The Fancy Bread Rolls Of Victorian Middle Class | Victorian Bakers | Absolute History

across britain bakers work to feed our passion for bread and cake but where did this 4 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] four modern bakers are reporting for duty deep in the industrial heartland of victorian britain they've come to one of the very few places in britain which still has a 19th century bake house in working order the black country living museum near birmingham it's very different from the rural setting of their previous victorian bakery they've moved forward in time and during the three decades that have passed britain's population has increased by 20 percent to over 30 million we've become the world's first urban economy by the time we get to the 1870s you've got over two-thirds of the population of britain living in towns and cities and people were flooding to the cities to work in factories in various emerging industries and this booming population of course created a need for food you're also in an urban environment in an industrial age which means that as bakers you'll be working longer hours for less money you can see how it's going to go it's going to be hard it's going to be very hard but we should show you the bait house first so come this way by the 1870s the industrial revolution had already been underway for nearly a century and almost two-thirds of our economy was classified as industrialized this figure had doubled since victoria began her rule just 33 years earlier the astonishing rate of progress is a hopeful sign for modern factory owner john foster i'm expecting to see a little bit more equipment that would be nice will we get any controls on our oven it would be rather nice if there was a mixing machine and we didn't have to mix it all by hand there we have it it's a bit small it's a lot smaller than i thought it would be now where's the bakery so although you might think of victorian britain as a place of big factories and children up chimneys baking really hadn't caught up this is about the same size as the bakehouse you were used to in the 1840s half hundred weight of coal outsides you know a bit different to usual but in terms of how baking worked it's still very much a lot of brute force so come and have a look inside i'm sorry there aren't any fancy machines for you john yeah but i'll sing the blues music yeah this is grubby as anything i know what this is that's a big big ass tray wow full sack yeah this is where we get to know how strong we all are annie and i are on hand to explain how a bake house like this would have worked in the 1870s but we're depending on the baker's expertise to turn historical theory into practice bread is still very very much the staple of life we know that in birmingham there were about 340 bakeries and that's that's a lot big houses like they're small bake houses like this would probably use sacks of around 280 pounds worth of flour so you're probably working towards between 90 and 100 loaves on top of those loaves one of the things they really developed to taste for victorians was fresh little rolls that you're also going to churn out for first thing in the morning so that means without a doubt you're going to be working through the night nothing changes not scaring us no one final point as well there is a hierarchy within the bakery that means a foreman yeah i'll tell everybody what to do yeah a second hand a third hand and then the fourth hand and they earned about two and a half times less than the foreman so you're looking at quite a wage differential i'm basically cold shoveler for the night that's pretty much it isn't it that's where you're going to start yeah baker's shifts usually started at around 11 in the evening and since we are about on that now we'll let you get to work thank you thank you very much catch you later okay since ancient times baking had been seen as a valued trade a venerable craft handed down through generations i'll tell you what guys this is this is chuffing heavy but in the new industrial towns bakers were increasingly treated as little more than unskilled muscle right shall we have actually i'm not allowed to talk no i'm just a cold shoveler we've got to figure out how to do the dough yeah and how to get these ovens late the rapid development of victorian britain would have been impossible without coal we mined 200 million tons a year of the stuff and the industry employed one in 10 working men but it's not something you'd ever see in the bakery owned by 21st century artisan duncan glenn dinning having to fire up the oven with coal this is just a nightmare i mean being conscious running my own bakery and conscious of the cleanliness with which we have to tackle bread making the idea of me turning my hands to some dough with the hands in the state that they're in is is a little bit scary [Music] fifth generation baker john swift sets to work with the flower aided by couture cake creator harpreet borah a typical bakery of this size would get through at least two 20 stone sacks a night john's great-great-aunt harriet who founded his family business in 1863 has one at the ready just behind her [Music] a pre-dough is already fermenting normally the foreman would have come in earlier in the day to set the sponge by mixing a little flour with yeast it's good it's looking pretty lively then water is added along with the rest of the flour and it's time to mix the dough manually the team found this