Episode 3 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.

So far, they have experienced a time when most Britons were country folk.

The bakery and the pub were the heartbeats of the village.

Where bread was local and natural.

Oh, gosh, that is lovely.

But where famine was a real threat.

It's really upsetting.

It was about staying alive for these people.

They have also endured the industrial squalor of the 1870s.

And the physical exertion just to get the damn stuff made

is pretty much sickening.

A time when bakers resorted to desperate measures.

-This is potassium aluminium sulphate.

-Doesn't that cause brain damage?

It's got this grittiness about it which is just awful.

We're cheating.

That's the issue. It's cheating and I feel ashamed.

Now, the bakers have reached the end of Victoria's reign.

Welcome to the future.

This doesn't complain, this won't die

and this can work 24 hours a day.

The trade has gone upmarket.

Everything on the table is shouting to me "high-end".

They'll need to bake a new range of products...

It was a case of how bling can this cake be?

This stuff isn't sexy.

And face a brand-new set of challenges.

Sorry. That's not going to pass.

These guys would have lost their minds.

This is harder than kneading the dough by hand.

Oh, wow! That is phenomenal.

This time,

the bakers are being set to work in one of the many London suburbs

built by the Victorians - Crouch End.

Hello, bakers. How are you?

Welcome to 1900.

At this point in Britain's history,

the Empire is at the height of its powers

and London is the biggest city in the world.

You'll probably find it looks recognisably modern

and that's because the late Victorians built so much

of what we see around us in the 21st century.

Crouch End's grand high street was built in the 1890s,

the decade when Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee.

Oh, wow, check this out!

This bakery has been serving customers continuously since then.

And for the next week, it's being taken back in time,

starting with one window.

Look what we've got. We've got a shop.

We're not just bakers any more, we're confectionery.

-Pastry cook, cake baker.

-Lots more sweet stuff.

-All the naughty things are out.

-We've got Vienna and fancy breads.

It looks like money is no object by what's in the window

and what is on the window.

The shop is a new development for the bakers.

Previously in their Victorian experience,

they've had to deliver what they've baked.

But by 1900, Britain's high streets were booming as never before.

Per head, Britons were the second wealthiest people on the planet.

Only America manufactured more.

Working conditions had gradually improved,

so with higher average wages and a bit more leisure time,

Britain went shopping.

-Cool.

-Shall we head in?

-Cool. Off we go.

Out front, this shop will keep serving 21st-century customers...

Wow!

..but its bakery out back has been taken back to 1900.

Love these ovens. Look at these.

Artisan Duncan Glendinning likes to make bread the old-fashioned way

but he's still grateful for gas-fired ovens.

Not a single sign of any coal anywhere.

The same goes for fifth-generation family baker John Swift.

It's the way it's built. It's just beautiful.

Oh, wow.

Fancy cake maker Harpreet Baura immediately spots more signs that she will be busy.

Look at all of these jams.

And for the first time in their Victorian experience,

the bakers will have some mechanical assistance,

music to the ears of bread factory boss John Foster.

An Artofex mixer. Fantastic.

-Look at that bad boy.

-This as a beautiful mixer, this.

By 1900, bakeries were not only better equipped,

they were more hygienic too,

thanks to union campaigning and government legislation.

-So, first impressions?

-Amazed.

-Phenomenal.

-I love the lack of the coal heap.

-Well, exactly.

I mean, one of the great benefits is of course gas and electricity.

We really have modern technology.

And you probably also saw the range of goods that are on offer.

Now you're not just baking bread

and previously there were separate trades

for confectionery, biscuit makers, cake makers, etc, etc.

But now we're in 1900, all of those are rolled into one.

Of course, you know you're on a busy, affluent Victorian high street.

So you have to keep an eye on quality and novelty

and we know in the late Victorian period, that was the way in which you made your money.

So the very first thing you're going to be doing is not bread,

-it's going to be pastry.

-Oh, wow.

-And of course, Harpreet,

-I can see already you are breathing a sigh of relief.

-Definitely.

