What was artisan bread like 50 years ago?

What I remember as a kid in the 60s-70s U.S. was tinned loaves, mainly white but some "whole wheat" that had brown coloring and maybe a little whole wheat flour in it.  Soft, even-textured.  "French bread," meaning baguettes, was known about but exotic; "Italian bread," a dense bland white bread obtainable in cities in the Northeast, is the only other non-tinned bread I can recall.

This is reflected in cookbooks.  I have a 1961 English translation of the _Larousse Gastronomique_ which includes a long discussion of bread, but with no mention of high-hydration breads, or pre-ferments beyond a clef from the previous batch.  

I still have the same tattered paperback 1964 _Joy of Cooking_ I consulted when I made my first loaves in the mid 1970s.  It's almost all tinned loaves with sugar and fat in them.  For some years I assumed sweeteners and fat were essential bread ingredients.

Bernard Clayton's 1978 _Breads of France_ is the first book I know of that points in the "artisan" direction, with some serious pre-ferments, though I didn't find it until the late 1980s.  I learned about high-hydration breads from Carol Field's 1985 _Italian Baker_, which was a massive revelation to me: how many different breads you could make with just flour water yeast and salt!

Do you remember Elizabeth David's _English Bread and Yeast Cookery_, from 1979 or so?  Interesting in its own way, but I don't remember any pre-ferments, and while I baked my way through it at the time there is not much in it that has stayed with me.  She liked whole grains.

A memory, in light of our current big-hole obsession: after I absorbed Carol Field's book, I proudly made my Dad a very artisany loaf with big holes and everything.  He was not happy.  He was born in England in the 20s and emigrated to the States in the 50s, and for him proper bread was evenly-textured and suitable for sandwiches.  He thought big holes were a mistake, if not a swindle: an effort to make a loaf look like it had more bread in it than it really did.

One more recollection.  I spent a month in London in the early 80s.  I was interested in bread and looked and ... the pickings were kinda slim.  There were earnest and allegedly healthy whole-wheat breads, but very little that you would eat because it tasted good.

Goodness, you've got me thinking of the past, and also doing a little research! My grandma taught me to make bread about 50-odd years ago. As I recall it was always white bread, and always in a pan. I seem to remember the texture was fairly heavy and moist (not fine, but not really dense) but quite delicious and it made excellent toast. It was baked in a sawdust and coal fired oven, and I don't remember what kind of yeast she used (or if she saved dough from the last baking).

As for the research, I found my mother's old school cook book. It's the Blue Ribbon Cookbook "for Everyday Use in Canadian Homes" from 1905. The bits about bread are enlightening (as are many of the other parts, such as the sensible things on nutrition - "Bread - brown is preferable as it gives more bulk and supplies mineral matter and vitamins". This in the section on Food for Children. Oh, and the part about the newly-discovered vitamins, being A, B, C and D. :)

Some bread-related points:

• "Whole wheat bread should be as light as white bread; if it is not, too much flour has been added, or it has been kneaded a third time"
• "Always make a sponge when dry yeast cakes are used. With homemade or compressed yeast it may be made into a dough at once"
• "A sponge should always rise at least twice its size or until it begins to fall."
• "Dough should always double itself and increase twice its size when placed in the pans"
• "Do not work dough too much as it is better to underwork than to overwork"
• "Do not let it rise too much in dough [i.e bulk ferment] or it will be slow in pans [final proof]. If risen too long it will be full of large holes"
• "Mix the dough soft. It has enough flour when it ceases to stick to the fingers."
• "The second kneading breaks the bubbles and distributes evenly the gas already formed"

They have recipes for soft whole wheat bread, graham bread and bran bread, as well as for 'home made yeast' which uses grated potatoes cooked in boiling water, with added sugar, and "a cupful of good yeast". This is left to ferment then kept in a cold place for two weeks. One then keeps a cupful of this to make the mixture the next time. Interesting. The note says "Home-made yeast sometimes gives very satisfactory results, but is apt to contain so many species of yeast plants that it is extremely hard to obtain uniform results, and it is considerable trouble to make and keep it right". Some things never change. :)

Wendy (British Canadian)

Growing up, I guess we sometimes had white, yeasted bread in the house, but not often. My family bought San Francisco sourdough bread, but our daily breads were from the local Jewish bakery. The closest to white pan loaves was an egg bread - pretty much challah baked in a pan. Otherwise, it was sour rye, "Corn" rye and pumpernickel. Sometimes, we had kaiser rolls.