tiring enough in their rural bakehouse where they were making much smaller batches for a much smaller oven though the amount of staff employed by a typical bakery didn't increase during victoria's reign the amount they were expected to produce multiplied five-fold this is about as difficult as getting the dog off of the bed ready the mean name must have been fitter than us are we relying on machines or sizes of doubt used to it 20 stone a dough by and bakers now are strong bakers back then must have been ferociously strong the dough is so dense and heavy that john foster decides a different approach is needed this is the one and only opportunity in my life i'm going to get to knead dough with my feet i am not missing it but we will be hygienic there are some horrified victorian accounts of bakers using their feet to knead but most used their hands someone must have looked at this and gone yeah hang on a minute we're mixing 20 stone of dough it's killing us it's killing me now i'll tell you you're right john yeah he's actually really enjoying this i think he's got some something something's creaking yep something's creepy the bakers might think this is the best approach but the kneading trough is feeling the strain [Music] so what we've got in here we've got 20 stone of flour so we've got like 25 stone now with johnny yeah you coming out is that it yeah that's it even using his feet john is out of breath and coated in sweat within minutes can i ask you a question you don't mind answering how old are you 53 53 okay the average life expectancy for a baker in this period is 42. there you go see you're pushing your luck is it you've been done with it dead man walking don't mind walking the thing is you you're past it at 30. yeah how long are you gonna have to need this for what are we looking at hour maybe can rotate yeah if not an hour and a half you've done five minutes and you're knackered yeah so you're starting to get an insight into the working conditions one of the things you've got here that you just wouldn't have really in most bakeries urban bakeries at this time are these things windows okay okay and i can feel the draught coming through here then we know from accounts that the large percentage of bakeries were actually underground they were in cellars imagine doing this down in the basement with no ventilation no wonder they died early well exactly though a baker's life had always been physically demanding before the mid-19th century when the majority were still based in the countryside they at least had clean air and a ready supply of fresh local produce if i could have this life and still make a living i would choose so rural bakeries were also most often family owned and run but in the ruthlessly competitive mid-victorian city bakeries were more likely to be owned by businessmen or absent landlords who would cut their costs by renting cheap seller premises individual bakers rarely had the capital to buy their own place in towns so they increasingly became freelancers for hire known as journeymen with little control over their working conditions right time to get some shut eye you too on the floor i'm on the top of the tub yeah the first woman i've slept with in 11 years it is my wife accounts of the time describe how the journeyman would grab a little sleep in the small hours while the doe proved they wouldn't have had time to get home for this besides in many places they were actually locked into their bake houses by the owners [Music] we all know that the industrial revolution led to appalling conditions but surprisingly bakers had it worse than nearly any other profession one victorian philanthropist argued that only a job in the bleach works was more damaging for your health the air in victorian cities was already pretty polluted due to industrialization but it was even worse for bakers in their underground bakeries surrounded by flying flower dust one study showed that of 111 bakers 108 were suffering from severe or moderate lung disease [Music] the flower would make the baker wheeze cause asthma and a dry throat that would often bleed [Music] skin diseases were common too a government sanitary commission found that over two-thirds of bakers had health problems and for the few hours a baker did get away from work they may well have returned to a slum these were also the conditions in which many of their customers would have lived a small room like this could very easily have housed a whole family sometimes several along with various lice and bed bugs rats and mice sanitation was very limited there was no running water and the bathroom probably just consisted of a couple of pots the other problem for everyone's health in the victorian industrial town was what they ate and what they didn't you might have a little bit of meat in your diet if you could afford it some dripping perhaps some bacon maybe a sausage but the meat would usually go to the breadwinner the man of the house and then perhaps the children women nearly always lost out and your cooking facilities would have been very limited as well so even if you did manage to get hold of something to vary your diet perhaps some potatoes or even some cabbage you'd have to work out how to cook it on a very very small fire no oven and really very little elf in this kind of context it's no surprise that the major source of calories for working people came from the bakery bread was still the main part of the working-class diet certainly