A Treatise on Bread, and Bread-making

by Sylvester Graham

But public bakers, like other men, who serve the public more for the sake of securing their own emolument than for the public good, have always had recourse to various expedients in order to increase the lucrativeness of their business.

To secure custom and profit at the same time, they have considered it necessary, that a given quantity of flour should be made into a loaf as large and as white as possible, and free from any disagreeable taste, while at the same time it retains the greatest possible weight.

From a variety of causes, the quality and price of flour have always been very unstable. Sometimes the crops are small, or the foreign demand for flour or the home consumption is unusually great, or the season is unfavorable to the health of grain, and the wheat becomes diseased, or the harvest time is unfavorable, and the wheat sprouts before it is secured, or large quantities of flour become soured or musty, or in some other manner damaged.

To counteract these things, and to make the most profitable use of such flour as the market affords them, the public bakers have been led to try various experiments with chemical agents, and there is reason to believe that in numerous instances, they have been too successful in their practices, for the well-being of those who have been the consumers of their bread.

According to treatises on bread-making, which have within a few years past appeared in European scientific journals, “alum, sulphate of zinc, sub-carbonate of magnesia, sub-carbonate of ammonia, sulphate of copper, and several other substances, have been used by public bakers in making bread; and some of these substances have been employed by them to a very great extent, and with very great success in the cause of their cupidity. They have not only succeeded by such means, in making light and white bread out of extremely poor flour, but they have also been able so to disguise their adulterations, as to work in with their flour, without being detected by the consumers, a portion of the flour of beans, peas and potatoes—and even chalk, pipe clay and plaster of Paris, have been employed to increase the weight and whiteness of their bread.”

“The use of alum in bread-making,” says a distinguished chemist, “appears to be very ancient. It is one of those articles which have been the most extensively and successfully used in disguising bad flour, and the various adulterations of bread. Its injurious action upon the health is not to be compared with that of sulphate of copper, and yet, daily taken into the stomach, it may seriously affect the system.”

“Thirteen bakers were condemned on the 27th of January, 1829, by the correctional tribunal of Brussels, for mixing sulphate of copper or blue vitriol with their bread. It makes the bread very white, light, large and porous, but rather tasteless; and it also enables the bread to retain a greater quantity of water, and thereby very considerably increases its weight. A much larger quantity of alum is necessary to produce these effects; but when of sufficient quantity, it strengthens the paste, and, as the bakers say, ‘makes the bread swell large.’”

If the statements of our large druggists can be relied on, the public bakers of our own country probably employ ammonia more freely, at present, than any other substance I have named. Pearlash or saleratus is also used by them in considerable quantities.

But even where these adulterations are not practised, the bakers’ bread is very rarely a wholesome article of diet.

If any dependence is to be placed on the testimony of several of the principal bakers and flour merchants in New York, Boston and other cities, the flour which most of our public bakers work into bread, is of a very inferior quality to what is called good “family flour,” and for which they pay from one to three dollars less per barrel; and they sometimes purchase large quantities of old spoiled flour from New Orleans and elsewhere, which has heated and soured in the barrel, and perhaps become almost as solid as a mass of chalk; so that they are obliged to break it up, and grind it over, and spread it out, and expose it to the air, in order to purify it in a measure from its acid and other bad properties; and then they mix it with a portion of much better flour; and from this mixture they can make, as they say, the very largest and finest looking loaf.[^[B]]