A year of medieval bread
I baked from a single 1390 household book every week for a year. The bread was better than I expected, and the rules around it were stranger.
he recipe is four lines long and assumes you already know how to bake. That, it turns out, is the whole problem with medieval cookery.
The book was written by an older husband for a young wife, and it is bossy. Bread gets a single paragraph between the care of roses and the removal of fleas. It assumes a hearth, a trough, a neighbour who brews, and patience.
Barm, not yeast
The first month failed. I used dried yeast and got a modern loaf in fancy dress. Once I begged barm from a brewery down the road, the crumb went open and sour-sweet, and the crust took on the colour of old oak.
The law of the loaf
Bakers were fined if a penny loaf came in light. So the loaf stayed a penny, and its size moved with the harvest. In a bad year you could see the famine in the bread before you heard about it.
By December I could bake from the four lines without the notes. That is what a recipe was for.
¶ Written by
Tobias Wren
History editor
Tobias is a former archivist who reads account books for fun. His Chronicles follow one object, recipe or guild through the centuries, footnotes and all.
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A year of medieval bread
I baked from a single 1390 household book every week for a year. The bread was better than I expected, and the rules around it were stranger.
Tobias Wren
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