your diet depended on exactly how much money you had but it's still fair to say that along with coal bread really did fuel the industrial revolution [Music] after considerably less than 40 wings the bakers get back to work [Music] come on guys ugh i'm unused to that i actually feel worse having stopped and lay down the coal has brought the oven to the right temperature and the dough is ready to be weighed out and molded into the 90 or so loaves which a 20 stone sack of flour would usually make oh it feels nice it's just four pound lumber doom the quarter was double the weight of a modern sliced loaf and a working man would get through four of these four pound whoppers a week you're looking good the dough is the most basic household variety the shapes are plain mounds like giant bats this was no frills utility bread basic fuel for hard-working people right first one's going are you ready from this side guys is that what you want like virtually all bread in britain at the time though it's white from the start of the 19th century that's what even the poorest customers demanded each loaf would be sold for eight pence roughly a third of a typical workers daily wages at the time well done everybody it's five in the morning but the shift is far from over the main reason baker's now had to work through the night is that urban customers expected fresh morning rolls with their breakfast you ready yep these belong to a class of products called fancy breads not something rural bakers had much call for some fresh milk put the cream on the top as well hello good morning good everyone good morning now you've baked what to me looks like a very respectable night's baking but here you are still baking on making these fancy breads but this in many ways is a bit of a money maker for you what the customer wants customer gets if you think about towns and cities okay you've got the people at the top of the pile and then you've got the working classes but what you do have emerging within the towns and cities is that middle class you know every warehouse every factory not only does it have its people working on the ground but it's also got its clerks all its admin staff and all its money people so you've got this developing middle class and they've also got money to spend they got disposable income what they want to do is they want to spend that income on the things that they like and one of those things would be fancy breads you know slightly sweeter breads but they want them first thing in the morning cooked nice and fresh of course as we all do today these are going to be small made with more expensive ingredients like fresh milk and eggs fancy bread was a little like brioche and you just and as with premium or artisan ranges today for this slightly more elite line bakers could get away with charging a bigger markup by 8 am the first night's bake is finally done it's just the two slices yeah yeah left side and right you can have that smells lovely a crusty bit oh no it's really lovely it doesn't taste anywhere near as holy as i was expecting the amount of coal dust is just ridiculous you can feel that this is workers bread though i think i mean the size of these loaves just just this is this is a man's bread basically this is what is fueling the factories of birmingham at this point one of the things that the poor used to put on their bread was treacle which is basically the goo left when you start to refine sugar at this point in time if you're a manual worker you're needing anything between five and a half to six and a half thousand calories a day your calories have got to come from somewhere and if you are on the bread line if you're a journeyman baker you know and you really have no idea whether or not you've got work tomorrow then you go for what's cheap and what's cheap is sugar-based calories it's 8 30 in the morning but the end of baking did not mean the end of the shift as the most junior bakers duncan and john are now expected to deliver to customers what a whopper the idea of bakers selling in their own shops still wasn't standard in the 1870s last to be loaded are the oven fresh fancy breads don't forget these wow okay i don't want to eat all our profits i'll just have a go at that smell funny they are a much higher class of bread delicate white suited to the middle class palette quite like them it tastes awful that's eggy and that's the point in it oh it's delicious [Music] the sweetened bread isn't to the taste of sourdough loving duncan but refined white rolls were exactly what aspirational victorian customers would have paid a premium for good morning good morning this is really nice oh thank you very much that's made the night worthwhile by law victorian bakers were obliged to weigh each loaf in front of the customer right and fingers crossed well there you go we've been very very generous last night if it was underweight or you were caught not weighing it you could be fined up to five pounds which would be 40 times your weekly wage [Music] bread would also be delivered to factories so junior bakers were sometimes still working 18 hours after they'd started some lovely loads for you yeah i'll get this one let's go 18 hours in that environment with that soot lifting those weights you know i'd literally take my hat off because quite frankly i don't think many people can do that anymore this tiny glimpse that we've had into their world um has just made me realize just how difficult their lives would have