It is not my intention to depreciate the great good that would be
derived from scientific chemistry if properly applied to bread-making.
But who is to study and apply it? Surely not a man who earns from 20s.
to 30s. per week, and works twelve, fourteen, and sixteen hours a day
in an overheated atmosphere. What hours of rest he has should be used
to recuperate his lost vitality. Not till scientific chemistry is
taught in our Board schools and made one of the elements of a scholar’s
ordinary education, can we hope to see it used successfully with bakers
in making bread.
Chemistry, I believe, is destined to play as important a part in
the annals of the baking trade as did the substitution of machinery
for hand labour. But at the present day how many bakers know that
the decomposition of sugar produces fermentation; that fermentation
destroys sugar and produces alcohol; that maltose assists fermentation;
that starch, however obtained, has always the same characteristics,
though there are different kinds from different sources; that dextrine
is soluble in water and insoluble in alcohol; that protoplasm, the
basis of all life, consists of protein, compounds, mineral salts,
nitrogen, &c.? And do not the meaning and use of terms familiar in
scientific chemistry--such as _diastase_, _cerealin_, _gluten_, and
others--only perplex the ordinary journeyman baker, and make him think
that the less he has to do with science, the more easily he will get
his life “rubbed through.” It is impossible for working bakers to
become acquainted with these things while in the bakehouse; and while
there are in many towns such valuable institutions as free libraries,
mechanics’ institutes, &c., they are not available to the ordinary
baker, as his hours are so exceptional. The baker’s hours of labour,
indeed, are shorter in many places than they used to be, and he is no
longer called “the white slave.” Still, the spirit of competition is so
strong that a baker has to work much harder proportionally than other
working men, and his mind is in no condition, in the little spare time
he has, to study the problems of science; and nobody can expect the
baker to know, as it were by intuition, the _whys_ and the _wherefores_
of chemistry. However, what he has learnt in the practice of his art,
and what the common custom of the trade has handed down to him, he
may use to more or less advantage, according as he has more or less
personal skill. In the case of fermentation, which may be described as
the very backbone of bread-making, a baker will find plenty to study
and to think about, from his first “setting the sponge” until his bread
is out of the oven, without perplexing himself over problems about
which he can understand little or nothing.
With time and money at his disposal, however, the study of chemistry
opens up a wide field to the studious baker, and would no doubt reward
him for his pains, and at the same time prove a great gain to his
trade; and I believe there are not a few earnest workers labouring at
the present time to afford that knowledge and help to the journeyman
baker which will eventually lead to an easier way of earning his daily
bread.