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 The Flower of Wheat: Bread in the Middle Ages and Colonial Era
 
Bread was the essential food for all classes of society in the Middle Ages. The basic element, common to every table, was the pain de mayne, the hand-bread or table loaf, a round, bellied bread to be eaten plain, however else bread was incorporated with the meal. Recent historical studies have revealed surprising similarities in the statistics for bread consumption across class and geographic boundaries, confirming the centrality of this staple food in the medieval person's diet. Rather, differences of social status and era present themselves in the composition of that bread, as well as the source of its production.
Two main types of bread dominated the production of medieval bakeries,
table bread and trenchers. This object receives frequent mention in
literature, even idiomatic usage ("a good trencherman"),
and occupies a position somewhere between tableware and food. The
Menagier de Paris gives specifications for the desired size of a trencher:
"half a foot long, by four fingers, by four fingers."[1]
These relatively small loaves would then be turned over and over in
the oven until hard, flat crusts formed on both sides, so that, when
cut horizontally, the soft bread remaining would dissolve to form
a relatively sturdy pair of bowls. With trenchers, staleness was actually
an asset, so the menagier tells his wife to demand four-day-old trencher
bread from her baker, for the best dinner party.
Since structure was critical with trenchers, brown bread was ideal,
but colour was quite a different matter with pain de mayne.
Wheat had historically held the place of primacy among grains for
purposes of bread baking because of its prevalence in the Mediterranean
lands. It should be noted, though, that the term "wheat"
was used somewhat generically by some writers, and sometimes encompassed
a number of different related grains, including varieties as different
as spelt, a hard wheat valued for its high nutritional capacity. Rye,
on the other hand, was the grain most easily grown in the British
Isles and northwestern Europe (Scandinavia, Germanic lands, Netherlands,
much of France), and remained the most common cereal crop until the
end of the eighteenth century.[2] Oats and barley were
also widely available, but were commonly used as animal fodder, so
remain absent from medieval bread production.
Over time, the whiteness of wheat flour and the bread made from it
became a sign of times of plenty and of high social status because
of its relative scarcity in the medieval diet. The standard of excellence,
prized above all on the medieval dining table, was the pure white
leavened bread, sometimes even called 'cake.' Medieval physicians
even maintained that this bread had special curative properties, when,
in fact, it actually had less nutritive value than the breads which
left in more of the wholesome wheat bran, just as the good old Wonder
Bread ads used to claim in the 1950s and '60s.[3] Mixture of flours also acquired the
mark of lower status, signifying the adulteration of the flour of
pure wheat, [4]
and peasants became associated with black bread, the dark ryes and
whole grain varieties, often made with whatever grains (sometimes
with whatever plant materials, period) they could find and grind.
The vast majority of the population fell in between, eating meslin
or maslin bread (Fr.
metail), a mixture of wheat and rye flours that was most economical
in the growing climate of Northern Europe.[5]
Bread composition changed even further once it reached the shores
of America, to reflect its new agricultural and economic environment.
It appears that corn went into immediate use, ground into flour, thereby
earning its place in the breadbaking mix. Cornmeal alone, however,
yields the griddle-cooked "johnny cake" or "corn dodger,"
rather than a leavened loaf. Bread's ongoing prevalence lay in the
colonists' continued reluctance to adopt the potato as an acceptable
carbohydrate, on account of its membership in the nightshade family.
Perceptions of healthiness of heavy vs. light breads appear to have
been left behind as colonists crossed the Atlantic; the new environment,
with its radically redefined notions of status and starvation, as
well as a different growing environment, changed attitudes toward
acceptability of bread products. While refined white wheat bread would
still have status implications in the urban centers, much of the negative
connotation associated with lesser admixtures fell by the wayside.
Famed American journalist William Cobbett notes that, though Long
Islanders are very prosperous, nine out of ten families rarely eat
wheaten bread; instead they usually have rye.[6]
One might assume that the poor would receive less bread than the wealthy,
as well as poorer quality bread, but recent studies of medieval and
colonial bread consumption prove exactly the opposite. In fact, consumption
figures for various countries are surprisingly similar as well. In
the houses of late medieval English nobility, every individual is
given a standard daily food ration of between two and three pounds
of wheat bread and about a gallon of ale. What is even more striking
is that the nearby castle garrisons are provisioned at almost exactly
the same rations, as are the local hospital inmates. Crossing into
the French provinces, the 3500 residents of Chambéry appear
to have received approximately 24 litres of wheat per month, which
likewise averages out to about a two-pound loaf of bread per day.