been and how hard they would have had to work to put you know bread on their own table let alone feeding the nation like they've done as it was growing from the mid 19th century onwards legislation limited the working day to 10 hours for an ever increasing number of trades but not baking in a freelance industry with 14 000 journeymen competing for jobs in london alone employers had the upper hand you could hardly blame bakers for spending what little free time they had down the pub exhausted by the inordinate amount of work exacted of them how strong is the temptation during the brief periods which they can snatch from labor and sleep systematically to repair to the ale house to stir up their languid frames by means of stimulating drafts no wonder then if in the course of time they abandoned themselves to dissipated habits have you got any dissipated habits i have many i have literally i've got a whole closet full of them i think we all have i kind of feel a bit depressed for them because i can go back to my life and even though that's a lot of hours difficult it's not this you know it's not the drudgery of 18 hours through the night 20 stone caked in all sorts of muck it's dirty it wasn't about the quality of the product it was purely about the volume people at the top are wanting more and more money more profit and are pushing us harder and harder in the mid-1870s baker's hands earned between 12 and 20 shillings a week often less than an average male factory worker but they worked more hours despite this house owners were struggling to make a profit as they tried to hold on to business amongst hundreds of competitors the biggest challenge came from the so-called undersellers which much like supermarket chains today won custom by competing ruthlessly on price they were sometimes owned directly by milling firms who by cutting out the middleman could supply cheaper flour we move into a time where really in order to make a profit you have to start cutting corners one of the ways in which you can become competitive is to become an underseller now there's all sorts of ways in which you can do that you can cut costs through labor cheaper labor longer hours but you've already kind of experienced that but there are other ways within which you can do it and that has to do with adulteration of the flower itself we're going to turn out around the same number of loaves as yesterday but we'd like you to use a lot less flour you're going to be making one full sack of flour which the aim of which is to bulk it out will give you what you're putting into it shortly and then a half sack of flour where the aim is to really work on the whiteness of the loaf here we go again let me get in there john should i get the water guys that sounds good yeah beautiful sponge and what are we about to add what a travesty for much of the victorian era there wasn't effective regulation in place to check whether food or drink were being sold in a pure state so there was little to stop traders adding ingredients usually with something cheaper a common act of adulteration was watering down milk flour was by far the most expensive outlay for any bakery a single sat cost five times as much as a junior baker's pay for the week so using less of it would massively reduce the owners running costs here it's your first adulterant chalk chalk we know from accounts that people were adding about ten percent so what we've done is taken out ten percent of the flour here's ten percent chalk i can't believe that this went in there i mean i'm it's got this grittiness to it it's incredible sure of it is just ridiculous oh my god it's so dusty not good guys this this is not good welcome to the future it smells like it's a mortar mix you're mixing up like plaster or something it genuinely does there's nothing that smells of bread in here it's got this grittiness about it which is just awful there's nothing that's right about this and the idea that they would have reached this level of trying to eke out and you know as much as possible from their ingredients is just it's just crazy i know it's a test but i feel ashamed even though it's a test which is uh which i didn't think i would do we are doing it not from a from any moralistic point of view we're doing it because we're cheating that's the issue it's cheating that's there's no other word the trough was slightly damaged by john's feet needing the night before so this time the bakers will stick to using their upper bodies which they soon appreciate is much much harder the old thing is pretty much sickening in all fairness and the physical exertion you've got to put just to get this stamp stuff made i've got an oven to the back of me and i bake it to the right it's just ridiculous that even though we're making all this effort there's absolutely no way you'd want to stick at your own shop it's just what a thankless task it's just nuts right i'm sweating buckets it's dripping into the trough look at this you may have to move so what you saw you'd never get it mixed i think everyone's feeling quite low because you don't mind working hard when you're excited about the end product but the level of excitement about this chalkboard is just on the floor i've never needed this quality come on this level of physical exertion would be illegal in a modern bakery 20 stone i mean you're only allowed to lift by today's standard is 16 kilos which is like two and a half stone here you are in a trough next to a furnace you know you can't have people doing this at the moment not only do i want to throw up because i'm leaning over this um my back's hurting my legs then might i suggest it is time to stop never yeah the reason i came here was to see what my family did if this is what they did then they were mine not to do it you want that on your gravestone no matter how much you mix that you're not going to pull it together but are you talking from a hell i mean love you to bits but are you talking from health and safety pointing forward just the fact you like us and we don't want to be dead not dying is a bit of a bonus but yeah but i still don't think that you're going to pull together to get the type of dough that you're expecting to get all i want to do is not give up i don't give up eventually john accepts he needs a break [Music] my shirt is literally i'm gonna have to peel this off later on if it gets any hot in here it's gonna be naked baker's central many bakers did need topless another cause for victorian concern about what was being added to their bread leading food writer of the period eliza acton described how the violent exertions of bakers who were overflowing with perspiration led to torrents of sweat pouring into the bread she summed up the conditions baker's worked in with a simple word killing so she campaigned for what today seems the obvious solution to both the poor hygiene and the human misery where are the machines yes the industrial revolution where are the machines it's still nowhere near where i thought we'd be you've got to work out how you power your machinery when you consider that most of the bait houses are this kind of size where are you going to site the machinery and the capital cost is immense and then you look at things like this not just the fact that labour is changing electric is that what's that manual so it's still using the labor they've got you've got to fill the machine by hand you've got to turn it by hand you've got to get the dough out by hand when you've done all of that you think well you know what actually what's the point in spending all this money i might as well just do the whole thing by hand um and when you've got people treated labour yeah the journeyman bakery expendable yeah it is expensive always comes back to that what's the one thing that they can afford to use abuse burn out and and turn over it's it's it's people the other thing is that journeyman bakers themselves resist mechanization and their argument is well if you bring in a machine it does away with the jobs for all of us they're scared so put scaredness on top of this you're going to work your ass off aren't you your guts are going to come up doing this because you don't want to be out of a job what a horrible horrible situation to be in [Music] although the average small-scale bakery didn't mechanize a few large factories found more success at this time [Music] this machine was capable of converting two sacks of flour into 400 two-pound loaves in just 40 minutes it would take all four bakers all night to do the same and the resulting bread was 20 cheaper no wonder the company who owned it became a household name to victorians they have largely been forgotten but you can just make out traces of the aerated bread company over there in the street signage of fleet street none of their extraordinary machines survive but at the university of huddersfield there's a food scientist who can recreate the bread once enjoyed by millions of victorians but which barely anyone has eaten for a century and as professor grant campbell explains to me the abc machine marked a revolutionary break with millennia of bread making for thousands of years we've been getting bubbles into bread using yeast to slowly slowly produce the carbon dioxide and that makes our dough piece rise we put it in the oven we bake it into bread we've got this nice aerated loaf but the victorians had discovered what carbon dioxide was um and how to produce themselves and how to make carbonated water soda water with that now okay here we have some carbonated water if you then mix that with flour to create a dough keeping it all under pressure right then you'll get a lot of carbon dioxide dissolved in your dough when you release the pressure your dough expands you can put it straight in the oven and bake it and you haven't had to wait around for the yeast to produce the carbon dioxide though grant's air rating machine clearly isn't steam powered like the original it does replicate the process of forcing carbon dioxide into the dough mix under pressure and even on a small scale you sense what an appealing alternative it must have seemed to handmade bread this was sold in part that it was pure and it was hygienic and that you were no longer when you were eating your bread eating quite a lot of baker's sweat i would have bought this new bread for that reason alone the victorians were simply very experimental it was a time of massive social change and industrial change and they wanted to try new and modern things that made business sense as well there was an element of the science and the engineering allowed this oh wow that's grown that's raising another reason why victorians were trying to make bread without yeast was the work of contemporary french scientist louis pasteur for thousands of years the action of whatever it was that was making bread rise was mysterious and a bit sinister and then pasteur comes along and shows it's a living organism and not only that it's the same sort of stuff as germs which make you sick some victorians began to worry whether yeast itself was another dodgy additive the growing temperance movement were also suspicious of it because like booze yeast relies on fermentation so why isn't aerated bread still on sale today here we go then it's bread it's missing something and it's the it's it's clawy i am missing the yeast yes it's not inedible no but i don't know whether that's a that's a go-to bread for me it's a fantastic taste of victorian britain a taste of scientific yes and technology driven victorian britain but i don't know that it's a taste that would necessarily take off today possibly not but in the 19th century unadulterated aerated bread was stealing sales from independent bakers making their lives harder still [Music] how many more by 3 am the bakers have their chalky dough in the oven they still have another 50 standard loaves to bake and for those they're going to experiment with a different additive oh that looks beautifully white yeah oh my god it's horrible i'd be quite careful with this one if you've got cuts on your hands this is the adulterant part excellence this is alum um which is potassium aluminium sulfate doesn't that cause brain damage not immediately oh okay no um this was an adulterant that was in really common use we know from the examinations of bread done by the lancet every single loaf of bread in london have this in it the point of alum is is really threefold one is it is supposed to be a flower improver another is that it's supposed to help you to add more water to the dough and the other is that it whitens flour the baker's fetch the flour they'll supposedly improve with alum it feels gritty it actually is really smelly and precisely as annie said i've got a cut on this finger that i managed to do yesterday while scaling off and it's starting to sting a bit so there's that immediate change that you can tell and we are not happy makers today jeez it stinks sticks it's very dry make sure it's in my get all of that water in just smell it there's something just not right about this when mixed with alum flour becomes more absorbent that means the weight of each loaf the baker's cell will come more from water and less from flour so they save on their most expensive ingredient you want the more watery we'll have more water fantastic well i don't think we need the water waters from thank god for alum yeah yeah good old alum water's free so from a historic point of view we are in the money guys we're in the money many victorian consumers would never have tasted unadulterated bread and bakers would have become skillful in the artful use of additives but our 21st century bakers can't draw on the same experience it's just like foam like sludge victorian accounts are vague about quantities and techniques the bakers may have added too much alum and misjudged the flower quality really really strange to work with there's nothing to to actually to do to do yeah just yeah but this is better apparently something's happened to this definitely because there's just no stretch to it it's not it's not bread it's not bread as we know it but victorian customers judged bread not on stretch but on appearance by the end of the shift the bakers have successfully turned out to 150 decent looking white loaves how much repeat business they'd have got is harder to say so this is what i've been most interested to see is what it tastes like here we are you start off dunking i'm the guinea pig am i go for it if you choke we will all run now this is the one that's got the uh chalk in isn't it yeah oh have you just hit the chalk oh it's gritty grittiness about it ah what do you think it tastes like bread but there's a look that would grind your teeth down it would bring a new definition to the meaning of a sandwich wouldn't it [Laughter] the thing is the thing is it's whiter so it's whiter what you have achieved is something that is marketable yeah in terms of how it appears it's time i think still a bit of warmth in this one this makes me sound like a diva but i i don't even want to try it i'm not even gonna try it and it's not really the health thing it's just i mean this has been really upsetting having to make this and it's kind of more what it represents to me you're not going to try it i'm going on strike okay well i know john will try it yeah john verdict valley bread really just like barley bread barley bread with fizz is it fizz yeah there's season [Laughter] actually disgusting it's sort of borderline rancid and then you get that you can compare it to anything that you've had no i would naturally i can't compare that to anything i would put in my mouth and enjoy eating in any way shape or form that's disgusting there is an extra twist to this now millers are renowned for adulterating the flower before you even get it so i don't know how much you picked up on it because i know you were so appalled by the fact you were using alum but there's a substantial portion of sour flour in here properly off rancid flower so some of that sour note is due to the fact that we or rather our miller had adulterated the flower before we'd even got here which means the baker really can't win well that explains it so by the time that that loaf get to the customer if we've adult rated it and the miller's adult rated it what they're going to get they get it's basically nothing alan was used to improve flour but this bake was