Unleavened Bread.
Bread prepared by baking from the meal of farinaceous seeds kneaded with water into a dough and baked, is divided into three sorts, namely;—1. Unleavened bread; 2. Leavened bread; and, 3. Bread made with yeast.
Unleavened bread contains all the component parts of the flour but little altered. The meal is simply mixed with water, and baked into cakes. It is heavy, dry, friable, and not porous. The oatmeal bread of Scotland, is unleavened bread; as also sea biscuit, and all other kinds of biscuit.
The bread that is eaten by the Jews during the passover is unleavened. The usage of which was introduced in commemorationof their hasty departure from Egypt, [Exodus, chap. 12, v. 14 to 17.] when they had not leisure to bake leavened bread, but took the dough before it was fermented and baked unleavened cakes.
In Roman catholic countries it is still used, and prepared with the finest wheaten flour, moistened with water, and pressed between two plates, graven like wafer moulds, being first rubbed with wax to prevent the paste from sticking, and when dry it is used. Unleavened bread is hardly less nutritious than loaf or fermented bread, but it is generally speaking neither so wholesome nor so digestible.
To make Oatmeal Cakes.
To a peck of oatmeal add a few table-spoonsful of salt; knead the mixture into a stiff paste, with warm water, roll it out into thin cakes, and bake it in an oven or on embers.
In some cottages oatmeal bread undergoes a partial fermentation, whereby it is rendered lighter; but the generality of the people in the more humble walks of life, where oatmeal bread is eaten, merely soften their oatmeal with water, and having added to it a little salt, bake it into cakes. To strangers oatmeal bread has a dry, harsh, unpleasant taste, but the cottagers of Scotland, in particular, most commonly prefer it to wheaten bread.
Mixed Oatmeal and Pease Bread.
To a peck of pease flour, and a like quantity of oatmeal, previously mixed by passing the flour through a sieve, add three or four ounces of salt, knead it into a stiff mass with warm water, roll it out into thin cakes, and bake them in an oven. In some parts of Lancashire and Scotland, this kind of bread is made into flattened rolls, and the cottagers usually bake them in an iron pot.
In Norway they make unleavened bread of oatmeal and barley, which keeps thirty or forty years, and is considered the better for being old, so that at the baptism of a child, bread is sometimes used which has been baked perhaps at the baptism of its great grandfather.
Unleavened Maize Bread.
The bread made of maize flour, which is in common use in North America, is unleavened bread. The maize flour is kneaded with a little salt and water into a stiff mass; which, after being rolled out into thin cakes, is usually baked on a hot broad iron hoe.
Another kind of unleavenedmaize cakes, which is a North American bread, calledHoe cake, is made in the following manner.[3]
Take maize, boil it with a small proportion of kidney beans, until it becomesalmost a pulp, and bake it over embers into a cake.
3.This and several other of the directions here given, for making various species of bread, are taken from Edlin’s excellent Treatise on bread making, a small work, long ago out of print.
3.This and several other of the directions here given, for making various species of bread, are taken from Edlin’s excellent Treatise on bread making, a small work, long ago out of print.
Take a quarter of a peck of bean-flour and one ounce of salt, mix it into a thick batter with water, pour a sufficient quantity to make a cake into an iron kettle, and bake it over the fire, taking care to turn it frequently.
4.From the Reports of the Board of Agriculture.
4.From the Reports of the Board of Agriculture.
Take a gallon of water, set it over a fire, and when it boils, let a peck of the flour of buckwheat be mixed with it, little by little,and keep the mixture constantly stirred, to prevent any lumps being formed till a thick batter is made. Then add two or three ounces of salt, set it over the fire again, and allow it to boil an hour and a half, pour the proper proportion for a cake into an iron kettle and bake it.
Take acorns, fully ripe, deprive them of their covers and beat them into a paste, let them lay in water for a night, and then press the water from them, which deprives the acorns entirely of their astringency. Then dry and powder the mass for use. When wanted, knead it up into a dough with water, and roll it out into thin cakes, which may be baked over embers.
Bread made after this method is by no means disagreeable, and even to this day, it is said to be made use of in some countries.
The process of biscuit-baking for the British navy is as follows, and it is equally simple and ingenious. The meal, and every other article, being supplied with much certainty and simplicity, large lumps of dough, consisting merely of flour and water, are mixed up together; and as the quantity is so immense as to preclude, by any common process, a possibility of kneading it, a man manages, or, as it is termed, rides a machine, which is called a horse. This machine is a long roller, apparentlyabout four or five inches in diameter, and about seven or eight feet in length. It has a play to a certain extension, by means of a staple in the wall, to which is inserted a kind of eye, making its action like the machine by which they cut chaff for horses. The lump of dough being placed exactly in the centre of a raised platform, the man sits upon the end of the machine, and literally rides up and down throughout its whole circular direction, till the dough is equally indented; and this is repeated till it is sufficiently kneaded; at which times, by the different positions of the lines, large or small circles are described, according as they are near to or distant from the wall.
The dough in this state is handed over to a second workman, who slices it with a prodigious knife; and it is then in a proper state for the use of those bakers who attendthe oven. These are five in number; and their different departments are as well calculated for expedition and correctness, as the making of pins, or other mechanical employments. On each side of a large table, where the dough is laid, stands a workman; at a small table near the oven stands another; a fourth stands by the side of the oven, to receive the bread; and a fifth to supply the peel. By this arrangement the oven is as regularly filled and the whole exercise performed in as exact time, as a military evolution. The man on the further side of the large table, moulds the dough, having previously formed it into small pieces till it has the appearance of muffins, although rather thinner, and which he does two together, with each hand; and, as fast as he accomplishes this task, he delivers his work over to the manon the other side of the table, who stamps them with a docker on both sides with a mark. As he rids himself of this work, he throws the biscuits on the smaller table next the oven, where stands the third workman, whose business is merely to separate the different pieces into two, and place them immediately under the hand of him who supplies the oven, whose work of throwing, or rather chucking, the bread upon the peel, must be so exact, that if he looked round for a single moment, it is impossible he should perform it correctly. The fifth receives the biscuit on the peel, and arranges it in the oven; in which duty he is so very expert, that though the different pieces are thrown at the rate of seventy in a minute, the peel is always disengaged in time to receive them separately.
As the oven stands open during the whole time of filling it, the biscuits first thrown in would be first baked, were there not some counteraction to such an inconvenience. The remedy lies in the ingenuity of the man who forms the pieces of dough, and who, by imperceptible degrees, proportionably diminishes their size, till the loss of that time, which is taken up during the filling of the oven, has no more effect to the disadvantage of one of the biscuits than to another.
So much critical exactness and neat activity occur in the exercise of this labour, that it is difficult to decide whether the palm of excellence is due to the moulder, the marker, the splitter, the chucker, or the depositor; all of them, like the wheels of a machine, seeming to be actuated by the same principle. The business is to depositin the oven seventy biscuits in a minute; and this is accomplished with the regularity of a clock; the clack of the peel, during its motion in the oven, operating like the pendulum.
The biscuits thus baked, are dried in lofts over the oven till they are perfectly dry, to prevent them getting mouldy when stored for use.
One-hundred and twelve pounds of flour produce one hundred and two pounds of perfectly dry biscuits.