers was not allowed to pass uncontested. In 1758, a Bristol writer called Emmanuel Collins published a book called Lying Detected, dismissing the notion that bakers indulged in these cannibalistic practices. “At this rate,” he wrote, “a man may happen to eat the bone of his own father’s nose in a buttered muffin for breakfast.”80 These were fairy tales, and Collins cited the chant of the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk:
Fe, Fa, Fum
I smell the blood of an English Man,
Be he alive or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
To Collins, the charnel house accusation was also culinarily implausible. If bakers really added bone flour to bread, “you might look into the oven and see it boil instead of bake; and your composition would come out broth instead of bread.”81 Modern historians have agreed with Collins that the charge of using human bones in bread was wholly fantastical. Yet thanks to the antibread tracts, “a shocked public firmly believed that their flour was mixed with dead men’s bones and that the millers and bakers were a set of rascals.”82