infant bread baked on occasion of the birth of
its grandmother. Hospitable people bring out
their stale bread as other men in other lands
produce for a chosen friend their oldest wine.
In some districts, however, they have no barley
and oats; wherefore they make bread of the
flour of fir bark, which will keep as long. As
long as a deal board will keep, undoubtedly.

Wheat, rye, barley, and oats, acorns, chesnuts,
peas, and beans, in Europe, carrots, also,
mixed with a third part of flour, and potatoes,
which, when first introduced, were made, in
Austria, to yield both bread and wine, maize in
America and Africa, rice in Asia, dried fishes
among some islanders; what is there grindable,
from birch bark upwards, that men have not
ground and baked into loaves or cakes? But
the true bread that furnishes philosophers and
poets with their allegories, that is the pabulum
of politicians, and the King of Good Victuals to
the European, comes of wheat or rye, let us not
grudge to add barley, which is the life of the
sweet black pumpernickel, good to eat in moderation,
freely buttered.

It used to be a belief of theologians that
Adam was taught how to bake; but it has been
observed that there is no evidence that Abraham
could make loaf bread, which we first hear
of in the Mosaic prohibition of its use during
the Passover. The Chaldeans were famous for
good bread, and it would seem to have been in
Chaldea or in Egypt that the first loaf was
invented.

Beyond the ordinary nourishment given by it as
food, a special strengthening power used to be
ascribed to bread, and there was a time when men
saw a reference to this peculiar virtue in David's
mention of "bread that strengtheneth the heart
of man," and in the scriptural statement that
when Saul was with the witch at Endor "there
was no strength in him, for he had eaten no
bread all the day, nor all the night;" upon
which the woman said, "Let me set a morsel of
bread before thee, and eat that thou mayest
have strength." Laertius and Arsenius cite
two cases in which life was said to have been
prolonged and sustained wholly upon the smell
of a new loaf. The spirit obtained from bread
was held to be an elixir of life in a small way.
For outward bruise or inward malady bread was
a remedy. Chewed bread, salt, and spider's
web was sovereign against a wound, and who
shall revile bread pills when he has heard all
that was done in cases of lingering fever by pills
made of rye bread, salt, and fasting spittle!

We are still a long way from Dockhead where
Ceres, trading, with a physician for high priest,
under the style of Peek, Frean, and Co., has
caused a great steam-engine to be set up, and is
again, through her high priest, Doctor Danglish,
teaching the world how to make bread.

The noblest Romans throve on pulse and
bannocks until they received from the Greeks the
art of making leavened loaves. Dough left to
turn sour and thin by standing six-and-thirty
hours in a warm place, is leaven, sour dough, as
the German's call it. It contains twenty or
more grains of the essence of vinegar to every
pound of flour, and communicates, as it used to
be said, a sour taste to the bread raised by it
very grateful to the juices of the stomach.
Fermentation in the dough with which a small
quantity of such leaven is mixed, rapidly
extends, and the carbonic acid gas given out
during the process, swells in the paste, raises it,
and makes it spongy. If the bread be left to
go on fermenting five minutes too long there is
more acid formed than the consumer likes: the
bread is sour. If the bread do not ferment
sufficiently, it becomes heavy, and the chances,
except in the most careful hands, are against
the exact selection of the happy moment for
arresting fermentation in the oven, when the bread
may be over-baked or under-baked, or baked too
fast, or baked too slowly. But with all its
imperfections the old leavened bread, the bread
without which no meal ever was complete, though
eaten daily, never palled. It was commonly the
last thing the sick man relinquished, and the first
for which the convalescent regained appetite. The
different qualities of flour had their appointed
use from old time. Centuries ago a doctor
explained why, that he might purify himself on the
last day of every week, he ate white bread on
every other day, but black on Friday.

We know from Pliny that the Romans knew
the use of yeast for raising bread, and preferred
bread made with it to that produced by use of
the sour dough or leaven. But the leavened
bread was commonest among them, and it was
with leaven that they taught people to make
bread in the provinces. Until the end of the
seventeenth century in France and Spain, and
Europe generally, bread was made only by
means of leaven. Then it was that the Paris
bakers began to import for themselves yeast
from Flanders. The obvious improvement of
the bread of Paris soon attracted notice, inquiry
was set on foot, and the new custom among the
bakers having become known, was declared by
the Faculty of Medicine at Paris, and the
physicians at the court of the great Louis Quatorze,
to be injurious to health. The use of yeast was
therefore prohibited by government.

An absurd prohibition does not command
much respect. The Flanders yeast was put
into sacks, from which its moisture was allowed
to pass, and it was imported in a new form,
almost dry, for the use of the pertinacious
bakers. Perfectly dry yeast will ferment again
when moistened. The bread was liked, the
opinion of the doctors was not cared about, the
prohibition lapsed by disuse, and the new way
of making bread spread itself from Paris
through surrounding countries as fast as the
fermentation of the bit of yeast spreads through
the mass of dough.

So bread-making has passed from the cake
period to the leaven period, thence to the great
period, and through that to a new period, upon
the edge of which we now are standing. Until
lately, in many parts of England, bread-making
and baking were among the household duties of a
private family. Less than sixty years ago