What Life Was Like As A Victorian Baker | Victorian Bakers | Absolute History

across britain bakers work to feed our passion for bread and cake but where did this four billion pound a year industry come from to find out four professionals are going back in time they're baking through 63 years which transformed their trade and our diet forever the age of the victorians from the rural bakeries of the 1840s where baking had barely changed for centuries to the sweat and toil of the urban bakery at the height of the industrial revolution to luxurious high street retailers at the dawn of the 20th century [Music] this is chopping heavy they'll experience firsthand the tough conditions faced by the workers who fed the nation [Music] the physical exertion just to get the damn stuff made is pretty much sickening to be a woman in this age you'd almost feel a bit like a caged bird bakers back then were the people who stood between britain and starvation it's really upsetting it was about staying alive for these people it was an era when bread was mostly natural and wholesome [Music] but was sometimes poisoned this is potassium aluminium sulfate doesn't that cause brain damage until it took the form we know today this doesn't complain this won't die and this can work 24 hours a day welcome to the future they'll bake things virtually no one has tried for at least a century oh wow that is phenomenal it's got this grittiness about it which is just awful that looks hideous that was horrible this for me is actually tasting history they'll work in ways very different from today we're cheating that's the issue it's cheating and i feel ashamed these guys would have lost their minds they're recreating the bread that made britain great that is the business and the lives of the people who baked it i clearly need to learn a thing or two from the victorians [Music] [Applause] when victoria became queen in 1837 the majority of britain's population still lived in the countryside so that's where we're starting to you and i both know that the challenge with this project was always going to be to find an authentic bakehouse yeah back in the day in the victorian period every single parish would have had either a communal oven or a village bake house and so few of them still exist and even fewer of them still work but i think we have found the perfect candidate in the heart of a rural community we've come to sacrael in the cambridgeshire countryside where a bakery was built in the early 19th century next to a mill house in victorian times bakeries have an average staff of three or four people so to staff our bakehouse we've recruited four passionate bakers from across the modern industry whether factory owner or artisan all will bring crucial skills because each of their different branches of baking has its roots in victorian britain [Music] john swift for instance runs a family business that began life over 150 years ago in the victorian countryside it started with my great great aunt harriet her husband was in the field and she baked for the village and there's been a swift baking ever since now he's leaving behind his shropshire high street to experience the kind of rural business his great great aunt would have known it's going back to where we began and to see what my ancestors did and how they coped with it i want to find out exactly how tough it was at the start of victoria's reign a baker's life seemed gentle simple and steeped in tradition there was only really one type of baker the person who made the daily bread on which every community depended soon they'll face dramatic changes but first they're experiencing the last days of a rural golden age the 1830s and like them their bakehouse has been kitted out for the period wow wow dough will be mixed by hand little doterra that's just standard coffin yeah they're breaking new ground for me because i've never used one of them let's have a look at this beast over here that oven is an incredibly rare survival and back in victoria's rain it would have been churning out bread on a daily basis it's essentially based on a medieval style of oven there's a real sense of continuity here i think and bakers have been baking like this for hundreds and hundreds of years and although it's all about to change right here we really are looking backwards used to something that small no [Laughter] this is a slightly worrying thing for me because it doesn't plug in it doesn't it doesn't have a digital display we've all become reliant on like kit machines of some description yeah but what do you need to make bread you need some flour you need some hands and you need a bit of uh a bit of a bit of kind of knowledge compared to what they used to this isn't a huge space and the equipment is quite primitive yeah but i suppose it doesn't need to be any more than this i mean a bakery this size would be feeding what 50 maybe 100 people at most right you've had a chance to explore your bakehouse the first thing we're going to do is bake a standard loaf of bread the kind of thing that would have been made for agricultural workers when queen victoria was young now baking victorian bread from scratch takes around about nine hours so you've got all of your ingredients to prepare you've got a number of processes to go through you've got to get your fuel for the oven and of course you've got to get your oven up to heat as well yeah the main thing is you're professionals you know what you're doing as historians we can learn a certain amount from books but what we're hoping is that you can use your modern expertise to take us that bit further so we can really gain an insight into what it was like to work in a victorian bakery it's over to you sounds good thank you okay should we share this one we've left the bakers with some rare accounts of professional baking from this period be great to find a recipe now compared to what they're used to that's quite a small oven i think they're going to look at the oven and think four of us easy but what they haven't really realized yet i think is that baking bread is only a very small part of what they've got to do somebody needs to do the weighing dope don't know and find the ingredients and get it getting someone needs to like that beast right so we split into two teams yeah small rural bakeries like this were often owned and run by families sometimes for many generations so they're unlikely to have had a strict hierarchy of roles instead bakers would share out whatever task needed doing i don't quite know on this oven where the fire goes john foster is the most technically minded of the bakers together with harpreet borah he's tackling the first task of the day in any bakehouse yeah we've got soot there so fire has to be lit inside that chamber compared to my ovens at the bakery a little bit different in size [Music] in the 21st century john runs an industrial bakery in barnsley which turns out a million products a week the victorians are most admirable for the way they industrialize things making all these machines these guys built things to last and they built things of great quality of great ingenuity but at the start of the victorian era baking hadn't been mechanized ovens relied on the same fuel the ancient romans would have used dried bundles of sticks called were still the optimum fuel [Music] so i presume that we're actually putting this into yeah i know i know it may come as a surprise to you with your modern ovens but yeah you're actually going to have the fire in the oven that doesn't really leave us much space for anything no we're going to get really rapid heat really high heat those bricks are going to absorb all of that heat then we're going to rake it all out and then it's ready to take our bread but only if it's hot enough thank you okay thank you okay right should we try fanning it a bit oh yeah that's good idea this seems so much more laborious i walk into my kitchen and literally turn the oven on and in 10 minutes time it is good and ready to go but we have to draw a picture of a switch on the other way doesn't this seem strangely more satisfying it does actually yeah yeah oh the house of baking these days i know oh wow that's fantastic there it is that is cool yeah a bit different from a micro processor controlled electric thing in it yeah in some ways it's more reliable there's nothing to go wrong here is that you just do it yeah one of the crucial ingredients for bread took up a lot more of a victorian baker's time and money than it does today back then yeast didn't come dried in packets bakers bought it wet in buckets this is your brewer's yeast and what this is is it's the froth off the top of the beer so as the beer is fermenting that froth is scooped off using beer completely new to me i'm usually taken out of a packet so the first thing you need to do is just scrape the froth off the top so what you don't want to do is to get too much liquid in there yeah the victorian baker had to separate the yeasty froth from the dregs of beer because while their customers may have drunk it they didn't want their bread to taste of booze this hasn't been done for 150 years this is what my ancestors would have been doing it's kind of weird that then the dregs of beer must be carefully drained off because there's more yeast which has settled on the bottom steady it strikes me as incredibly delicate yeah there's nothing like this in nothing no modern-day world you're caught up in deadlines when do people need it by how much can you make by that time because that's where where the profits are for a rural victorian baker time was less of an issue because customer demand was very steady and labor was cheap buying fresh yeast from the brewer by contrast was one of their biggest costs for us it's an affordable product today you buy it you get on with it whereas here it's like every single last bit that we could get out really mattered this is gold and one tiny drop on the floor is money wasted and if they drop the old lot you know where do they go from there right and we're ready to go again not only was brewer's yeast pricier it was also weaker than the industrially produced strains used today so the victorian baker would mix it with a little flower to create something called the sponge which would then be left for at least six hours [Music] historically baking had always been linked to other ancient trades not just brewing but also farming and milling [Music] the milhouse and the bake house were owned by the same person in the victorian period and it may well have been that they shared the same labor force as well all living here on site in this range of buildings the bakers and millers would also have been on first name terms with the local farmer it would be his grain that would be brought into this mill house it would be fed down these shoots pass through these stones or it would be grounded to find flour british bakers today rely on flour imported from across the world the victorians used fewer food miles for our bakehouse we've not only sourced english flour but varieties of wheat which would have been grown in the 19th century and that will make a huge difference to the bread the bakers create back then there were hundreds and hundreds of varieties of wheat every region would have grown a different blend of wheat strains and every region's bread would have tasted differently as a result very few of those types are still grown today farmers now