Then a transplanted Frenchman opened a bakery, at first selling at a farmer's market, then a small store front then a larger bakery. We began also having baguettes and the yeast-spiked pain au levain variations he made. 

David

In the novel ‘My Antonia’ written in 1918 and set on the american frontier in the late 1800s, the neighbors of the narrator are Bohemian and there’s a description of the mother baking sourdough bread and a comment about how it was inferior to the bread of his own home ( though there was no description of his home’s bread). I wondered about the authenticity of this detail- not sure where his household would have obtained their non-sour bread culture. Perhaps from the local brewery, but bread was not the topic of the book. It’s a great novel, by the way, with an early feminist perspective on the old west. 

in spelling and grammar.  Sorry the first one was so bad. 

50 year old bread memories largely depend on where you grew up 

New York and San Francisco or maybe some other large USA city like Chicago or St Louis, there might be a Jewish Bakery or some other one could be found that had SD bread.  The bread bakery options and breads might have been available there but not growing up on a farm in Kansas.  My German heritage great grandmothers passed on sourdough bread making to their daughters.  One eventually left the farm and moved to the ‘big city’ of Topeka.  One of my grandmothers passed on sourdough bread making to my mom too but she had moved to Kansas City where my dad worked at Wonder Bread. But I learned it from her mom who was born in1900 and died at 94 in the home that she was born in - few can say that today!

No one bought bread on the farm because no one sold it in the old days. But most farm folks made yeast bread after commercial yeast was invented in the late 1880's.  There was some SD bread made occasionally sort of like now - by the few who preferred it and didn't mind the extra time and work it takes.  Before commercial yeast, lots of farm people made sourdough bread if they couldn't get barm or they didn't make beer at home or knew who did.  They did a lot of fermenting and canning because they had to.  I was lucky enough to have a grandmother's who made SD stuff occasionally and an aunt who made it a lot - still does and is 90 :-)

But my SD journey really started in SF in 1973 when I was being mustered out of the Navy at Treasure Island.  A chief petty officer, when I was on KP there, was the baker and he made SD bread.  While there, I bought Clayton's Complete Book of Bread - first edition on the Chief's recommendation.  It had every bread recipe known to man in it, a lot of SD ones and all the wild starter recipes except yeast water ones for some reason - so it wasn't complete:-)   No pictures but hundreds of recipes from all over the world.

German heredity meant my grandmother made rye SD breads, whole wheat SD ones too and combinations of the 3 as did my aunt.  Even though it is my favorite now, all the kids hated rye bread and we didn't like WW much better:-)   We did love Wonder Bread though….. which luckily was free with 3 hungry boys, 3 years apart, eating everything in sight!  My mom's idea of homemade bread was frozen white dough bought at the grocery store and plopped into a greased pan for proofing.  My goodness that was great bread and a treat to eat it warm out of the oven!

My mom knew about SD bread from her mom and her sister and even made a few loaves when I got home from the Navy and brought her a Larraburu SD boule from the airport in SF.  I made her a starter and kept it going for a while.

Grandma always had her mason jar of white starter in the fridge with hooch on top:-)   She made the best SD biscuits. Since I was going to college at K-State in the other Manhattan, KS, I got to pick granny's brain about all kinds stuff including bread when driving to and from school and KCMO.  Plus I got free meals on these trips so we cooked and baked together a bit every so often for years.  We learned each other's secrets, not all related to cooking and baking:-)

I found out that if I asked people what it was like for them, when they were my age at the time, they had all kinds of stories.  It was fun to ask these questions at family gatherings where everyone was sitting around, chit chatting.  They all remembered something different about the same thing, or disagreed about it, when they were all still living together and home with Granny.

