Episode 1 Victorian Bakers

Across Britain, bakers work to feed our passion for bread and cake.

But where did this £4 billion 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.

This is chuffing heavy.

They'll experience, firsthand, the tough conditions faced

by the workers who fed the nation.

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...

Oh, gosh, that is lovely.

..but was sometimes poisoned...

This is potassium aluminium sulphate.

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, it's actually tasting history.

They'll in work in ways very different from today.

We're cheating, that's the issue. it's cheating, and I feel ashamed.

These guys would've 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.

When Victoria became Queen in 1837, the majority of Britain's population

still lived in the countryside, so that's where we're starting, too.

You and I both know, that the challenge with this project,

-was always going to be to find an authentic bake house.

-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 Sacrewell in the Cambridgeshire countryside, where

a bakery was built in the early 19th century next to a mill house.

In Victorian times, bakeries had an average staff

of three or four people, so to staff our bake house,

we've recruited four passionate bakers

from across the modern industry.

Whether factory owner or artisan, all with bring crucial skills,

because each of their different branches of baking has its roots

in Victorian Britain.

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 bake house has been kitted out for the period.

-Wow!

-Wow!

Dough will be mixed by hand.

-Little dough tray.

-That's your standard coffin.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, breaking new ground for me cos 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 reign it would've been churning out bread on a daily basis.

Wowzers!

But 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.

This is a slightly worrying thing, for me, cos it doesn't plug in.

-Yeah, that's right.

-And it doesn't beep.

-It hasn't got the...

-And 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, ovens.

You need these! And we have hands.

You need some hands and you need a bit of, er,

a bit of, a bit of, kind of, knowledge.

Compared to what they're 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.

I think it certainly looks the part, especially

when we look at some of the images from the period.

Right, you've had a chance to explore your bake house.

The first thing we're going to do, is bake

a standard loaf of bread, the kind of thing that would've 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.

-So, over to you.

-Sounds good, thank you.

-OK.

-Shall we share this one?

-We'll share this one.

I'll have 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, phwoar!

Four of us, easy.

But what they haven't really realised 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 up, don't they?

And find the ingredients and get it, get the stuff.

-And someone needs to light that beast.

-Right.

-So if we split into...

-Two groups.

-..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 because...

John Foster is the most technically minded of the bakers.

Together, with Harpreet Baura, he's tackling

the first task of the day in any bake house.

Yeah, we've got soot there.

So a fire has to be lit inside that chamber.

Compared to my ovens at the bakery, a little bit different in size.

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 industrialised 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 mechanised.

Ovens relied on the same fuel the ancient Romans would have used.

Dried bundles of sticks, called faggots were still the optimum fuel.

So, I presume that we're actually putting

-this in to the top of the oven.

-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. But 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.

-OK, thank you.

OK.

-Right.

-Shall we try fanning it a bit?

Oh, yeah, that's a good idea.

-This seems so much more laborious.

-Yeah.

-I walk into my kitchen and

-literally turn the oven on.

-Yeah.

And in ten minute's time, it is good and ready to go.

But we have to draw a picture of a switch on the oven,

and we can turn it around.

But doesn't this seem strangely more satisfying than that?

-It does, actually, yeah, yeah.

-Sense of satisfaction.

-All the fun's gone out of baking these days, hasn't it?

-I know.

-Oh, wow!

-Oh, my God! That's fantastic, there it is.

-That is cool.

-Yeah.

Yeah, a bit different from a micro-processor controlled

-electric thing, innit?

-Yeah.

In some ways, it's more reliable.

-There's nothing to go wrong here, is there? 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 used to taking it out of a packet.

Brewing and baking have always been closely linked trades,

because both rely on grains fermenting.

Victorians preferred brewer's yeast to the ancient

technique of sour dough, because it was readily available and,

to them, it tasted much better.

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've 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.

-This strikes me as incredibly delicate.

-Yeah.

-Presumably there's nothing like this in?