rely on just a tiny number of scientifically cross-bred strains but archaeologist turned farmer john letts grows heritage varieties which is what we're using i do believe that many of the older wheats certainly the older species like rivet wheat or you know spelt or emerald and the ancient grains but a lot of these bread weeds they do have differences in flavor in many ways bread today the flavor it comes from the butter and the jam that you put on it rather than the bread itself so what you are effectively saying is that bread's made from something like this the bread itself would have flavor that's well that's that's why i see it and taste isn't the only quality that was different about victorian wheat modern wheat has been bred for higher gluten content gluten being the protein obviously that traps the air bubbles that makes bread rise whereas these older heritage wheats victorian wheats the overall gluten content is lower so our modern breads made with modern flour we would expect to be much higher much smaller i suppose spongy and fluffier than a bread made with something like this absolutely [Music] back at sacrawell it's time for the bakers to turn their heritage flower into victorian dough [Music] these are slightly more cumbersome than the ones that you're good luck does that go on yeah yeah so what's it like lovely creamy color plenty of brown in there still so we need three ounces of salt i wonder if the amount of salt meets the department of health guidelines these days today i'd be very surprised by that not a chance these ingredients will be added to the earlier brewers yeast sponge mix which has been left for six hours to ferment and with any luck expand big reveal oh wow that's bubbled up really nicely hasn't it well done guys i mean that's got to be three times the size easily check it's like a living thing it is it is this is amazing it's literally like blue so we'll get mixing guys should we do this as two two-man teams uh one two-man team and two two-person teams one in the 21st century harpreet bakes couture cakes something there wasn't much call for in the victorian countryside i think the beauty of being in the baking industry is that it's so wide and you will have some people that literally only work with bread and i wish i had that skill a bit more but i think that i'm very able to just get stuck in and get on with it [Music] i'm actually finally getting to do something we're not swapping for a while this is definitely a good cardio workout i must say how many of you in your kitchens would do this manually generally speaking this hard labour intensive process which you're sweating about is done by a wonderful machine this flower yeah is traditional english flower yeah yeah so i've been led to believe that it's not overly great not but compared to sort of today's standards today's standards but this is ancient grains remember so when you know if we're not used to seeing these types of strains of weed um it may be it actually wasn't that bad yeah right should we let them take over it's really strong isn't it okay i'm back again look at that technique i'll tell you what i'm adding water and salt content as i'm mixing here guys has the sweats dripping in the dough the dough finally comes together after half an hour's hard labor [Music] next it needs to be left for another hour to prove what i love is that this is very close to the style of bread that i'm really really passionate about as longer fermentation as possible because for me bread making is all about flavor flavor flavor i.t consultant duncan glendining runs a small artisan bakery in bath i make bread the way we've always made bread before machines and industry kind of came in so it's no surprise to find he's enjoying the unhurried organic world of a traditional country bakery i'm seeing a lot of similarities with our styler baking which is that we try and be very in tune with nature working with the resources that are around good that's time for a cup of tea seem stronger rural victorian bakers would have been serving a very specific type of customer the rich wouldn't usually buy from tradesmen they'd have relied on their own kitchen staff and the middle class at this time was relatively tiny and mostly found in towns so the baker's customers were mainly working people who made up the vast majority of britain's 27 million strong population this is representative of the working class diet at the beginning of the 19th century breakfast for example you've got bread bread and butter and then for your dinner the main meal of the day for most of the working classes you've got bread potatoes which sometimes replace some of the bread and then if you're really really lucky you also have some meat and then your last meal of the day the one just before you go to bed supper bread and perhaps a bit of cheese if you were a rural worker in the 1830s and 40s you would need to consume around six and a half thousand calories a day so more than double the recommended government allowance for calories per person today most of that came in the form of bread it's not surprising to learn that the average victorian family of six people got through a massive 55 pounds of bread per week that's the equivalent of 31 modern supermarket leaves all of this in one week and with bread so important to people's lives bakers were also important yet despite all this demand for bread the typical baker's product range was rather limited today the average british household consumes over a hundred different types of bread product whether it's chibata or baguette or soft white bap but back in the victorian times a rural bakery would really only have been turning out two different types of bread household and