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. Most people choose a cheap loaf… made of cheap flour, which, to produce a white and firm loaf, must have a large dose of alum mixed with it.

Bakers were no doubt encouraged to behave by the double threat of ‘hard labour for a month’ and their name, bakery and home address being published in newspapers ‘near the place where the offence was committed’. But, arguably, the most significant step in the quest for affordable white bread came from the United States in the 1870s, where the invention of high-speed roller-milling, by the Welsh-born John Stevens, meant that finer, whiter flour could be cheaply made and potentially exported to the UK. Together with increasingly powerful machine-mixing, it produced a loaf of seductive whiteness beyond the dreams of previous generations.

His dislike of today’s version of that industrialised soft white loaf led to Robert Penn’s bread-making/grain-growing hobby-turned-obsession, described in Slow Rise, set around his home in the Black Mountains.