Labour of love: producing the perfect loaf

Wheat flour, and the bread made from it, has been a recurring cause of concern for the British for centuries, with parliament passing laws to control the size of loaves and quantity of additives. The 1758 Act required bread to contain ‘genuine meal or flour, common salt, pure water, eggs, and yeast or barm, or such leaven as magistrates shall occasionally allow of’. Flour might be adulterated, mostly to whiten the bread; but rather than this being the work of a mad baker-poisoner it was more likely a response to a public that wanted not just the whitest bread but the cheapest, whitest bread. In the years following the 1820 publication of the German chemist Friedrich Accum’s A treatise on adulterations of food and culinary poisons, an editorial in the Lancet explained the dilemma facing bakers and millers,quoting a reader’s letter:

There is much bread sold in London that has not a particle of alum in it; but then the price is high, for it is made of the best flour.