Eighteenth Century French Breads





It is difficult to define many Old Regime breads from France, much less explain how they were made. A number of the names that have survived appear to be different names for the same bread and descriptions of their composition (such as they are) can be contradictory. When instructions do exist, they often are for large quantities and so modern home bakers will be required to do some calculation. The ingredients, though they were simple and can be readily approximated today, were in fact almost all different in important ways, complicating the task for anyone seeking to be truly “authentic”.

Still, enough information exists to give a more or less specific idea of the composition and often the making of these breads. This was a period when interest in the manual crafts was on a par with interest in the greater ideas which arose at this time and Diderot was not the only one to write in loving detail of how the simplest things were done. Among several who wrote about bread-making at the time, Paul-Jacques Malouin in particular stands out, and much of what follows was taken from his highly influential L'art du Meunier, du Boulanger, du Vermicillier (volume I of Jean-Elie Bertrand's Descriptions des arts et métiers). Malouin is so manically thorough that at one point he apologizes for providing so much detail (the modern researcher smiles...). But he nonetheless omits or ambivalently describes some of the more common breads and so specifications are added from other sources, notably Nicolas de Bonnefons' Les délices de la campagne (1655/1662) and Diderot's ever helpful Encyclopedie .

At the least, this catalog, if not quite complete, will give those who study the period, bakers or not, an idea of what breads were eaten then. Hopefully, too, some with the relevant skills will be tempted to reproduce one or more of the breads listed. (NOTE: Anyone who does so is invited to share their experience. )





Traditional bread?

The label "Traditional" has taken on a power well beyond its pleasant, rather comforting associations; it is effective enough commercially that you will see it attached to a range of breads made with a range of methods. "Traditional" French bread can be anything from bread made, at least in part, with methods that are only a few decades old, or it can claim roots going back before the arrival of Austrian methods (with August Zang in 1839) in Paris. So whether or not breads that do not strictly adhere to eighteenth century methods and ingredients are traditional is too amorphous an issue to address here. What can be said is that certain things did exist then and others didn't.

Notably, despite claims by some very prominent bakers to the contrary, long narrow breads (as opposed to round ones or, in the 17th century, long wide ones) were already common and yeast was already used by itself as a ferment. (Note that "narrow" here is relative; some baguettes today are thin and evenly narrow for their entire length; others however swell a bit in the middle, much like some breads Malouin shows). These methods were NOT, as has been claimed, introduced by Zang, and are perfectly appropriate for any traditional bread that does not claim to be based on pre-modern methods. They are French methods, not foreign innovations.

On the other hand, anything called a "traditional baguette" is taking a pretty short view of tradition - the first significant use of the word for a bread comes from 1920. Does that mean there is no such thing? Well, again, long thin breads were already dominant in this period, so the bread may have existed, if not that label for it. But it would have lacked two key identifying characteristics that were already common by the late nineteenth century: grignes (the scores across the front of the bread) and a steam-glazed crust. The latter is a direct result of use of the Viennese steam oven, introduced by Zang in 1839. It may be that grignes were starting to be used at the end of this century, but if so they were very much a new innovation.

In other words, if you want to make French bread that is clearly identifiable as "traditional" in the sense of going back to the Old Regime, do not score the front (you might split it, which is quite different) and do not steam-glaze it. For lighter finer breads, feel free to use butter or milk, but for household and other common breads, flour, water, leaven or yeast and, very optionally, salt are all the ingredients you need. Baked of course in a wood-burning oven and using not only (as one writer puts it) "organic" flours, but coarsely ground and sifted flours as well. If you do use yeast, brewer's yeast - preferably from an actual brewer - is the only acceptable option (which may - some disagree - give the bread a distinct flavor).

Is any commercial baker likely to market such "traditional" breads? Iffy, at best. But then "traditional" itself is so shapeless a term that the question is essentially moot.

Period considerations

Several terms and ingredients were assumed in descriptions of eighteenth century bread making.

Types of dough

Dough was described as ferme (firm or hard) or molle (soft), or in-between, that is, batarde (bastard) or (more rarely) moyenne (medium). Firm dough had been the norm until the end of the seventeenth century; “bastard” dough would become the standard dough by the nineteenth (and, with due allowance for modernization, is still the standard dough today). The difference lay largely in the amount of water used and the way it was kneaded, though other elements (cooking, leavening, etc.) could affect the end result.

An especially hard dough - pâte briée – was so hard it had to be kneaded with the feet. But this was falling out of favor by the eighteenth century. A dough with a similar name - pâte broyée - was pounded with iron clad sticks, which apparently would have made the bread harder and fine grained.

Pain Chapelé

Note that the hard outside crust on breads was sometimes grated or cut off, a practice which may have been more necessary when hard dough was the norm than when soft or medium dough became standard. Such bread was known as Pain Chapelé. (This was also the name of a soft roll – see Pain Mollet.)

Bear in mind that for a long time not only was the bread harder, but ovens were harder to regulate, so that over-cooking of the crust may have been more of a problem. Legrand d'Aussy also said that, quite simply, people in earlier times did not like the crust:

In general today we eat far less bread from firm dough than before. This is why we give ours a lot of crust, and then to the contrary people cared so little for the crust that, at the tables of the rich, says Liébaut, they were always careful to grate the bread.

Bakers had a financial incentive to continue this in the eighteenth century: they sold the grated crust as chapelure. However, the finer breads were often glazed with egg yolk and water and it is very unlikely that they were grated.

Shapes

While bread was made (as will be seen) in various shapes, the default shape was already long and narrow, and Malouin refers to the round shape as how “bread was shaped in former times” (though he himself gives instructions for several round breads and seems to prefer that shape: “The round shape is in general the most useful for bread” ). To a modern non-specialist, a number of the breads would have looked like baguettes.

Ovens

These breads would typically have been made in large wood-burning ovens especially constructed for that purpose. Among other things, this meant that different parts of the oven could be more or less hot, and so some recipes refer to “quarters” of the oven. Otherwise, the very rare modern bakers who will use such ovens presumably know far more about the nuances of using them then can be offered here.

Measures

A pound was equal (as now) to sixteen ounces; an ounce was equal to eight gros, and the gros to sixteen grains.

A French pint was equal to two English pints.

A chopine was half a French pint, or one English pint.

A minot was an old measure about equal to a bushel, or eight gallons, equal to, in the UK, 36,37 liters, and in the US, 35,24.

Many of the measures used are intuitive - “the size of two eggs” - or based on relative proportions of ingredients.

Ingredients

Modern home bakers may get good approximations of the breads described, at least as contrasted with modern breads, by using modern ingredients. But almost every ingredient in the period was significantly different. with a predictable impact on the end result: