The Week in: Baking the Best of It

A guest essay on baking myths and fables from two delicious podcasters!

Nov 08, 2024

Thank you to Roxie and Fiona of the Baking the Best of It podcast for this guest post while I give this grief some time. Back soon, love you all. (And thank you for the kindest condolences.)

Great News About Flour, Unless You’re a Peasant in the 1700s

Great news about living in 2024: there’s probably the least amount of sawdust in our food there’s ever been. We’re not at “absolutely no sawdust whatsoever” in our food, as it’s currently used regularly to supplement fiber in many packaged foods in the United States*. That said, hopefully hearing about a time when it was much worse will be comforting!

In 1700s Europe, millers and bakers would add sawdust to their flour to stretch their supply and eke out an income for their product. It didn’t stop at sawdust, either: chalk, bone powder, plaster of Paris, and even dung from livestock were flour adulterants. Historically, bread was a staple food for Europeans, making up about 50% of their diet. This holds especially true, of course, for folks who were not noble, and in the 1700s malnutrition was widespread among the poor in particular. Best case scenario as a 1700s English peasant was getting bread whose flour the baker or miller had added sawdust too, because that seems to have been the additive least likely to make you very sick. But also, the human digestive system gains no nutrition or calories from sawdust, as the cellulose simply passes through undigested. We are not, sadly, pandas. These flour additives only worsened already dire malnutrition.

Bakers and millers were themselves coping with economic constraints. Wheat flour became That Girl for milled grains beginning in the 1700s (overtaking rye and barley), although wheat remained expensive even as it grew in popularity. Bread regulation attended to the weight and price of the product, not the ingredients. Pre-industrial flour folks, under strict pricing regulations, were primarily concerned with making enough money to survive. Non-food adulterants became a cheap or free way for bakers to make more off of their loaves while skirting regulations, and millers were able to make more from selling the same weight flour to bakers.

This flour adulteration even contributed to the frustrations and anger of French peasants before the revolution, and understandably so! As a result, the French government updated regulations to bread in the early 1800s. The problem persisted throughout Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, however, into the 1900s when countries finally began regulating food ingredients.

*Not trying to start a panic over this. Cellulose, aka plant fiber, is regulated by the FDA as a food additive and is usually derived from wood pulp. It’s typically added to increase the fiber content of diet foods, to make ice cream creamier without adding cream, etc. It doesn’t seem unsafe and I don’t think this specifically is the biggest concern around our modern food systems, but it it’s a symptom of American diet culture under capitalism, and well, fuck that.

Did Knife Fights Beneath Paris Lead to the Creation of the Baguette?

Well, no. But please keep reading anyway!

The origins of iconic foods are often wrapped in layers of myth, and even specific bakes “named” for royals like Charlotte Royale or Battenberg Cake generally aren’t tied as directly to their namesakes as pop history claims. The baguette is no exception, and because it’s so important to French culture, there are a number of absurd legends around its origin. And they both involve the violence of men, because that’s what Joseph Campbell said makes a good story or whatever.

A common French tale about the baguette is that Napoleon commissioned long, thin loaves of bread from bakers for his soldiers. The long, thin bread was allegedly ideal for marching because it could be stored in the soldiers’ pant legs. I heartily disagree that this would be ideal. I would not prefer to eat a baguette steamed next to a 19th century soldier’s leg while he stomps around all day. Some versions of the story claim the soldiers’ pants were made with special baguette pockets, which is not only false but not much of an improvement. Baguette is known for its crackly crust, as the hot lady with the bob from Ratatouille expertly explained. While steam is important to the creation of that crust, once it’s baked, a moist environment is counter-productive.

The other “fun” myth of the baguette’s origin alleges that it was a result of construction workers having too many violent, unproductive knife fights during the construction of the Paris metro. As the story goes, in the early 1900s, construction workers from different areas of Paris and France were at war in the dark tunnels of the metro-in-progress. Regional factions of workers spent so much of their time knife-fighting that the construction companies banned knives. As a result, the baguette.

You’re hoping that the workers fought with baguettes instead of knives, increasing the demand for long, thin bread and cementing the loaves one of France’s iconic foods. Sadly, no, according to this legend, bakers made long, thin breads as a response to this metro-worker-knife-ban. That way, workers had a bread they could easily tear and eat, without the need for a knife.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, neither of these is true. Difficult to imagine the French working class responding to a knife ban with compliance, really. The baguette has no single point of origin, and seems to have evolved over the 1800s and early 1900s as a result of multifaceted economic, regulatory, and cultural factors. But we’ll always have (the) Paris (metro construction knife fight myth).

Birds Have Historically Been Too Involved In Baking

Part 1 : Peacocking

Aside from the crows who actively break into Japanese apartments and steal clothes hangers to build nests with, it would be unfair to say that birds commit crimes. They are not subject to human norms or laws so they can’t break them. But unfortunately they have been made to be unwitting accomplices to culinary crimes committed by humans. We can’t expect medieval chefs to have had an understanding of the germ theory of disease, but even allowing for that, there comes a time where you find yourself saying, “Come on man, get it together and leave the birds alone.”

You may have seen images of entire peacocks at medieval banquet tables and wondered how the effect was achieved. Were the birds taxidermied and put on display? Were they elaborate marchpane constructions? Reader, they were not. Peacocks were roasted and eaten much like their dowdier turkey counterparts, but after the birds were roasted their flayed skin was reattached to their bodies with the heads stuffed and propped up with wires. You may wonder, how could it be sanitary to put an untreated peacock hide on top of cooked meat?

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t even slightly sanitary.

The medieval and early renaissance periods in England were very invested in style over substance, ignoring flavor profiles and sanitary practices in favor of making banquets appear incredibly decadent and expensive. Peacocks aren’t even particularly delicious birds, but they look so beautiful when sitting on a banquet table that considerations of taste and untreated peacock skin touching cooked food were fully set aside. In case you aren't aware, raw meat - or however you classify the scraped inside of a peacock skin - spoils within 2 hours of being left at room temperature. Raw meat also carries a huge number of pathogens, salmonella being the most commonly cited one. I hope I don't need to tell you this, but please don’t put the untreated, gooey hide of an animal back on the cooked animal and then eat it.

Part 2 : Four and Twenty Blackbirds Shitting In a Pie

To the extent that you’ve ever thought of the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” you probably thought the image of live birds in a pie was the result of some old-timey person on some old-timey mushrooms imagining if food was alive. But some folks in Italy in the late 1500s thought they’d make a pie full of live birds a reality as a delightful party trick/prank. Very kindly, they have left directions behind:

“To make Pies that the Birds may be aliue in them, and flie out when it is cut vp.

Make the coffin of a great Pie or pasty, in the bottome whereof make a hole as big as your fist, or bigger if you will, let the sides of the coffin bee somewhat higher then ordinary Pies, which done, put it full of flower and bake it, and being baked, open the hole in the bottome, and take out the flower. Then hauing a Pie of the bignesse of the hole in the bottome of the coffin aforesaid, you shal put it into the coffin, withall put into the said coffin round about the aforesaid Pie as many small liue birds as the empty coffin will hold, besides the Pie aforesaid. And this is to be done at such time as you send the Pie to the table, and set before the guests: where vncouering or cutting vp the lid of the great Pie, all the Birds will flie out, which is to delight and pleasure shew to the company. And because they shall not bee altogether mocked, you shall cut open the small Pie, and in this sort you may make many others, like you may do with a Tart.”

From Epulario, or The Italian banquet, 1598

If you don’t feel like reading a Middle English translation of whatever the Italian Middle English equivalent was, the long and short of it is you make a very big fake pie, put a small, real pie in the middle of it, and fill the empty space up with as many live birds as you can. Then you cover it with a fake pie crust, and when you slice into it the birds will fly out. You then serve the smaller pie so they don’t get mad at you for pranking them.

All in all a flawless prank and a wonderful show stopping gag except for one little thing: are you seriously putting a bunch of live birds in a case with food that people are supposed to eat? Live birds that are almost certainly extremely nervous and will be rubbing up against the pie and almost certainly having panic poops? Not to mention the fact that you will be releasing these birds who will almost certainly be stuck in the dining hall, finding their way to the rafters and continuing to poop on everything.

You may be tempted to say that the birds are the criminals in this case since they are the ones defecating in close proximity to food. But I think we must all agree that it is a result of quite literal entrapment, and cannot be held against them. Humankind must simply agree not to shove live birds into small spaces with food meant to be eaten shortly after, and then surely we can all live happier lives.

Fiona and Roxie are lifelong bakers with over a decade-long friendship and a shared affinity for pastry. Their favorite things to do together are develop recipes and tell each other stories. Usually it all ends up being about how food is a portal to the sacred and the resilient. Listen to Baking The Best Of It wherever you get podcasts and follow them on instagram @bakingbestpod. You can also follow Roxie @roxierusalka, and Fiona is enjoying a minimal digital footprint.