-Nothing.

-No.

-In the modern day world, you're caught up in deadlines.

-Time.

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 labour 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, and one tiny drop on the floor is money wasted.

And if they drop the whole 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

flour to create something called the sponge, which would then be

left for at least six hours.

Historically, baking had always been linked to other ancient trades,

not just brewing but also farming and milling.

The traditional closeness of those industries is clear to see at

Sacrewell, where the bake house was built as an extension

to the older watermill.

The mill house 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 labour 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 chutes passed through these stones,

where it would be ground into fine flour.

British bakers today rely on flour imported from across the world.

The Victorians used fewer food miles.

For our bake house, 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

crossbred 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 amaranth,

the ancient grains, but a lot of these bread wheats,

they do have differences in flavour.

In many ways bread, today, the flavour, 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 breads

made from something like this, the bread itself would have flavour.

-That's... Yeah.

-Or hopefully, it would.

-That's how I see it.

And taste isn't the only quality that was

different about Victorian wheat.

Modern wheat has been bred for a 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 more, I suppose,

spongy and fluffier than a bread made with something like this?

Oh, absolutely.

Back at Sacrewell, it's time for the bakers to turn

their heritage flour into Victorian dough.

These are slightly more cumbersome than the ones we're used to.

It's a good look.

Hold it up.

-Ugh! Does that go on like that?

-Yeah.

So, what's it like?

Lovely creamy colour. Plenty of bran in there, still.

So, we need 3oz of salt.

I wonder if the amount of salt meets the Department of Health

-guidelines, these days?

-What, today?

-Not a chance, is there?

-I'd be very surprised by that.

-Not a chance.

These ingredients will be added to the earlier brewer's yeast

sponge mix which has been left for six hours to ferment,

and with any luck, expand.

It's the 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's...

-It is, it is a living thing.

This is amazing. It's literally like, blugh, blugh, blugh.

-So, we'll get mixing guys.

-Shall we do this as two, two-man teams?

-Er, one two-man team and one man...

-Two two-person teams, excuse me.

One man and woman, team.

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.

-Shall we get stuck in?

-Let's go for it.

I'm actually finally getting to do something,

we're not swapping for a while.

-This is definitely a good cardio workout.

-Yeah.

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 flour...

-Yeah.

-..is traditional English flour, yeah?

-Yeah.

So, I've been led to believe that it wasn't overly great.

-Not compared to sort of...

-Today's standards.

-..today's standards.

But this is ancient grains, remember, so we're, you know,

if we're not used to seeing these types of strains of wheat,

-erm, it may be that...

-That is actually wasn't half bad.

It wasn't that bad, yeah.

-Right, shall we let them take over?

-Mm-hm.

It's really strong, isn't it?

-OK, 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, as the sweat's dripping in the dough.

-It's your forehead.

-Yeah.

The dough finally comes together after half an hour's hard labour.

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 long a fermentation as possible cos, for me,

bread making is all about flavour, flavour, flavour.

Former IT Consultant, Duncan Glendinning,

runs a small artisan bakery in Bath.

I make bread the way we've always made bread,

before machines and the 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 style of baking, which is that we

try and be very in tune with nature, working with the resources

that are around.

-Good. Now it's time for a cup of tea.

-Off we go.

Something 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 bakers' 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 6,500 calories a day, so more than double

the recommended government allowance of 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 lbs of bread per week.

That's the equivalent of 31 modern supermarket loaves.

All of this, in one week.

And with bread so important to people's lives,

bakers were also important.

They were one of the crucial building blocks of the British

economy, one of the essential trades.

There were around 44,000 bakers in Britain

when Victoria came to the throne.

Twice as many as the industry employs today, even though

the British population was half the size.

Yet, despite all this demand for bread,

the typical baker's product range was rather limited.

Today, the average British household consumes over 100 different

types of bread product.

Whether it's ciabatta 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 wheaten.

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, wheaten 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 whitish bread.

By the Victorian era, even the poorest demanded white bread,

something which in earlier centuries had been the exclusive

preserve of the rich.

They paid more for it than they would have done for wholemeal,

but it was felt to be higher status, as well as easier to digest.

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 2lb loaf,

equivalent to a modern large sliced.

Tins weren't in widespread use by bakers at this point, so all

loaves must be hand-moulded.

We're producing a 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 favour in the later 20th century,

when demand for sliced bread increased.

-Right, am I pushing these through.

-Yeah.

-Yeah, get 'em through.

-Right.

Get 'em in straight 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 it's shape.

Yeah, we're losing the top into the bottom.

So these guys need to hit the now, cos 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.

Ooh, eh-up.

They'll bake until risen.

-Right, do your thing.

-That's if they rise at all.

It could be that they're a complete disaster and we're going to have to

-chip it out.

-Yeah.

-I think, let's wait and see

how those turn out and then we know what to do a bit differently

-with these...

-But.

-..and with our next bake.

All of their labours, 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 camp fire.

-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 recognisable to somebody who is 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 have a go

and look at it. But I, I'm in awe of why they used it.

The other thing about a bake house like this, is that the oven

isn't just there for your bread.

But a lot of the villagers, the local community, would be

bringing their bits and pieces to be baked, as well.

They wouldn't necessarily have ovens in their own houses.

And you would charge people to come and bake things in your oven.

So, they've got to really have a system in place where

you're always constantly getting ready for the next batch.

So it's constantly, you know, in work.

After an hour, the bakers find out what the oven's done

to their worryingly wet household bread.

Is this one done? It's a bit soggy inside.

-The fermentation from the dough has worked.

-Yeah.

It's brought out all the colours you want.

It looks a nice loaf considering what we're working with.

It looks good, but the proof of the pudding's always in the eating.

-Yeah.

-Well, that's true.

-Let's crack into this one.

-Rather, rather good.

-That is nice.

-Yeah.

-That's a really nice loaf.

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 crust. Is that sacrilege?

-Not at all.

-The French make fantastic bread.

-It's beautiful.

-So do the Germans, you know.

-Just that crust, there.

But that's similar to a sourdough crust, in a sense.

-Yeah.

-It hasn't got the, you know, the richness and flavours that come

through, but the actual depth of the crust.

-You can see it's this beautiful, kind of, creamy colour.

-Yeah.

It's quite open, as well. I thought it'd be more dense.

The taste is what surprised me, cos it tastes beautiful.

-The yeast has done its job.

-Yeah.

The one thing I'm amazed about, is the brewer's yeast

and how active it is. I mean, you know 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, it's actually tasting history.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

And, I think, this is as close as anyone will ever have got to

an authentic bread from the late 1830s.

It 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.

Yeah, I mean, you would've had a whole army of agricultural labourers

out there but you'd have all the village trades, like the cobbler

the thatcher.

You've got the hedgers, the blacksmiths, the wheelwright.

There's all manner of people that would need daily bread.

Yeah, and the baker, of course, would've known all of them,

many of them from childhood.

Some of these customers would've called at the bake house 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, wind, rain or shine.

Everybody's within walking distance.

My customers now, well, my goodness me, we're selling product in China.

And er, 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 2lb loaf in 1837 was four pence

and a farthing, roughly a quarter of what an agricultural

labourer earned per day.

-Good evening, sir.

-Good evening.

Hello. How are you?

-We've got cottage loaves.

-Can I 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 bread 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 bakers had a, kind of, captive market.

That's very nice, very flavoursome.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

It's completely different to modern bread, isn't it?

-Definitely, yeah.

-Mm.

Having no competition sounds almost

like a dream, to be honest, you know.

There's no other baker snapping at your heels.

-They're a bit stodgy.

-They're not stodgy, sir.

-It's just to fill you up.

-Hm. Be nice with some jam.