It was great fun to listen about it all, even if some was kind of horrible.  Life was hard on the farm or small city back then, especially during the pre WW 2, dust bowl, depression 30's.  Hard to believe you could starve living on a farm but they all were hungry, even in the cities, if you weren't working and many weren't with over 30% unemployment - even in the best places to work.

It's been 80 years since those bad days, that turned into a decade of years ….and 110 years from the date of the stories my grannies and others told me - and yours probably to you too.  All first hand and some going back to after the turn of the ‘old’ century, pre WW1 when they were in their early teens. 

But, now is the golden age of sourdough baking.  It has never been this good, exciting and new ...and you are on the cutting edge of it, helping to make it happen.  Tell the great, grandkids how wonderful; it is ….or was!  Otherwise, the question was wonderful and the answers we have are but fleeting memories soon forgotten....... forever.  Happy SD baking and a Haiku for you too.

Our days fly away

Makes us think of older tales

Told about times long gone

My mother grew up in Montreal, and whenever we visited her family we had baguettes from the local boulangerie.  My dad grew up in Saskatchewan, and his brothers still farmed there.  The Saskatchewan aunties made all their own bread and buns (for 8 and 5 children, respectively), both "brown" and "white."  The brown bread was just about as fluffy as the white, but sweeter.  It was fantastic with jam on it.  At home, my mom made Swedish Limpa bread for my dad at the holidays. The days she devoted to breadmaking were a Big Deal.  It was a delicious change from Pepperidge Farm, totally worth our mom being all distracted.  We attended a Lutheran school for a while in the Chicago area, and our friends' lunches often had the breads of German and Hungarian grandmothers, a very different flavor of rye bread than the Limpa we knew in our family.  Bread baking was transformed for me about 1980 when Laurel's Kitchen was published.  At the time I lived near a health food store that ground wheat into flour directly into the consumer's vessel of choice.  Our teeny tiny grad school oven could hold four coffee cans for baking bread.  (When we turned the oven on the cockroaches would come streaming out of the back.)  We had really tasty "silo" bread. It cut up into rounds that looked a bit like English muffins.  I made pizza dough constantly when our kids were small but didn't get serious about baking bread again until 2010 when I discovered the fun of wild yeast levain and, a few years later, of baking in a dutch oven.  I don't think I've bought bread from a store since I moved to North Dakota seven years ago. Now I'm playing with heritage varieties of wheat, rye, spelt and emmer.   Most recently I've discovered that I can use the whey from making Greek yogurt as the liquid in my wild yeast levain and get a loaf with outstanding flavor.  So yes, probably we are in a golden age of breadmaking. 

rye bread with whey.JPG

My husband's grandmother woke at 3:00 a.m. every morning to make the white bread she sold to locals. They would stop by her home in the mornings to pick it up. No one ordered it, they just stopped by to buy some. Her husband had made her a huge box that held 50 lbs of flour. He also made the brick bread oven in the backyard that she called the bake house. He built it up off the ground so she wouldn't have to bend over to see inside it. She was only 4 ft 11 in tall. The bake house  was about 8 ft wide with thick interior walls for the fire on the sides. It finally had to be torn down in 1990.

She also made pizza in it. Just dough, olive oil, garlic, and basil. They both came from Rocca Pia, Italy when they were 4 & 7 years..different times of course. Late 1800s I think because they had children born in 1910.

I wish I could find someone who could build a bake house for me just like hers.

Funny that dark Artisan bread used to only be for servants or the poor. Rich people ate white bread. 

Speaking for the US bread scene, quality bread is a nascent phenomenon.   The US bread scene is awakening to the bread that is available in other parts of the world, such as Germany.   Bread outside of the US has always been a higher quality and more enjoyable product.  

Hole size or number, with respect, are not the marks of quality bread. Flavor, aroma, texture and appearance are marks of quality in my view.   Please spend some time in Germany, France, Italy and Denmark sampling the bread, and note the prevalence of so-called big hole bread.