wheaton these two varieties were enshrined in law so important was bread that the government regulated its quality weight and even for many centuries the price a standard loaf could be sold for household was your basic bread wheaton was slightly better it was more finely ground and it cost up to a third more per loaf but they were both essentially white or at least white-ish bread by the victorian era even the poorest demanded white bread something which in earlier centuries had been the exclusive preserve of the rich [Music] right let's get this dough out of the trough now it's the more basic household dough these bakers have made which they're now scaling up to make individual loaves let's get as much of this out as possible this is profit they're baking one of the standard weights of the time the two pound loaf equivalent to a modern large sliced [Music] tins weren't in widespread use by bakers at this point so all lows must be hand molded producing the traditional cottage loaf loved by the people another one yeah go for it go for it as it comes yeah this two-tiered shape was by far the most familiar loaf for victorians let's get as many as we can going it only really fell out of favor in the later 20th century when demand for sliced bread increased right am i pushing these through yeah get them through get them in chained away they followed their victorian recipes but they're using brewer's yeast for the first time and the resulting dough isn't behaving as they'd want it's very wet this is totally losing its shape yeah we're losing the top and to the bottom so these guys need to hit the oven now because we're losing their shape now they're sticking together this is such a wet dough with their cottage loaves rapidly turning into pancakes right go it's a race against time to get them in the oven they'll bake until risen right do your thing that's if they rise at all it could be that they're complete disaster and we're gonna have to chip it out i think let's wait and see how those turn out and then we know what to do a bit differently with these and with our next bake the best thing all of their labors so far have just got a baker's dozen into the oven it's much smaller than they're used to it's like a campfire yeah it's just it's very strange i suppose what you've got here is really something on the threshold of domestic and commercial so it's slightly bigger than you'd get in a domestic household but totally recognizable to somebody who was just baking at home i suspect it's the kind of thing that your family probably started in yeah which is why it's interesting you know to to have a go and look at it but i i'm in awe of why they used it after an hour the bakers find out what the oven's done to their worryingly wet household bread this has been done it's a bit soggy inside the fermentation from the dough has worked it's got it's brought out all the colors you want it looks a nice loaf considering what we're working on it looks good but the proof of the pudding's always in the eating yeah but that's true let's crack into this one rather rather good that is nice that's a really nice life so much better than i expected i expected it to be utter utter inedible rubbish to be fair it's like heaven it's like heaven yeah to the untrained palate i would say it's almost a bit like french bread that crushed is that sacrilege the french make fantastic bread so the germans you know just that crust there but that that's similar to a sourdough crust in a sense it hasn't got the you know the richness and flavors that come through but the actual depth of the crust you can see it's this beautiful kind of creamy color it's quite open as well i thought it'd be more dense the taste is what surprised me because it tastes beautiful the yeast has done its job one thing i'm amazed about is the brewer's yeast and how active it is i mean you know that's that's it has actually done really well oh gosh that is lovely this for me is what this has all been about this it's actually tasting history yeah and i think this is as close as anyone will ever have got to an authentic bread from the late 1830s would take at least nine hours from first setting the sponge to the loaves coming out of the oven but the baker's day wouldn't be over yet while some of them cleared up or prepared for the next day other bakers would need to go out and sell what they'd made people might be wondering where the high street is but in somewhere like this the rural community was really dispersed some of these customers would have called at the bakehouse door to buy their loaves but most had them delivered by the more junior bakers because of my family history i knew that the door-to-door sales was important they've got to physically take their bread to their customers every day win rain or shine everybody's within walking distance my customers now well my goodness me we're selling products in china and we deal with them electronically through the internet here it would be well i suppose they call in and tell you what they want or you see them face to face that's a big difference the average price of a two pound loaf in 1837 was four pence and a farthing roughly a quarter of what an agricultural laborer earned per day good evening sir good evening hello how are you we've got cottage loaves could have a little try you can sir thank you very much the great advantage for a rural bake house like this is that there's no real competition if people want to get bred from somewhere else their only real choice is to bake it themselves and in most working-class households they're just too busy to do that yeah so baker's had a kind of captive market very nice very flavorful much thank you completely different to