I did feel, walking with the bread on me back,

it's like re-treading history for myself

and thinking, you know, this has been done before by one of me.

A big lesson I learnt today, is that back then, the bakery was ingrained

within the community.

The grain 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.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Long day.

-Cheers, guys.

-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.

Am I going to... Am I just going to sell the bakery and do something,

er, 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 6am.

So far, it's all feeling a little bit idyllic for them, isn't it?

But I think they're still in the novelty phase.

Their 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 non-baking stuff.

Do you know what somebody needs to invent? Matches.

I got a mate called Swanny, might do it.

Where's that chuffing historian.

You know where this is going, don't ya?

What I don't think they've quite realised, is that

if they were Victorian bakers, this would've 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.

OK.

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.

Here you go.

This experience makes you really understand how thrifty people were,

when they needed to be.

The by-products 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 20st.

Victorian bakers were supposedly capable of carrying these

single-handedly.

-Where shall I grab.

-Somebody needs to get underneath it, don't they?

The sack is seven times heavier than modern health

and safety legislation would allow.

-Have we got it, yeah?

-Watch your step, you could trip over there.

Ooh!

-Gosh! Right.

-OK, so shall I...?

-Which way we going?

Shall I...? We need to go out the door. Shall I just direct you?

-Do I need to? Hang on.

-OK, I'll, I'll direct you. Mind your head.

-Thank God you're here, Harpreet.

-Mind your heads.

Come down a bit, OK.

Just, um, we're just going to have to put this down, guys,

because I've just done a hernia.

-Drop it, then.

-John needs help!

We need to put it down, John needs help.

I have just done something really awful.

Fortunately, John's 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 cos, I mean, I just, carrying it

and just all of a sudden I just got like a... Something popped.

So, um, they were built of, er sterner stuff than I.

-The fact of the matter is, they did carry 'em.

-Yeah.

They used to come off the horse and trap and they used to bring

-'em in by themselves.

-Wow!

-One person picking this

-whole

-thing up?

-Yeah.

-They were literally all hunched up cos their muscles

would grow, cos they could pick it up, but they would then be deformed.

-Yeah.

-That's amazing.

The bakers will use this new sack of flour to slightly

expand their product line.

Yesterday, you prepared loaves for your general customers, so your

standard second loaf.

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.

In a rural area, there wouldn't have been many of these,

but there would have been a few, like the local doctor,

magistrate or vicar and their families, who would've demanded

the higher grade of bread - wheaten made with first class flour.

So, today we're going to go for that slightly more upmarket customer.

What you're going to be making with your first flour,

is this particular shaped loaf, known as the Coburg.

Now, the shape is very, very old,

but the name is one that comes about in the 19th century.

Queen Victoria marries Albert of Saxe-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.

Oh, without any doubt whatsoever, machine mixed dough is better than

hand mixed dough.

By hand, everybody just tires.

You know, and, and I'm used to watching a machine do it.

But not at the same time as having 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 faggots 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 oven's as hot?

-It's tricky.

Cos it was, it was a hot oven last time.

Yeah, well, I think it's a bit warmer to be honest.

I'm just going to cool it down a bit. Have we got a cup of water?

-Don't go crazy cooling that down.

-Well, I don't know.

That's about right.

That is definitely evaporating a lot slower than it did yesterday.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

-Do you think so?

-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.

Right, let's have a look at this dough.

This recipe calls for another of the standard Victorian sizes,

the quartern, which weighed 4lbs.

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've just got to step it up for today, I think.

-How many you got?

-We got...

-How many you got?

-A baker's dozen and two.

A 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, very regal,

cos it's obviously a Royal Coburg.

Just using a bit of guess

and a little bit of experience, er, that looks OK.

I'm happy with that dough. I think that's the lot, to be honest.

OK. 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've been doing

most of the work.

And we know from illustrations as well, that women were very

active in the baking business.

This is one that shows a Cornish bake house and you've got a man

stoking the oven.