impossible to salvage today it's just been a kind of a travesty to my trade my craft and sort of everything i stand for is sort of a modern artisan baker we've actually been looking at this real dark side of of the bacon industry in victorian era and that's something i've never come across before and that's been really interesting to be this tired having done nothing valuable is just heartbreaking john swift's family bakery was started in this period exactly the time when adulteration would have been rife i reflected and thought you know have my family at some point use these methods the chalk and and stuff and there may have been a chance that we actually didn't do it but there is a massive chance that we did i mean they were living in times where you know if they didn't eat they died if they lost their job they were at the workout so you know when push comes to shove who knows they may have good evening good evening i've got something else to add here to your trolley you're very very lucky because britain has access to enormous supplies of cheap grain coming in from the united states it will be milled in ports like liverpool manchester and then brought down to places like this on the barge but of course also on the railway lines as well so you've got good cheap unadulterated pure flower to work with and the other thing you've got is sugar sugar comes down enormously in price during victoria's reign and of course consumption of it goes up in direct relation to the price of it so we know that sugar consumption pretty much doubles from the beginning of victoria's reign till in the 1880s we're consuming around 80 pounds per head per person per year so tonight not only are we going to be baking loaves we're also going to diversify and that's where the sugar comes in we're going to be baking that great 19th century classic buns let's make our way to the bakehouse this is edible british baking was turning a corner at last now that's finer i can't i'm really excited to work with this actually and i'm pretty sure this hasn't been contaminated [Music] as soon as the bakers start working with the flower they noticed the difference do you feel like there's a buzz in the bakery okay yeah i mean we're definitely all upbeat now because we've got something decent to work with and i don't feel like we're gonna make something that's gonna kill no children oh god this looks so much better this is so good from where we've been this is it it's literally it's it's it's so familiar as well the way it feels i'm even considering catching my sweat so it doesn't go into it i'm thinking i don't want to ruin the day north american flower is naturally high in gluten making it perfect for bread and it's still widely used in british baking i would really really like to be able to buy uh you know the lovely spelt that is grown and milled literally 10 miles down the road from me but the reality is that there has to be some compromises i i'm a big believer in local but only when it works for my business so so we buy local when it's better yeah by the end of victoria's reign 90 percent of british flower was imported and our wheat industry came close to collapse we're doing this we're killing ourselves but it's for a perfect day in a row yeah but at least it feels like we're making something decent again yeah yeah what a difference the dough makes i didn't hear much laughing yesterday that's because yesterday we were bloody depressed better flower wasn't the only example of technological progress finally improving life for 1880s bakers i think we can safely say that the industrial revolution has finally arrived in the bakehouse heralded by the advent of tins and these things i think are a progressive step in the sense that you can just get more in the oven with tins it's a lot cleaner because we're still on the floor we're still firing with coal yeah we're still getting that dirt so using these yeah he's cutting out the the amount of filth on the bottom of the lathe i can sense the sort of morale is lifting in the bakehouse could not possibly have been any lower yes yes this dough is really different from the moment you cut it out the bowl you can tell it's got that elasticity where you can really pull it out without it breaking and you've got that stretchiness theme on the bottom same on the bottom of course average wages for working people began to improve in the 1880s even a humble factory worker could afford the occasional bun which is good news for cake baker harpreet doesn't it feel good to be working with sugar again [Laughter] okay that's about right and then we want a pint of milk for centuries bake houses only sold bread but as the price of sugar fell baker's increasingly diversified buns weren't too big a leap from standard bread dough still reliant on yeast for their texture wow that is awesome not fun just leave me here guys i'm in heaven so this really is a sweet treat this is when you come into your own then so now to the sponge we're adding this fantastic peel which is the best thing i've spent in days other than duncan this is for the bath buns yeah well they're known as london buns they have their origins in the great exhibition which was sort of generation before really 1851 this huge exhibition set up by prince albert to kind of showcase british industrialism so you can imagine this great exhibition six million visitors all of them needed feeding and there was lots of food stores put on uh schweppes they were