modern bread isn't it definitely yeah having no competition sounds almost like a dream to be honest you know there's no other baker snapping at your heels it's dodgy they're not stodgy sir it's just to fill you up you've been asked for some jam i did feel walking with the bread on me back it's like retreading history for myself and thinking you know this has been done before by one of me a big lesson i learned today is that back then the bakery was ingrained within the community the brain was grown in the fields we then turned that into some lovely bread using the yeast from the local brewery and then another job for the baker is actually to go out into the community and effectively sell the products back yeah cheers i have a feeling that the bakery and the pub were the heartbeats of the village and it was these two places which really kept the village united together if i could have this life and still make a living i would choose so that maybe gives me a decision to make when i get home you know i'm gonna i'm gonna just gonna sell the bakery and do something you know like the good life or something i could do this i could retire here the rural baker's working day would typically begin around 6 a.m so far it's all feeling a little bit idyllic for them isn't it i think they're still in the novelty phase the victorian forebears would have grafted seven days a week pretty much every week of the year with much of the day spent on tasks which aren't part of a modern baker's job description the two johns for instance need to get the oven back up to heat and in the 1830s countryside that meant using a tinderbox i did not think that i would spend so much time doing the non-baking stuff do you know what somebody needs to invent matches i've got a mate called swanny might do it where's that chuffing historian you know where this is going don't you what i don't think they've quite realized is that if they were victorian bakers this would have been constant though stoking the fire filling the ovens looking after the ovens churning out loaves of bread it may look absolutely beautiful but back then it would have been real drudgery okay harpreet is taking bran left over from the milling process to feed pigs rural bakers sometimes kept livestock to supplement their income since there was only so much they could make from selling bread to their limited pool of local customers this experience makes you really understand how thrifty people were when they needed to be the byproducts of what we are using the waste then is fed to our animals to fatten them up to make them better for us to eventually eat later on and it just makes you understand how wasteful we actually are in modern day bakeries and in our lives in general for the new day's baking they need another sack of flour although the flour mill is handily close moving a victorian sack even a short distance was never easy because the standard weight was 20 stone victorian bakers were supposedly capable of carrying these single handedly somebody needs to get underneath the sack is seven times heavier than modern health and safety legislation would allow can we get you trip over there gosh right okay so which way are we going should i we need to go out the door shall i just direct you okay i'll direct you mind your head you're here mind your heads come down a bit just um we're just gonna have to put this down guys because i've just done a hernia drop it then john needs help john we need to put it down john needs help i have just done something really awful fortunately john strain passes when he puts the sack down i don't think anybody can do it these days we're just not strong enough it's really silly because i mean i just carrying it and just all of a sudden i've just got like a somewhat popped so um they were built of uh sterner stuff than in fact to the matter is they did carry them yeah they used to come off the orson trap and they used to bring them in by themselves wow one person picking this whole thing up they were literally all lunched up because their muscles would grow because they could pick it up but they would then be deformed yeah that's amazing the bakers will use this new sack of flower to slightly expand their product line yesterday you prepared leaves for your general customers so your your standard second lathe but not all the bread that was bought would have been the sort of rural working class bread you will also have had slightly posher customers so today we're going to go for that slightly more upmarket customer what you're going to be making with your first flower is this particular shaped loaf known as the cobourg now the shape is very very old the name is one that comes about in the 19th century queen victoria maria's albert sax coburg and you'd find a lot of recipes particularly baking recipes are linked to the royal family so they're named after albert victoria the children as they start to come along so this is your loaf that's got that bit of royal glamour every batch of bread victorian bakers made meant getting physical and with this small oven they might make five or six batches a day without any doubt whatsoever machine mixed dough is better than handmix dough by hand everybody just tires you know and i'm used to watching a machine do it but not at the same time as i mean to be the machine that's the hard bit yeah in john's modern factory it would certainly be easier to set the oven temperature before bread can be baked in this oven the remains of the have to be raked out and the floor cleaned with a swabber so the bread doesn't taste of ashes but the longer you take to clean your oven the more heat it loses do you think the ovens is hot because it was a hot oven yeah well i