Introduction

1.1 HISTORY

Baking, particularly the baking of bread, is one of the oldest of human activities – indeed one of the oldest surviving papyri appears to be a set of instructions for making bread. Another document is part of a correspondence explaining that pyramid construction is falling behind because the supply of beer and bread to the labourers has been insufficient, thus revealing that the diet of labourers has changed relatively little in thousands of years.

Western civilisation is based on the cultivation of wheat, a practice that seems to have started in Mesopotamia, the area that is currently Iraq. Wheat is a member of the Grammacidae, i.e. it is a member of the grass family. The cultivation of wheat spread from the Middle East across Europe. Settlers took wheat seeds with them to the Americas and started to cultivate wheat there. Those settlers from Great Britain took wheat that had evolved to grow in British conditions. These wheat varieties would grow on the eastern seaboard but were not successful in the American Midwest. Subsequently, however, wheat from Eastern and Central Europe was found to thrive in the Midwest. The cultivation of wheat also spread to Canada and Australia.

In Great Britain, the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century was initially good for the farming community – as people moved from subsistence agriculture to the factories it created markets for agricultural products. This situation continued up to the 1880s when quantities of imported grain started to become available. This imported grain was much harder than English wheat and created a problem since the wind and watermills could not grind it. A solution appeared in the form of the roller mill, a Hungarian invention, which could cope with hard North American wheat. These roller mills could easily produce much whiter flour than the old stone mills. The large milling companies set up mills on dockside sites as the most economic way of handling imported grain. The large wind and water mills that had supplied the cities started to close as they could not compete with these new dockside roller mills. Small rural mills, though, continued to trade locally.

The imported grain triggered a farming recession that ran from the 1880s to 1939. British governments became aware of the strategic problems caused by relying on imported food. Research on wheat breeding led to varieties of wheat with good bread making potential that would grow in the British climate. Other research led to the Chorleywood Bread Process that was intended, among other things, to reduce the dependence on imported wheat.

The next stage was Britain's accession to the European Economic Community [EEC, commonly known then as the Common Market, and now known as the European Union (EU)], which meant that the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) applied. The policy in the form then current sought to penalise the use of food crops from outside the EEC when the crop could be produced inside the EEC.

Originally, the policy had sought to support small farmers by guaranteeing a stable high price for their products. When the supply of a commodity exceeded the demand the surplus was bought and placed in store. This process was called intervention. Keeping stocks of intervention wheat was easier than some other commodities as neither refrigeration nor freezing was needed, unlike the position for butter and beef. There was also the distinct possibility that a bad harvest would allow the grain to be brought out of intervention. The other way of disposing of intervention wheat was subsidised sales on the world market. This was the feature that the traditional wheat-exporting nations objected to most strongly.

If the EEC price was higher than the world price, which it usually was, then imports from outside the EEC had to pay a levy. This provided strong financial motive to try and move from using Canadian wheat. The British wheat that was mainly used instead was not, and is not, as fundamentally well suited to making bread by a long process. Thus, although there were other issues in the move to shorter processes for bread making, the CAP supplied a push because it provided financial advantages for using EEC wheat.

At the time of writing, the World Trade Organisation is pushing for the abolition of agricultural subsidies. If this happens, wheat imported into the EU will no longer be at a financial disadvantage. However, the baking industry is most unlikely to shift back to longer bread making processes. The one area where the use of long processes for bread making has increased is in domestic bread machines, which have increased domestic bread production markedly. Because these machines use a fairly long process the demand for very strong bread flour sold retail has also increased markedly.

The baking industry is not just concerned with the production of bread, there is an important difference between bread and other baked products. Bread is regarded as a staple food and as such attracts regulation of its composition and sometimes price. Biscuits, cakes, pastries and pies are regarded as discretionary purchases and avoid regulation. Bread production is an extremely competitive business while the production of other baked goods is not quite so competitive.

Some supermarkets use cheap bread to attract customers. The supermarket management, knowing that bread is a basic necessity, reckon that if the customer can be lured into the supermarket with the offer of cheap bread then their trade can be captured. Producing the cheapest possible bread does not have a positive effect on quality.

Some small bakers use a variant of the same trick by arranging the shop so that customers need to queue for bread in front of a display of cakes and pastries – which is intended to produce impulse sales.

Another modern trend is the increased sale of filled rolls and pre-packed sandwiches. The sale of filled rolls provides many small bakers with a very satisfactory source of profit. The manufacture of pre-packed sandwiches is now a large industry, consuming large quantities of bread. Such sales growth is obviously caused by a population that is short of time rather than money.

The two hardest decisions in writing this book are what to put in and what to leave out. While the length is decided by the publisher there is no room to produce an encyclopaedia. An attempt has been made to cover examples of the commonest types of product. Inevitably there has to be a great deal about bread in this work but it is not solely about bread, other baked goods have their place in the book just as they do in the bakery industry.

In deciding what to put in and what to leave out, preference has been given to items that are thought likely to be useful to the reader or give an understanding of the current situation. This leads to information on nutrition being included while the genetics of yeast have been left out.

It is a...