![]() Barley bread was, besides, used as a kind of punishment, and monks who had committed any serious offence against discipline were condemned to live on it for a certain period. In many counties they sprinkled the bread, before putting it into the oven, with powdered linseed.īread made with barley, oats, or millet was always ranked as coarse food, to which the poor only had recourse in years of want. For the servants an inferior bread was baked, called "common bread.". The "table loaves," were served at the tables of the rich, were of such a convenient size that one of them would suffice for a man of ordinary appetite, even after the crust was cut off, which it was considered polite to offer to the ladies, who soaked it in their soup. Loaves varied in form, quality and consequently in name, there were at least twenty sorts of bread made during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with names such as the court loaf, the pope's loaf, the knight's loaf, the squire's loaf, the peer's loaf and the varlet's loaf. The man who undertook the grinding of the grain had ovens near his mill, which he let to his lord to bake bread, when he did not confine his business to persons who sent him their corn to grind. ![]() Middle Ages Food - Facts and Information about breadĪt first the trades of miller and baker were carried on by the same person. Yeast was reserved for pastry, and it was only at the end of the sixteenth century that bakers used it for bread. It would be difficult to point out the exact period at which leavening bread was adopted in Europe, but we can assert that in the Middle Ages it was anything but general. The use of trenchers remained long in fashion even at the most splendid banquets. These loaves served as plates for cutting up the other food upon, and when they became saturated with the sauce and gravy they were eaten as cakes. For this reason, as the dough without leaven could only produce a heavy and indigestible bread, they made the bread very thin. The custom of leavening the dough by the addition of a ferment was not universally adopted.
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