think it's a bit warmer to be honest i'm just going to cool it down a little bit i've got a cup of water i wouldn't go crazy cooling that down i don't know that's about right that is definitely evaporating a lot slower than it did yesterday yeah i mean we don't know how it holds the heat do we no it seems to hold the heat hoping they've judged the temperature right the bakers start scaling their loaves let's have a look at this dough this recipe calls for another of the standard victorian sizes the quarton which weighed four pounds [Music] we would expect that these customers are going to be paying a little bit more they're probably going to be a little bit more picky a little bit less grateful shall we say so perhaps we just got to step it up for today i think how many you got you got faker's dozen and two baker's dozen and two right the coburg we cut it into four and those little pieces of the four will just hopefully will stand up like a crown or a regal because it's obviously a royal coburg just using a bit of gas and a little bit of experience uh that looks okay i'm happy with that dough i think that's a lot to be honest okay now let's hope for the best despite her expertise being with cake harpreet is taking a central role in preparing the loaves though in the 21st century bread making is a profession dominated by men it didn't used to be women were a big part of the trade back in the 1840s i mean you've only got to look at john swift's great great aunt to realise she started the bakery she would have been doing most of the work and we know from illustrations as well that women were very active in the baking business that's actually really funny because we do have one of the john's that's very much in charge of the oven because he's worried i'm going to burn my eyelashes and i have been looking after a lot of the weighing and the scaling and molding actually so that does look like quite an accurate depiction of our bakehouse after an hour the loaves intended for the bakery's posher customers come out of the oven oh dear okay so they don't exactly have the coburg shape that we were after you can't even call that bread i don't think they're so pale yeah i'm pushing this dough in and it's completely still soft imagine how expensive that would have been you wouldn't be able to get away with the amount wastage we have here definitely not so let's look at why it happened it's clear that the protein in this weed is not what we're used to using so maybe we're missing something in the technique maybe they could work with a flower better because they were working with this flower it's been lost over 150 years and we've we're trial and error we'll find it again i mean another thing would be it would be nice to have a thermometer for the oven if there's any way we could have some idea of what the temperature is the oven just wasn't hot enough this is a great lesson to ask about how little technology they actually had and how well they must have known their oven i know one thing my ancestors are laughing at me yeah quite frankly they're having a right here still totally i feel gutted i don't like to see bread like that we've got this product that is unsalable so i would have thought that the consequences to a bake house in that era would have been absolutely huge to ruin that high prejudice bread i can't i mean i know what i'd do in my bakery and you know we're talking major flip out so that would been disastrous you know possibly even you know end of the loaf intended for the wealthier rural customer has been a failure but the victorian baker would have been closer to the poorer end of the social scale as with the bulk of their customers even in this apparently picturesque setting poverty would never have been far away i think we've rather over romanticized our pre-industrial past we think of it especially in terms of the countryside as some pastoral idol roses around the door and everyone growing their own vegetables but it wasn't like that at all in many parts of the countryside people really struggled in the 1840s three years of bad harvest sent the price of wheat soaring the impact this had on the price of bread was catastrophic a loaf like this would have cost you about 50 more than it would have done just five years before believe it or not in parts of the british countryside people were suffering from quite severe famine bakers were spared the worst deprivation because there was always demand for their services but when wheat prices were high customers could sometimes only afford a cheaper alternative made from different grains barley flour cost half the price of wheat flour to make barley bread by sir john coke along with rye barley was once commonly used in british baking but by the 19th century it was only eaten by the very poorest this barley bread is eaten by many of the farmers in devonshire and cornwall by most of the labourers and husbandry and by almost all of the miners during the season of scarcity this is gonna be a very very dense very heavy bread like all flowers except wheat barley is low in gluten which means it won't produce the light fluffy texture which most british customers preferred then as now this is dodgy this is definitely designed to fill you up this is about subsistence in the 21st century bakers mix barley or rye or spelt with a little wheat flour to give it some rise the resulting breads far from being marketed to the poor and desperate are these days premium products nowadays we're starting to see a huge following for the really heavier german rice sourdough breads and wholemeal breads people love the bran people love the seeds because that's where the goodness is generally speaking the higher the class of place that