When you look around, you can kind of see all of the naughty things, which is quite nice.

-Do you feel like you're in your element there?

-Yes, I actually do.

So far, cake entrepreneur Harpreet

hasn't been impressed with the amount of bread and brawn

demanded in the 19th century.

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

and I was really looking at, hopefully,

slightly more sophisticated products.

Thank you very much.

Now, Harpreet will be making fancier stuff,

and the team will be working in more sophisticated uniforms.

By 1900, bakers were keen to shed their reputation

for being a uncouth, sweaty, manual workers.

Shirt and tie stayed on at all times

and hygiene was preserved by means of sleeve protectors.

I look like I'm actually going to, you know, have to deliver a cow.

Straight in, out it comes.

Bakers were dressed like high-end restaurant chefs,

reflecting all the new skills they were expected to demonstrate.

Looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Oh, God.

LAUGHTER

You've got to admit, we're starting to take care

of the things and the products. We've got protection.

I was sweating and coughing

and generally I didn't care about the dough in the last one

and now I'm wearing a hat to make sure I don't get hair in it.

The bakers set to work making rich Victorian recipes

for short and puff pastry,

which they'll use to make some of the tarts and turnovers

popular with customers in 1900.

OK, so no expense spared.

Earlier in the Victorian era, eggs and sugar were still used

only in small quantities by the average bakery.

The place that we left, all that we were producing,

-it was subsistence living, it was...

-Tummy filling.

It was survival, basically. Whereas now, this is about stuff your face.

-Stuff your face and actually treat yourself.

-Good enough for you?

I reckon so, yes.

Butter, once used sparingly, is now laid on in slabs.

See, look, what I want to do, it's going to go on there

and so then this comes over here.

It smells wonderful.

There's a lovely, lovely buttery, beautiful smell, yeah.

It's yellow. When was the last time we saw anything yellow?

It's been white and pasty and grey

and now you've got these rich colours

and baking at this point must've been so exciting for the baker.

All these new things, all these new ingredients, fantastic,

and then he's watching the money go in as well.

Advice on the most profitable pastries can be found

in The Modern Baker, Confectioner And Caterer, all six volumes of it.

These are written by John Kirkland.

He founded the National School Of Bakery in 1899.

And as you can see, they are going to be slightly more comprehensive

than some of the books that you've used before.

They don't just go through recipes

and you'll see they go through recipes in quite a lot of detail

but they've also got science, so there's a lot about yeast,

a lot about gluten.

They also go through shop fittings, they go through pricing,

they go through absolutely everything.

Book three is tarts and small pastries.

Here we go, guys.

For a good class trade, the pan should be rather small

as the large tarts appear common and coarse.

So we don't want the large tarts.

To be fair, the bigger the tart, the better.

In all seriousness, at this time,

it seems as though if you could make your product

more towards the elite spectrum,

that's how you could actually be onto a winner.

The manual illustrates over 30 pastries

sold in late-Victorian shops.

The bakers are starting with four of these, including Madeira tarts

and the classic jam variety.

It just needs to be as thin as you can possibly go

while still being able to pick it up.

Thinner, much, much thinner.

Too thick.

Because of her 21st century expertise, Harpreet is taking charge.

You know, the deeper trays are the rose ones.

In 1900, a master baker or foreman would have been

managing the first, second and third hands.

I mean, this is just really, really weird.

I'm normally a bread maker.

I would be more comfortable making bread, to be fair,

but I've got Harpreet here bossing me around, which I'm happy with.

So let's stick with what we've got.

They were into their interesting jams.

Have a sniff of that, Harpreet.

Oh, this is... Oh, that's delicious.

You have got the greengage going in the bottom of those.

I've got the greengage being piped into the bottom of my Madeira tarts.

In a relatively small high-street bakery like this,

it was most productive for staff of all grades to share the workload,

whatever they were making.

This need for flexibility

had meant bakers learning new skills at great speed.

Just a generation before, bread was all most would ever make.

It must have been a nightmare for them

to get their heads round it and kind of re-evaluate, you know,

where their job roles were and what they were expected to do.