one of the contractors providing food for people there i've got an appendix here which lists all of the food stuff that was sold soda water lemonade and ginger beer over a million bottles but most importantly for our purposes bath buns okay so this bun that had come from the west country from your homeland duncan 934 thousand six hundred and ninety one bath buns that's that is insane i mean that's nearly a million buns the bath buns sold at the exhibition were reputedly cheaper and sweeter than the traditional west country variety and so according to some the london bun was born it's turned into a bakery this is this is the nice bit we've got certain jobs being done in certain places it's like you know you've in the environment we're in is isn't exactly a modern bakery but it the the actual system's in place and the ingredients coming in is starting to feel like more of a modern bakery it's starting to feel like what we're used to and and you can tell that by everyone's faces because they're all smiling it's just really nice working with a dough that you just know is packed full of delicious stuff and they must have loved this back in the day this was in the height of luxury butter mixed with sugar yeah all these exciting ingredients coming in um it's just great so i'm i'm kind of feeling excited because i know that they they would have been excited by all of this it smells like christmas smells lovely now with new ingredients and improved flour pride is returning to the urban bakehouse you go oh wow i cannot wait to tuck into that that is just the business that i mean you could sell that in this shop look in the 21st century you've got the flower line where you've put it on and it's moved you've got you've it's it's jumped it looks good great let's get the rest out are you going on for the racks yeah nice color on them they smell amazing job done london buns they do look pretty good for the first time since arriving at the urban bake house the bakers are excited to taste what they have produced [Music] that's lovely yes we bet i'm actually really impressed that we made this in this kitchen right who's up for trying these buns really delicate really lovely mmm i think it's really helped with the peel and the sugar on top that's actually really nice what a difference a day makes hey with the last shift in the industrial bakehouse at an end the bakers are finally getting some fresh air and enjoying time off 1880s style with a brass band in the park alex and i have also dressed in the fashion of the time to join the bakers in a new commemorative ritual of the period photography was becoming cheaper and more widespread towards the end of the 19th century and bakers were among the trades people who lined up to be captured on film [Music] here we go oh my god oh wow that is literally like the real deal that is absolutely bonkers that looks superb isn't it yeah it is fantastic captured the moment of a wonderful week's baking i think don't don't use it like wonderful but we took you to the brink yeah you literally did although the working through the night isn't very nice in terms of the physicality of life and in terms of the expectations on people and in terms of the fact that if you fail there is no safety net i think this is very reflective of the working-class experience in late victorian britain i have a massive respect for my family now because they were baking at this point with these and these conditions and for my family to have gone through what i went through last night it's just humbling and quite emotional let's face it they are aware they're going to go back to a world that has a welfare state and a health service so actually you know they've just scratched the surface of what it would have been like when our hands are not dirty it's soft i actually don't think i could have been a victorian baker because the level of graft that was required in terms of kneading those doughs i was just physically not strong enough to do it so i think i definitely would have got sent to the workhouse when i look at a bread mixer in future it will hold a special place in my heart because i know what it's doing it really is taking the the that back-breaking arm-making horrible work out of it i think i'm going to go back to my bakery and hug a few things [Music] the victorian period everything was expanding everything was growing and if you could make money somewhere you would but there was always a price to pay and i think it's opened their eyes to that i've been quite militant with my approach to bread and my not wanting the other types of bread the commercial stuff to even really be in existence but i understand that we've kind of gone through periods in history where it was a genuine need to feed the nation bread is what the industrialization was kind of fueled on they didn't want to adulterate that bread but the reality is if you had family members at home if you had a wife and children at home and you had to keep your business going you would have had to and these are still arguments we're having today what goes into our food what price do we need to pay for things how much is too much how cheap is too cheap physically i hope it gets easier because i think i'm done

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 45,527

Rating: 4.9497685 out of 5

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

Id: Sa8eWuGZzMc

Length: 52min 51sec (3171 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021