With regard to the nutritive qualities of brown bread, Professor Jago
(who I think one of our highest authorities) says that whole meal, and
flour from which the bran and germ have not been removed, do not keep
well. These bodies contain oil and nitrogenous principles which readily
decompose, producing rancidity and mustiness in flavour. Not only do
these changes occur in the flour, but they also proceed apace in the
dough. The diastastic bodies of the bran and germ attack the starch,
and more or less convert it into dextrine and maltose; they further
attack the gluten, and that remarkably elastic body which confers on
wheaten flour, alone of all the cereals, the power of forming a light,
spongy, well-risen loaf. The gluten, under the action of the bran
and germ, loses its elasticity, and becomes fragile and incapable of
retaining the gas produced during fermentation; the result is heavy,
sodden, indigestible bread.
Evidence of this is found in the fact that while whole-meal loaves
are so excessively baked as to produce a crust two or three times
the ordinary thickness, the interior is still in a damp and sodden
condition. This is the effect of bran in whole-meal.
“Not only, then, on the ground of nutritive value may the use of a pure
white loaf be urged, but such bread is more healthily made, and will
be sweet and free from acidity when whole-meal and dark breads are
sour and unwholesome. It has also been pointed out that the nutritive
constituents of the bran are so locked within it that they escape
unaltered from the human body.”
Such, in brief, is Professor Jago’s opinion of whole-meal, and bread
made from it. My own opinion is that Darwin’s theory of the survival
of the fittest is very forcibly illustrated in the milling of cereals,
and the adoption of food most proper for the human system. We have had
brown bread and white bread before the public from time immemorial, and
what is the result? Why, for every sack of wheat-meal bread which is
baked we have a thousand sacks of fine or white bread. And what of our
hospitals and our army and navy, with medical men at the head of them,
watching the results of this food or that food, and its effects on the
human body? I admit that brown bread does suit some constitutions;
but to the majority of people it is nauseous, frequently causing
flatulency. I will just quote another good authority--Professor Charles
Graham.
In his lecture upon “The Chemistry of Bread-Making,” delivered before
the Society of Arts in December, 1879, he said: “As regards the
importance of the constituents of bran, I say that the analyst, and the
physician who makes use of the analyst as his supporter, in bringing
before us the importance of brown bread as compared with white, and
who assert that in rejecting the bran we are guilty of a serious waste
of flesh-forming and bone-forming material, should not take a mere
chemical analysis as all-sufficient to establish their point. A table
showing, from an analyst’s point of view, the comparative merits of
various substances for feeding purposes, shows hay to be of high value
as a food, and even oat straw--as, indeed, every farmer knows from
experience. Still more valuable for their heat-giving, and especially
for their flesh-forming, materials, are linseed-cake, rape-cake, and
decorticated cotton-cake. Now those who hold, from mere chemical
analysis, that bran is of such high value as a food material that its
omission from flour would meet with grave censure, should, from a
similar analytical standpoint, urge us to eat hay, oat-straw, linseed
and cotton cakes. Doubtless these substances are of high value as food
for cattle, because the herbivorous oxen can digest and utilise them
with ease; not so with man, who would starve in a field where a cow or
a sheep would fatten. As with hay or linseed cake, so with bran; I hold
that the best mode of digesting such food substances is first of all by
the aid of our hoofed friends, to convert them into milk or cream, or
bacon, beef, or mutton.”
Now these are the scientific opinions of two of our very highest
authorities. But of late I have been making brown bread out of a blend
of cereals made and milled by an enterprising firm of millers in the
North of England, and I must really say that it meets a long-felt want,
as it produces a brown loaf which is free from that nauseous taste of
which complaint is so often made with brown bread, and has a good nutty
flavour of its own.
* * * * *
In conclusion, let me say that we have reason for great hope for the
future of the Bread and Confectionery trade. Many earnest minds are
devoting both time and money to the development of this important
industry, and their efforts cannot fail to result in bettering the
knowledge and lightening the labour of the practical baker.