They would have walked in and go, right, here's a palette knife,

put the dough scraper down, you're now making these cakes.

They would have been, like, "What on earth are you talking about?"

And actually, in modern-day life,

it's an absolute rarity that a bread maker is also a cake maker.

It just does not happen.

But bakers' lives had to change in the late-Victorian period

because of what was happening to the one product

that had always kept them in business.

For centuries,

bread had been absolutely central to the British diet.

Its fortunes began to change in the last decades of the Victorian era -

at first, it seemed, for the better.

From the 1880s, for perhaps the first time in British history,

good-quality bread became affordable for everyone.

And this was all thanks to Victorian ingenuity,

from the steamships that brought vast quantities of cheap corn

from across the Atlantic, North America,

to the steam-powered roller mills that ground it down

into fine reliable flour.

Bread got cheaper just as average wages were rising.

Bizarrely, that was when things got harder for bakers.

Between 1885 and 1914,

the consumption of bread in Britain practically halved.

It turned out people linked bread with poverty.

As soon as they had more money to spend,

they preferred to eat more of other foods, like meat.

Bread would never again be so central to our diets.

The average Briton today eats less than a quarter of the amount

consumed by a typical Victorian.

That might have spelt the end for thousands of bakery businesses,

had it not been for another big food trend of the Victorian era.

Consumption of sugar per head in Britain

quadrupled in the 19th century.

Once, it was a luxury used sparingly in tea, but by 1900,

with improved access to sugar plantations throughout the Empire,

it became much more widely available.

Britain had acquired the sweet tooth

which troubles our waistlines to this day,

and sales of chocolates, cakes and pastries were soaring.

Bakers saw an opportunity to expand into these luxurious

and more profitable markets

so it's from this point onwards

that they start to sell the range of goods

which we still find in high street bakeries today.

As ever, the baker was at the mercy of bigger changes

in our tastes, society and the economy.

Shall we have a look?

-They look really good, don't they?

-Yes.

Right, shall we set these down and get the next ones in?

According to accounts from the time, profit margin on small pastries

could be up to 60%, triple the amount that could be made on bread.

Oh, look at that!

What wonderful confection of heaven is this?

Mm, those are so good.

They're buttery and crisp.

And really good layers of pastry flakiness. They are good.

It is good, isn't it?

What the bakers haven't been able to produce, however,

is what three of them love most.

Now, we're in an era where flour is cheaper,

we're finally able to make amazing bread,

incredible new technologies and everything,

and no-one wants it.

Two steps forward, one step back, isn't it? We've gone...

Were at a moment where we're thinking, great,

everything's looking rosy for the baker

and things are looking up and now we find that,

in actual fact, he's got to diversify or he's going to be

in the same doldrums where we were before.

Isn't that exactly what's happening today in all our businesses?

Either you go out of business or you have to evolve.

We're doing nothing, other than what the Victorian bakers did.

To counter the declining popularity of bread,

bakers attempted to woo customers with new premium varieties.

So, if one scales, one balls, one rolls and I fold, so...

No, we need to ball them all up, first.

The next day, work begins on some Vienna bread,

the most fashionable product of the time,

according to The Modern Baker, Confectioner And Caterer.

So, the one that we're making is this Kaiser roll.

For Vienna bread, dough was enriched

with milk, butter and sometimes egg

and then moulded into eye-catching shapes.

These days, we have a nifty little tool,

a hand tool, you press down and it creates this shape.

Here, they're showing you how to make it by hand

which seems a bit of an effort.

Vienna breads were mostly morning rolls.

Bakeries often supplied them to hotels.

They were also found on what the manual calls,

"the breakfast tables of the well-to-do classes".

If we were selling these on to a higher class hotel or restaurant,

to actually give to their patrons, they'd be a bit confused

as to why some are so big and some...

There's nothing written in the book on scaling weight.

-Look at that and look at that.

-Look, some people are bigger than others.

For me, what's most interesting about this,

is we really see the tradesmen having to raise their game

and we've got a middle-class here that is swelling and swelling

and they're aspirational.