you're supplying the more bits there are the more oaty the more granular and the the larger the the particle size and so on and so forth so absolute opposite to what it was back then here it goes guys oh god that would feed a family wouldn't it we all having a taste [Music] top it's not bad it's okay you can taste the barley can't you hmm it's got that kind of wholesome smell and wholesome taste to it sure if if i had these in my shop they would they probably would say i would go like that they would go actually but if you thought starvation or this i'd take this yeah this would be fine [Music] some people couldn't afford any bread there are heart-rending accounts of people living on crusts and raw onions of parents depriving themselves that their children could eat and of people dropping to the ground at work faint with hunger people are becoming so poor and so desperate they can't even afford any form of bread barley bread whatever it is and we know from various anecdotal evidence that people turn to a thing called crumbings crammings are chicken feed there's an agricultural practice with chicken farming where you literally cram your chicken so you're cramming it down its throat a bit like foie gras today where you force feeding yeah and this is because chickens are really expensive at this point they're not the kind of they're not for human consumption no but we know people were eating them so i suppose what i'd like us to try and work out is if you're so so reduced in circumstances that you are eating chicken feed how do you render it edible they seem to be based predominantly on bran water lard there are lots of vague recipes for them so i would just have an experiment really there would have been very little technique and effort put into this because this wasn't originally destined to feed human beings if they're that hungry they'll just make them with whatever they've got to answer exactly knowing that i'm making chicken feet is not making me ecstatically happy about this just i mean this is just making my tummy grown but you gotta think bakers at this point are doing this to feed people [Music] here we go so we got shaping them famished country folk bought crammings in penny bags bakers with their constant supply of bran were well placed to make and sell them how bad had it got the mindset of people to want to eat chicken food and that's quite sad really that that would happen to to this country but also you know to my family you know it was about sustaining yourself it was about staying alive for these people it smells like animal food there's no joy in making this and there's no joy in eating this either how unbelievably hungry desperate were these people yeah i mean this is just something to fill your tummy so that you can go to sleep basically isn't it on the table is basically desperation yeah it really is that's been interesting about today is seeing that shift change from you know being able to use the amazing flower it's a symbol of kind of like their class status to then basically eating the scrapings off the floor pretty much anything and everything everything they could get their hands off it really is the harsh reality is people were dying and this is what they had what they turned to yeah it's it's it's scary the hungry man has only one problem and that is to get food what would i do to feed my children if i were hungry well it perhaps just about anything [Music] it meant that people looked around to try and find a better life and it was the rapidly industrializing centres of britain that was sucking up the surplus labor from the countryside put simply britain was urbanizing and urbanizing rapidly but it meant for our rural bakers that their customer base was being eroded that they had to diversify that in some cases they had to close and move to the cities our bakers who will soon move to an urban setting themselves are marking their final day in the countryside by celebrating one of the few rural rituals to survive in rural britain of the 1840s you would have very very few days off okay you could count christmas easter you might have a few days off after haymaking and harvest as the real times in which you'd have your holiday what we want you to do is to create something for effectively a harvest festival and i think we want to bake something that's a real showpiece show off your skills and everything you've learned over the last few days to create a kind of celebratory loaf a big wheat sheath loaf we've got an example here from the victorian period okay it does say here of course the larger it is the more hands it will be necessary to employ upon it the other thing we've got for you as well is uh this one really hopefully should appeal to harpreet it's finally you get to cook a cake yes or at least it's what would have been called a cake in the 1840s so there's still no getting away from yeast i'm afraid what we want to do is to bake a caraway seed cake caraway seeds immensely popular in victorian england they're quite cheap but they're also very representative they tend to be used as a symbol of life of rebirth so it's the kind of thing that would have been cooked probably once a year anyway let's get on let's get our oven up to heat get to work and let's have a day's baking right game boys harvest festivals began to be celebrated in churches in the 1840s but the celebrations had older secular and pagan roots to this day harvest festivals remind us that the life nourishing journey from field to food traditionally depended on the baker [Music] for most people at this point in the 19th century sugar was only used sparingly to sweeten tea so even a plain seed cake would seem like a luxurious treat we've only been doing this