English Bread and Yeast Cookery

Name: English Bread and Yeast Cookery
Author: Elizabeth David
ISBN: 0964360004

by Elizabeth David

Even though the first book that brought me into this was Dan Lepard’s, Elizabeth David was raising some of these issues back in 1977. Going back to at least the 1800s, there had been people campaigning for better bread by reducing or kicking out additives. Even The Daily Mail ran a campaign in the early 1900s about getting more wholemeal flour into bread to make it healthier than nutritionally impoverished white bread. Elizabeth David took a look at loaves and said, ‘All those times you thought you were eating traditional loaves, they were probably quite modern. There is a better way of doing it. There are better breads to be made.’ She was perhaps the most prominent champion for real bread in Britain during the depths of the sliced white years. Elizabeth David looks at the history of breadmaking in Britain, particularly in England. She writes about how things were made and the differences between, for example, stone milling by traditional methods and roller milling. Back then, people didn’t necessarily realise that there were different ways of milling, and I would argue that most of us still don’t know. Forty years on, sadly, we’re still putting out a lot of the same messages in the current Real Bread Campaign. We have to remind people that ‘not all loaves are created equal’ and that often there is a better way of doing things. But she was one of the first within my lifetime who was saying ‘Here are some of the ways that you can do it better.’ The book is a mine of variations on classic English bread recipes. That is very much open to debate. Breadmaking goes back so far that no one quite knows. It was thought that the first leavened bread came about in Egypt and the Levantine region about 10,000 years ago. But a couple of years back, someone found fragments of a bread-like substance—which had bubbles in it to make them think it might have been leavened in some way—that predates that. Then there are points in history that we know more about. For example, commercial yeast—the yeast that most bread is made with now—was a mid-19th century invention. “We’ve been campaigning for a change in the law for the past decade” The word ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional’ is quite a tricky one when it comes to bread. If you say, ‘this is traditional’ there’s a tendency to think that’s the way it’s always been, or that it’s a very long established thing, and therefore better and more trustworthy. If you think about the baguette in France, it’s as if it’s been made since prehistory. Actually, it wasn’t even really possible to make a loaf of that type until you had highly-refined wheat flour and a roller milling process that was invented in Austro-Hungary in the mid-19th century. You also need compressed yeast to make the dough rise quickly and steam-fired ovens. The French baguette dates from the late 19th, very early 20th century. It doesn’t go back as far as we may think. Then there’s the question of what is traditional? Some people say it’s a couple of generations, maybe two to three. By that definition, the Chorleywood, white-sliced loaf is traditional.

Recommended by

Chris Young

"Even though the first book that brought me into this was Dan Lepard’s, Elizabeth David was raising some of these issues back in 1977. Going back to at least the 1800s, there had been people campaigning for better bread by reducing or kicking out additives. Even The Daily Mail ran a campaign in the early 1900s about getting more wholemeal flour into bread to make it healthier than nutritionally impoverished white bread. Elizabeth David took a look at loaves and said, ‘All those times you thought you were eating traditional loaves, they were probably quite modern. There is a better way of doing it. There are better breads to be made.’ She was perhaps the most prominent champion for real bread in Britain during the depths of the sliced white years. Elizabeth David looks at the history of breadmaking in Britain, particularly in England. She writes about how things were made and the differences between, for example, stone milling by traditional methods and roller milling. Back then, people didn’t necessarily realise that there were different ways of milling, and I would argue that most of us still don’t know. Forty years on, sadly, we’re still putting out a lot of the same messages in the current Real Bread Campaign. We have to remind people that ‘not all loaves are created equal’ and that often there is a better way of doing things. But she was one of the first within my lifetime who was saying ‘Here are some of the ways that you can do it better.’ The book is a mine of variations on classic English bread recipes. That is very much open to debate. Breadmaking goes back so far that no one quite knows. It was thought that the first leavened bread came about in Egypt and the Levantine region about 10,000 years ago. But a couple of years back, someone found fragments of a bread-like substance—which had bubbles in it to make them think it might have been leavened in some way—that predates that. Then there are points in history that we know more about. For example, commercial yeast—the yeast that most bread is made with now—was a mid-19th century invention. “We’ve been campaigning for a change in the law for the past decade” The word ‘tradition’ or ‘traditional’ is quite a tricky one when it comes to bread. If you say, ‘this is traditional’ there’s a tendency to think that’s the way it’s always been, or that it’s a very long established thing, and therefore better and more trustworthy. If you think about the baguette in France, it’s as if it’s been made since prehistory. Actually, it wasn’t even really possible to make a loaf of that type until you had highly-refined wheat flour and a roller milling process that was invented in Austro-Hungary in the mid-19th century. You also need compressed yeast to make the dough rise quickly and steam-fired ovens. The French baguette dates from the late 19th, very early 20th century. It doesn’t go back as far as we may think. Then there’s the question of what is traditional? Some people say it’s a couple of generations, maybe two to three. By that definition, the Chorleywood, white-sliced loaf is traditional."

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