These figures back up the notion that bread is the absolute staple
of the medieval diet throughout Europe, at all levels of society.[7] Remarkably,
this amount appears again, virtually unchanged, in the everyday diets
of the working residents of the American colonies. Social historians
like Stephanie Grauman Wolf and Billy Smith have shown that the average
colonial, living in Philadelphia between 1750 and 1800, also got by
on "a pound and a half of grain in some form, usually bread,"
supplemented by small amounts of other food groups such as dairy and
meat, just like his medieval counterparts.[8]
Who produced all the bread consumed by medieval people? Commercial
bakers — and the best indication of the importance of their product
and their profession in the medieval society was the amount of regulation
placed on them. This regulation was both internal and external in
origin. Bakers organized themselves into self-regulating commercial
trade cooperatives known as guilds. These collectives functioned as a combination of trade
union and market monopoly and regulatory body. Guilds compelled bakers
to join their groups; no rogue enterprises were allowed in guild territory.
Once you paid in, however, your business and your family enjoyed the
protections associated with guild membership. As a master baker, you
could take and train apprentices, without fear of having your proprietary
recipes stolen and used to establish another profitable bakery under
someone else's name. If anything happened to you or your business,
the guild would pay out a kind of insurance money to your family.
Since all bakers were guild bakers, the guild fixed prices on baked
goods in the region, as well as overseeing the quality in guild bakeries
and securing good prices on raw materials from other merchants and
manufacturers. The guilds comprised a powerful force in medieval urban
life, especially when they controlled the most important portion of
the medieval diet.
So who protected the consumer against the guilds? Well, technically,
that was where the state came in. But the state could not fight every
battle on the common man's behalf, so only two foods were deemed important
enough to legislate — beer and bread. The king's court came to oversee
aspects of weight, quality and price on the most necessary foods.
[See "All Bread is Not Created Equal"]
Once bread or porridge was produced, its uses were virtually endless
in medieval cooking. However, there are few recipes for the making
of bread in medieval manuscripts; it was a separate and distinct professional
craft, and therefore not included in cookbooks or domestic manuals.
No recipes for porridge were given either, as the boiling of grains
was assumed to be intuitive. Descriptions of common meals, menus and
uses of bread and grains inform our views, though. The well-to-do
often enjoyed a fine white bread bun for breakfast, sometimes with
currants or raisins in it, resembling a brioche. Peasants, on the other hand, often ate their coarser
black bread with raw apples or cheese for breakfast or a working lunch
in the fields.[9] [See Breughel unit.] The
staple food for the broadest section of society at the main meal was
a soup or stew — the French potage
— made of beans and/or game. If not served in trencher bread, it
was often poured directly over a hunk of coarse bread. One rural dish
with medieval origins, still being reported on the French countryside
menu in 1789, was a kind of "instant bread soup": 'The bread
is all ready in a big wooden dish, with a little knob of butter, and
then the boiling water is poured over it. Voila! That's the soup.
A clove of garlic and a raw onion grated by the cook and sprinkled
over the soup — that's the seasoning, the last word in culinary fashion.
The soup is served, it's excellent."
In richer aristocratic and bourgeois kitchens, bread and cereals were
not used so much as the center of the meal, as the essential matrix
that held it together. The most common appearance was simply as the
centerpiece of the table, the pain de mayne and the trencher
bread that held the meat, gravies, purees and other dinner foods.
The quality of that tough outer trencher crust was essential to the
success of the feast. Only one other baked good had so much resting
on its structural integrity — the pastry shell. Pies and savory meat
dishes were baked into dough crusts, and, as oven-hot juices built
up behind the starchy wall, once again, the quality of the baker was
critical to social and culinary success. However, pastries were typically
prepared in the home kitchen, so the honour of the house was on the
line. The home kitchen also recycled all stale table bread — drying,
grilling, or even charring it, to make crumbs for incorporation into
sauces. Once broken down, bread could be soaked in broth, vinegar
or verjuice; it would be sieved, then set aside for last-minute incorporation
in a sauce as a thickener. Other crumbs, the paler ones, would be
crushed and made into a panade, then sieved and added to the sauce
at the boiling point. At that moment, it would break down, losing
its own texture and making the sauce smooth, shiny, translucent, and
creamy. If added to milk or stewed fruit over gentle heat, then cooled,
it could even become a flan or custard.[10] With knowledgeable use, the staple
of the medieval diet could create a symphony of textures and flavours
in the medieval kitchen.
Notes
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