The Dorset County Express and Agricultural Gazette.
Dorchester, Dorset, England, 1862-09-02 00:00:00

OUR DAILY BREAD.

It seems certainly somewhat late in the day
to commence an agitation having for its object
a thorough reform in the manufacture of bread.
We have managed to get on for five thousand
years and more, not to take an unreasonable
series of pre-Adamite ages into account, with
the present mass of dough, formed into cakes of
a portable size, and called bread. We were
not until recently aware that the staff of life had
become a tottering reed. We knew that the
most ancient people in the world—the historic
Hebrew nation—had their leavened and unlea-
vened bread. We knew what shewbread was,
what the Australian " damper ;" what the
German "Pumpernickel," what the Russian
" Xhlaib." Captain Marryat has told us all
about sea-biscuit; how it was apt to grow hard
and indigestible, and, after undue keeping in
damp bags, to become infested with weevilla and
other animalculse. The early records of Scot-
land tell us how the Moss-troopers who strove
to beat Edward I. back to his Southern
dominions carried little provision beyond a
handful of oatmeal and an iron plate on which
they baked those "girdle cakes" which were the
prototypes of the modern " bannocks" formed
from that grain which Dr. Johnson declared to
be food for horses in England and of men in
Scotland. We knew, and we know, that the
bread we eat has had, and has still its faults
Some of it is lumpish, pastry, and indigestible.
Some is brittle, scaley, and sour. Six and
thirty years ago, Mr. Accum, in his famous
"death in the Pot," warned us that fraudulent
bakers were in the habit of grossly adulterating
our. bread. Not going so far as the Radical
chemist who declared that the bones of the
soldiers who fell in the battle of Waterloo were
dug up, conveyed to England, ground into
powder, and mingled with the meal that was to
make our bread, we are no less alive to the fact
that alum, that chalk, that calcareous clay and
other deleterious ingredients, dispensed under
the generic name of "stuff" have been used by
knavish bakers to eke out their stock of flour. ,
Everybody can reckon arnonglhis acquaintance,
people who have at sometime or another found ,
a fine human double tooth in their French roll,
or a calcined insect 'in their "two penny
cottage," or a lock of hair in their "tin baked
brick." As in duty bound, we are always very
angry when there is anything the matter with
the bread. We take care to give the baker a
piece of our mind, when the loaf happens to be
slack-baked or short in weight. We rigorously
denounce that:l/system of putting down "dead
men" of fictitious consumption when we happen
to run credit with the baker, and we grumble
terribly at the tradesman whose farinaceous
dealings give us reason to believe that he is
supplying us with "seconds" or "middlings" in
lieu of the finest wheaten flour. As we have
said, men have generally elected to take their
bread as they have found it, and to be thankful ,
to Him who, in his bounty and mercy, gives it to
us day by day, little dreaming while we were
partaking it we were "eating wonderful dirt and
feasting on abominations." The Times, how-
ever, has recently given an account which ought
to send every housekeeper out, either to inspect
the bakery from which he or she is supplied, or
in search of a clean and wholesome one if such is
to be found. On the authority of Mr. Tremen-
heere, commissioned to inquire by the Home
Office, our contemporary states :—Mr. Tremen-
heels visited ten bakehouses without any know-
ledge beforehand of their character, and which,
he says, were allowed to be fair types of their
class. The principal fact which struck him, and
for which he certainly was not prepared, he says,
was the extreme dirt. In many places the space
between the rafters was covered with cobwebs,
hanging so closely that a heavy foot-fall above
must bring large fragments down into the dough
beneath. Animals in considerable numbers
crawled in and out of the troughs in which the
bread is made, and on the walls. The smells
from the drains, &c., were very offensive, the
draught of the oven continually drawing the
effluvia through the bakehouse, and in every case
there was a total absence of ventilation. Rats
and mice, of course, abounded. Mr. Bennett,
the Secretary of the London Operative Bakers'
Society states, that very many bakehouses in
London are in a shocking filthy state, arising
from bad sewage and ventilation, and that the
bread, in the process of fermentation, gets impreg-
nated with the noxious gases surrounding it.
Another baker, who had been twenty-six years
in the trade, states that the places in which he
had worked had almost always been arches under
ground, with no means of ventilation, and they
were, therefore, generally fearfuly hot, and many
of them infested with vermin. "There are few
bakehouses," said this witness, "that are not
overrun with black beetles in great numbers,
and it is almost impossible to keep them out of
the bread. You could gather a quart pot full in
ten minutes." In another place Mr. Tremen-
heere says: "It was with the utmost reluctance
that I came to the conclusion, from the unvarying
testimonies of a great number of witnesses, and
from what I saw myself, that a batch of dough is
rarely made without having more or less of the
perspiration of the men mixed up with it." It
appears that to make and serve this nasty com-
pound, the men undergo great hardship and
fatigue, which accounts for the fact that has
often struck us, the extraordinary rudeness of
bakers' men, who if they can give your black
coat a brush with their baskets never fail to do
it, perhaps as the only assurance that they have
to do with flour. These men are made mis-
anthropic by their employment. The alum has
entered into their souls. They are soured by
black beetles.