Clerical Bread.

A deadline is approaching at the speed of something very fast, my friends, so there may be some very short posts coming up in the next few weeks. But there will be posts, I promise. I am then off to England for three weeks – to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery for a few days, then a holiday. As last year, I will post while I am away, so – as last year, if you have any requests for topics I will do my best to oblige.

I am still briefly pursuing this Naming of Dishes (sub-division: Clerical) idea. This pair does not take much fathoming. The Bishop gets bread that is actually a cake, the Reverend gets the bread that is unequivocally the wholesome daily variety. Or is it the Reverend’s own recipe? Did he make it for the parish poor?

Bishop’s Bread.
10 oz. flour
½ tsp salt
4 oz. butter
½ tsp cinnamon
12 oz. Demarara sugar.

Rub the fat into the flour, add the rest of dry ingredients, having put aside four tablespoonfuls (level) of these ingredients for sprinkling on top of the cake.
To the remainder add:

½ tsp baking powder
1 beaten egg
½ tsp bicarb soda
¼ pint sour milk

Beat thoroughly until the batter is smooth. Pour into a flat , greased tin. Sprinkle the dry ingredients over the top and a sprinkling of cinnamon, and bake in a moderate oven 35 to 45 min.
[from an old Yorkshire newspaper]

The Reverend Mr. Haggett’s Economical Bread.
Only the coarse flake-bran is to be removed from the flour; of this take five pounds, and boil it in rather more than four gallons of water; so that when perfectly smooth, you may have three gallons and three quarts of bran-water clear. With this knead fifty-six pounds of the flour, adding salt and yeast in the same way and proportions as for other bread. When ready to bake, divide it into loaves, and bake them two hours and a half.
Thus made, flour will imbibe three quarts more of bran-water than of plain; so that it not only produces a more nutritious substantial food, but makes an increase of one-fifth of the usual quantity of bread, which is a saving of one day's consumption out of six; and if this was adopted throughout the kingdom, it would make a saving of ten millions sterling a year, when wheat was at the price it stood in the scarcity, reckoning the consumption to be two hundred thousand bushels a day. The same quantity of flour which, kneaded with water, produces sixty-nine pounds eight ounces of bread, will, in the above way, make eighty-three pounds eight ounces, and gain fourteen pounds. At the ordinary price of flour four millions would be saved. When ten days old, if put into the oven for twenty minutes, this bread will appear quite new again.
A New System of Domestic Cookery, Formed Upon Principles of Economy, and Adapted to the Use of Private Families, by a Lady (Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell)
Boston: W. Andrews, 1807.

Quotation for the Day ….

A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway. Joyce Brothers