But, quite clearly, you've got women kneading, rolling,

scaling, measuring.

That's actually really funny, because we do have one of the Johns

that's very much in charge of the oven, cos 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 moulding actually. So, that does look like quite an accurate

depiction of our bake house.

After an hour, the loaves intended for the bakery's posher customers

-come out of the oven.

-Ooh!

Oh, dear.

OK, so they don't exactly have the Coburg shape that we were after.

-Ooh!

-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.

-Oh, no, no.

-Imagine how expensive that would've been.

You wouldn't be able to get away with the amount of wastage

that we have here, definitely not.

So let's look at why it happened.

It's clear that the protein in this wheat,

is not what we're used to using.

So maybe we're missing something in, in the technique.

Maybe they could work with the flour better because

they were working with this flour.

But, um it's been lost over 150 years and we've...

With 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 was any way we could have some idea

of what the temperature is.

Cos the oven just wasn't hot enough.

This is a great lesson to us about how little technology

they actually had and how well they must have known their ovens.

-Yeah.

-I know one thing.

-My ancestors are now laughing at me.

-Yeah.

Quite frankly they're having a right...

I mean, that's just 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've thought that the consequences to a bake house

in that era, would have been absolutely huge.

To ruin that high prestigious bread, I can't, I, I, I mean,

I know what I'd do in my bakery and, you know,

we're talking major flip-out.

So that would've 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've been closer to the poorer end

of the social scale, as would the bulk of their customers.

Even in this, apparently, picturesque setting,

poverty would never have been far away.

I think we've rather over-romanticised

our pre-industrial past.

We think of it, especially in terms of the countryside,

as some pastoral idyll, roses round 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.

To some extent, it was a problem caused by progress.

Newly invented machines were putting agricultural labourers

out of work, leaving them unable to afford their daily bread.

So what they did, is they took to protesting, violent protesting.

And they smashed many of these machines,

and their chant was very simple - bread or blood.

In the 1840s, three years of bad harvests

sent the price of wheat soaring.

The impact this had on the price of bread was catastrophic.

A loaf like this, would've 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.

Even in good times, the average labourer might spend half to

two-thirds of their income on food.

Now some people spent all of their money on it, even the rent.

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 going to be a very, very dense, very heavy bread.

Like all flours, 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 stodgy. This is definitely designed to fill you up.

This is about subsistence.

In the 21st century, bakers mixed 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, rye, 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.

They're more oaty, they're more granular and

the larger the particle size, and so on and so forth.

So, it's absolute opposite to what it was back then.

Here it goes, guys.

God, that would feed a family, wouldn't it?

We all having a taste?

Ta.

-It's not bad.

-It's OK.

-No.

-You can taste the barley, can't ya?

-Mm.

-It's got that, kind of, wholesome smell

and wholesome taste to it.

Do you know what, if, if I had these in my shop they would...

They probably would sell, wouldn't they?

-Be going like that, wouldn't they?

-They would go actually.

-Yeah.

But if you thought, starvation or this, I'd take this.

-Yeah, I'd take this.

-This would be fine.

Some people couldn't afford any bread.

There are heart-rending accounts of people living on

crusts and raw onions, of parents depriving themselves

so 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 call crammings.

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, er, 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...

-So 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 suggest, have an experiment, really.

There would've 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 'em with whatever

-they've got to hand.

-Exactly.

Knowing that I'm making chicken feed,

is not making me ecstatically happy about this.

Just, I mean, this is just making my tummy groan.

But you've got to think bakers at this point,

they were in this to feed people.

Here we go. Let's have a go at 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 mind-set 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 feed.

There's no joy in making this and there's no joy in eating this,

-either.

-Yeah.

-No.

-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, is basically desperation.

Yeah, it really is.

That's been interesting about today, seeing that shift change from,

you know, being able to use their amazing flour.

-It's a symbol of, kind of, like their class and everything.

