The Great Wheat Shortage of 1797 - Bread for the Commoners

Imagine you are a baker in the 18th century and your main ingredient is almost impossible to find. What are you going to do? You are going to replace it. That's what we're talking about today. Thank you for joining us as we savor the flavors and aromas of the 18th century. Bread was the most important food component of the common man's diet in the 18th century. Most common workers in the 18th century survived on nothing but beer and

bread

and they generally did not bake that

bread

themselves, they went to the baker to get it. bread survived on it was so important to the diet in England that bread was regulated for hundreds of years before the 18th century bread was regulated in its price, in its weight um everything the price of bread everything had to do with the price of

wheat

in that period, that's one of the problems that everyone in that period demanded white

wheat

bread, that's what they really wanted, they didn't want dark breads, the cheap bread, everyone wanted to eat wheat and white bread, what's wrong ? when there are crop failures in the 18th century or earlier, there were numerous crop failures.

In the 1630s, 1690s, 1740s, and 1790s, again and again they would have weather problems, they would have very, very cold summers, the whole wheat crop would fail or be lost, say, 80 percent of it, so the rich could still get their targets. bread, they could afford to buy expensive bread, maybe even wheat imported from the continent or even North America in that period, so the common man needed something else, the baker had to be able to make some other bread for this common bread. man to eat and we have numerous wonderful sources we can rely on to see what that baker was doing to feed that common man.

In 1804 this amazing little book came out called A Treatise on the Art of Making Bread and the author responded to this idea of ​​what are we going to do to feed the common man because bread is so important that it covers the entire art of making bread? the baker and dedicates a whole chapter to these substitute items that we need for wheat, because wheat is very difficult to get even in the period of 1804, wheat was still very expensive and still in

great

demand in that period, so that the baker has to He comes up with a solution so that some of the ingredients he mentions as substitutes, making bread with peas or partially made with peas is not a very good bread, sometimes we use something like oats or oat flour that is all ground and definitely used in bread.

We use it today, he talks about corn or, as we call it in North America, maize, which is one of those things that he talks about, but it never becomes popular in Britain, of course, it has been used in North America. North for all these hundreds of years. We make a lot of bread with corn and something like barley, we also have buckwheat and a lot of things are used that are grains like that, but some things are nothing like the grains that are used in this bread and he mentions potatoes specifically and Others work very similar to how turnips are used in our bread.

Now we can't necessarily make bread entirely from potatoes, but we can use it as an additive to stretch the amount of wheat you'll use in your bread. So today we will make a recipe taken from the treatise on the art of making bread, we will use potatoes, let's begin. So this treatise is about the art of bread. It's a wonderful book, not only does it have one potato bread recipe, but it also has three potato bread recipes and it spends a lot of time talking about how to prepare these potatoes for this bread now we're going to use the simplest of the three because it It becomes complex and I don't think it's necessary. "To make potato bread, mash a small piece of potatoes in a suitable quantity of water and boil them until they are reduced to pulp and then beat them finely in the water in which they are boiled and knead them with two small pieces of wheat flour with a quantity enough yeast and salt to form a dough, cover, let it ferment for two hours or more depending on the weather and then form loaves and bake them.

Pretty simple recipe, as simple as basically the 18th century plain bread recipe, which is just wheat flour, yeast, salt and water, and then we add this mashed potatoes, basically mashed potatoes, in a proportion of one part of potatoes to two parts of flour. so we are lengthening the time, we get as much bread as possible from the wheat flour we have, so maybe one of the reasons why the author of this book emphasized potatoes so much is because the potatoes used in this bread he continued making a very white wheat loaf, in fact you might not be able to tell the difference, maybe he could get away with making bread with potatoes and his customers might not even know the difference if he uses some of these others grains, huh?

I can tell right away by the color of the bread, but by the smell of the bread or even the look of the crumb, hey, this is substitute bread, this is not what I wanted and you might even get in trouble with the authorities because the bread was regulated. but with these potatoes you get an almost perfect white bread, like normal white wheat bread. So the recipe talked about boiling them to a pulp and sometimes we know we can interpret these 18th century recipes as over-boiling food. I don't know if they necessarily did that or if it was just how one of them described it.

The problem we have with these potatoes is that we can overwork them, we can try to reduce them to that very fine consistency, we can get them to acquire a mass that we don't want, so Some of these recipes talk about forcing potatoes through a sieve like this, which is very similar to an 18th century design and it turns out that if we do that, if we send it through the sieve, it does almost exactly the same thing as a modern potato processor, so they were doing basically the same thing. operation so they would just mash this through the strainer, mash it up and get it to the right consistency without us having to overwork these potatoes, so I peeled them off the bottom of the strainer and they're in the perfect spot. consistency  at this point now the recipe requires mixing all these ingredients we have our main component of flour here again we need two parts of flour for our part of potatoes we have a little salt and we are I'm going to use a little water and here is our main ingredient active, is our yeast today.

We'll use, you know, just active yeast, we'll get a little packet from the store, so just follow instructions like this. We're using it like In the 18th century they would have made a bar or a yeast that you get from the brewery and it's a liquid yeast, it's a yeast that's a byproduct of beer making, so sometimes beer is probably a a little better. the bitter hops it contains or at least as much as a standard beer, but that's what we're going to use for our yeast today. You can use just regular bread yeast from the store, so water and flour are the things you need.

We're going to adapt to get that nice soft bread consistency that you're looking for, because if that ball of dough is too hard it just can't rise and you'll have this dense, dense bread that doesn't do what you want it to do. and then of course if it's too soft it just sinks in and you have this giant flatbread that's still a good bread and worth eating, it's just not as pretty or as easy to use, so our consistency feels really good, obviously, neither too hard nor too soft looks good, so we can put it in our bowl, bring it all the way to the bottom and then place it so it can rise, there we go, so this bowl is still nice and warm.

We will let it rest for approximately those two hours. I mean, he says in the recipe that it all has to do with the weather. They didn't have as much climate control as we did, so they had to adjust their climb time to their weather. but two hours should work

great

for this, we're just going to cover it and set it aside now we have to work on our oven to get it to the right temperature so we can bake this bread. The fire looks good in this oven, it has to heat up for an hour or two, almost the perfect time to heat up, the bread should be ready, you know, this oven we made I don't know, six, seven, eight years. on the canal, but this oven is very far from our farm, where we are going to do a lot of cooking, so we are going to build a new clay oven, a bigger clay oven, right next to the cabin, so make sure you are there.

Pay attention, subscribe to the channel and press the notification bell so you can see us make this new oven. So three things before you try this bread I know you want me to try it right now which is why I didn't wait for the crumb to fully set on this thing, it might be a little rubbery but I know you want me to try it Now number two , on something like this, use the best butter you can get. I say try something like Kerrygold or go to the supermarket and get a special butter. It's worth it and the third thing is let's bake this in a clay oven and it definitely makes a difference if you have the opportunity to use an oven like this do it because it makes the best bread let's try this it smells so good it's a nice soft bread because it just It comes out of the oven is still hot, let's try it.

Excellent bread. You would never guess this bread had an additive because you were trying to stretch the wheat. You know it's so moist and so tender. I don't understand how anyone would complain in 1804 or any other time about getting wonderful potato bread. It's a great and easy thing to do. It's great to be able to make a recipe that connects directly to a situation and event in history. It's not just a random recipe taken from a cookbook, but it's taken from a book that was basically written. Due to the bread

shortage

, we were able to take one of those recipes, try it and enjoy it.

If you are interested in the treatise on the art of making bread, be sure to check the link in the description and if you want other bread. making videos look at this.