Victorian Bakers

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...until last night. I was really disappointed.

For more than ten years, starting, I think, with 'Tales from the Green Valley' the BBC has screened historical documentaries with an element of experimental history to them. The majority have been about farming and have seen three or four historians immersing themselves in farm life, using only what would be available to people of the period. Each series of 12 episodes was filmed over a complete farming year. Experts on particular topics were often brought in to teach some of the skills these people would find necessary, such as ploughing with a team of heavy horses. Periods from the 16th century to WWII were covered in five or six series which, to me and many other people, were compulsive viewing.

I had hoped that Victorian Bakers was going to be in the same vein, even though only three programmes cover three different parts of the Victorian era. Unfortunately, we were given four bakers who didn't have much knowledge of the period, the bread they were being asked to 'recreate' or the heritage grain they were given to work with. One of them bakes cup cakes, never bread, for a living and another one runs a commercial bakery selling frozen, par-baked loaves as far away as China. Only two run high-street bakeries and only one of them had any interest in long-fermentation baking. They were given some old books, a bucket of very wet brewer's yeast, shown a WFO and a pile of faggots and told to get on with it, without even the briefest instruction on using the oven or gauging its temperature. Hardly surprisingly, one of their bakes was a disaster because the oven was too cold and one produced decidedly pale looking loaves. A third produced a sheaf loaf and a yeasted caraway cake. We learned that baking was hard work back then but not a whole lot else.

This is evidently cheap filler produced to capitalise on the popularity of The Great British Bake Off and titled and costumed to be reminiscent of the excellent Victorian Farm. Just to underline the non-existent link, one of the historians involved in the farm series (Alex Langlands) is one of the presenters.

To his credit, the guy making the frozen 'bread' seemed to be genuinely moved by the aroma and taste of the one reasonable batch of bread they produced and made noises about doing something similar when he retired. I bet it'll be with a big mixer, though, having seen him working over the trough. Though I'm not convinced that they really needed to put as much energy into the dough as they did. Those Victorian bakers will have known that time will do a lot of your kneading for you because they weren't dropped into the job like these four.

I don't think I'm going to be bothering with the two remaining episodes.

It has been released on DVD so it should be out there somewhere.

See also the section headed 'Sequels' at the foot of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Green_Valley They're all worth watching, I think.