for three days and we're already so excited by these fairly basic ingredients that we just take for granted as modern bakers caraway seeds is actually something that i've grown up with so if you go to like an indian restaurant or a curry house towards the end of your meal you would be provided with caraway seeds covered in a candy coating so it's almost that combination of sugar and spice it'll be really interesting to see the impact that it has on the flavor of the cake this is rather like bakers that get to never grow up because this is just play-doh isn't it i have to admit these are the biggest scissors i've ever seen chop chop chop chop baking powder as we know it hadn't been invented in the 1840s so the only way to get a light texture to your cake was to whisk a lot so i am trying to get my egg whites into stiff white peaks using this and this is a victorian whisk that's been made out of birch twigs and a victorian baker would have actually created this themself when you've got layer and layer of clothing on it's just such hard work stiff peaks i think i'm going to be here till tomorrow [Music] let's just have a couple more years a sea of wheat heads beautiful it's the first time harpreet's ever made a cake with yeast and the resulting mix is more like bread dough than cake batter there's no way that you would be making a cake like this in a modern bakery with no butter it's just such a different consistency i can't wait to get back to my bakery and think about incorporating caraway into what i make [Music] off we go [Music] over their last lunch together john decides to show his fellow workers the victorian baker who started his business she is my great great aunt harriet she's the one that started it all off while tom was in the field and you can see uh the flower back yeah in the door more successfully in place she probably was a bit stronger than me and you that's amazing those in the thing yeah those loaves look fantastic compared to what we managed to make has your perception of what she would have done changed having come in here yourself massively i i you think in your head the victorian time's just lovely time it's great and everyone's happy and they all jolly round and eat goose and stuff but you know not this no it's it's graft it's it's it's really hard um limited equipment limited ingredients and you know the heat i mean she's wearing pretty much what you are and you know she doesn't look happy the caraway seed cakes have been in the oven for an hour it's time to see if all that whisking has paid off that is not bad so they've got a good rise on them haven't they i mean if you looked at the dough that you were putting in there the batter that went into these tins was so stodgy and then there's no baking powder in there at all no bicarb they've got a good rice with them because of the yeast that smell everything that we've made so far is pretty bland doesn't it and that's a real sensory overlap it's the first sweet thing that we've been able to make because it was the first time we had access to sugar last i know finally well done [Music] look at this beautiful table always safely gathered in we've invited some of the local community from sacral to join us in the victorian countryside all able-bodied men and women were expected to help with the harvest and afterwards celebrated with a feast getting into the festive spirit annie and i have changed into the height of 1840s fashion the kind of thing the local squire and his wife would have worn good evening everyone hello hello here we go hey that looks fantastic masterful and the caraway cakes as well an absolute triumph harper and now for some dancing it's a chance for us all to reflect on our experience of the victorian countryside i think you know as historians we we can sit in libraries all day and read history but it's quite another thing to taste history one of the main things that i've found out has really been the central focus of the bakery in rural life and the extent to which what's happening in the economy would affect our lives so much we're partying like it's 1847. never going to end this beautiful rural little but of course you and i as historians know that this really is the end actually for for rural britain of this type now indeed the sun is truly setting on a way of life which was hundreds of years old and bake houses like this would have served communities like this back into the medieval period and beyond but by the time we get to 1830 you know we really are looking at a britain that is on the cusp of profound change they've got what 15 20 years maximum before that swing happens and the majority of the population is now living in urban environments it's a time gone by it's finished it's over i think this system of making bread is okay for that era in the countryside when we're moving into the cities and the towns in industrialization there is no way you can keep up with it using the methods that we've used in this bakery here if our bakers were in the 1840s it's going to be their children that we see move into a new world a world which is much more urbanized a world which is much more industrialized in some cases i do fear that the next stage in our baking journey could be somewhat more challenging we've been very lucky so far but we can see that actually things are happening in the country and the impact that's having in the bake houses i'd be lying if i said i wasn't concerned as to what was in store for us

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 583,829

Rating: 4.9261732 out of 5

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history

Id: IIxrL-JKbzE

Length: 54min 33sec (3273 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021