-Status.

To then, basically, eating the scrapings off the floor pretty much.

-Anything and everything they could get hold of.

-Everything they could

-get their hands on.

-It really is quite depressing.

-The harsh reality is people were dying.

-Yeah.

-And this what they had.

-What they turned to.

Yeah. It, 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 they were hungry?

Well, you'd perhaps, just about anything.

Life in the countryside was becoming unsustainable.

It meant that people looked around to try and find a better life.

And it was the rapidly industrialising centres

of Britain that were sucking up the surplus labour from the countryside.

Put simply, Britain was urbanising and urbanising 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.

An ancient bond was breaking between the land where people lived

and worked, and the food that land produced.

Country traditions which stretched back to the distant past were

suddenly threatened with extinction.

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.

Harvest Festival took the form we know today in the early

Victorian era.

In rural Britain of the 1840s, you would have very,

very few days off, OK?

You could count Christmas, Easter,

you might have a few days off after haymaking,

and harvest is the real times in which you'd have your holiday.

And 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 learnt over the last

few days, to create a, kind of, celebratory loaf.

A big wheat sheaf loaf.

-We've got an example here from the Victorian period.

-Mm-hm.

OK? 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, er,

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.

Oh, OK.

So, er, 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've been cooked,

probably, once a year.

Anyway, let's get on, let's get that oven up to heat.

-Let's get to work.

-And let's have a day's baking.

Right, get in, 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.

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 seed 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 would be really interesting to see the impact that it

has on the flavour 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.

-Come on John, 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've actually created this themselves.

And 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.

Let's just have a couple more ears.

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.

Off we go!

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.

-Wow!

She's the one that started it all off while Tom was in the field.

-And you can see er, the flour bag...

-Yeah.

-..in the door.

More successfully in place.

She probably was a bit stronger than me and you.

That's amazing. Loaves in the thing, here in the window.

Those loaves look fantastic compared to what we managed to make.

Has your perception of what she would've done,

-changed having come in here yourself?

-Massively.

I've, I, pfft, you think in your head, the Victorian times,

it's lovely times, it's great and everyone's happy

and they all jolly round and eat goose and stuff.

-But, you know.

-Not at this level...

-Not at this, no.

-..of kind of society.

-No, it's graft.

-Yeah.

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.

-Yeah.

And then there's no baking powder in there at all, no bicarb.

They've got a good rise to them because of the yeast.

That smell, everything that we've made so far, is pretty bland,

isn't it? And that's a real... It's sensory overload.

It's the first sweet thing that we've been able to make,

cos it was the first time we had access to sugar.

-At last!

-I know, finally!

-Well done, well done!

-Woohoo!

Look at this beautiful table.

All we've safely gathered in.

We've invited some of the local community from Sacrewell 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.

-Evening, everyone.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-How's it going?

-Good evening.

-Hi.

-There we go.

Oh, that looks fantastic.

Masterful.

And the caraway cakes, as well. An absolute triumph, Harpreet.

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 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 idyll.

But, of course, you and I, as historians, know that this

really is the end, actually, 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've served communities like this back into the Medieval period

and beyond.

But 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, pfft, 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 OK for that

era, in the countryside.

When we're moving into the cities and the towns and industrialisation,

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 urbanised,

a world which is much more industrialised, 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 could see that, actually, things are happening

in the country and the impact that that's having in the bake houses.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned as to what was,

er, in store for us.

Next time...

-Argh!

-That is actually disgusting.

-Argh!

It's, sort of, borderline rancid.

The bakers experience how the Industrial Revolution changed

baking and Britain forever.

-Ugh!

-It's not bread as we'd know it.

What a thankless task.

You can't have people doing this.

At the moment, not only do I want to throw up,

um, my back's hurting, my legs are hurting.

-Then might I suggest it is time to stop.

-Never.

-Yeah, well.

-The reason I came here was to see what my family did.

Do you want that on your gravestone?