They want to consume, they want to be seen to be on the up.

What you tend to find more and more is you've got this lower middle-class

who can't quite afford to employ a live-in servant.

They might have a char or a day girl who comes in,

but they want to dress and they want to be seen to be slightly higher up

than they are and it's not about aping their betters,

it's all about wanting to compete with their own classes.

They're not competing with Lady Devonshire,

they're competing with Mrs Jones over the road.

Bakers themselves had moved up the social scale

since the mid-Victorian period.

A baker who owned their own shop would now have been categorised

as lower middle-class.

And the salary for even the most junior hand,

22 shillings a week, would have been considered fairly comfortable.

Probably the most popular shape of roll, as made in this country,

is the crescent, or, as is usually called, the horseshoe.

To modern eyes, this looks like a croissant,

but in 1900, British bakers still made the original Austrian model,

using bread dough rather than flaky pastry.

Continental cities, like Vienna and Paris,

often set styles in food as well as fashion.

Many of the people making our bread then had foreign origins too.

Baking still had a reputation for being unpleasant manual work,

so, most British people were reluctant to do it.

Sounds familiar, but one surprising difference

about Victorian immigration is where these new workers came from.

By the late 1880s, it was estimated that around half of London's

4,000 master bakers were German.

There was a huge community of Germans,

much of it centred here on Charlotte Street.

So much so, that it was even known as Carlota Strasse,

and around a third of the businesses here had German names.

According to the 1881 census,

Germans formed the largest foreign-born minority in Britain.

At the time, their homeland was struggling economically

and was politically oppressive, too.

Britain was the country they envied.

There was more than enough work and it was far more tolerant.

It was a land of opportunity, with no immigration laws,

with open borders and with no need for passports.

On the downside, like immigrants before and since,

the Germans usually worked longer hours for lower pay

and faced hostility from the British press.

Nonetheless, German names were a common sight on British high streets

until the outbreak of the First World War.

Give them a bit more space and we'll get the other tray.

Do you want to get them in?

Vienna breads were characterised not just by their rich dough,

but by their glaze.

One more, isn't there? Right, oven door coming open.

To create that, they needed something

which Victorian Britain now relied on in so many ways - steam.

That steam in the oven, now, will help them jump

and give them a better colour and crust to the outside

and it's something we use today.

It's fantastic. They've took it from the rest of Victorian life.

You've got steam trains, you've got all the heavy machinery, which is

using water and they've actually realised it, put it onto the ovens.

Spread bakers, we wouldn't ever really contemplate

baking bread without steam.

-And the customers must have noticed a difference.

-Yeah, definitely.

And that's it.

We didn't have to worry about stoking, extra faggots, nothing.

-It's all there.

-Getting rid of the soot in the bottom of the oven.

-It's all there.

Science and industry were transforming

every part of the baking process.

Keep your fingers out, guys, and...

The biggest change of all was the use of machinery.

Mind the doors.

Electric mixers were still a novelty in 1900,

but the national bakery school was already recommending

every establishment should have one.

Although the Victorian age was defined by industrial progress,

baking had been slow to mechanise.

Bread-making machinery had been on sale since the 1850s,

but early models had to be operated by steam, which was expensive,

or hand-cranked, which was exhausting.

As a result, right to the end of the 19th century,

the vast majority of bakers stuck with manual bread-making.

-I'm sweating buckets.

-It's dripping into the trough. Look at this.

But with the dawn of the 20th century,

bakers' lives would be transformed forever.

You can look at the action, can't you?

You can see, they've basically looked at what we were doing.

-Trying to do.

-And I know what we can do here,

we can just add two bloody great arms and go for it.

But it must have been nicer realising that it's not got

the sweat of you two guys in. That must be a comforting thought.

-Or any of your toenails.

-Or my toenails, that's right, yeah.

It's good, it's progress.

At the end of the Victorian era, though, bakers were still fearful

of what machines might do to their livelihoods.

A bakery which bought a mixer at this time cut labour costs in half.

Think how scary it was for them,

because now the owner of the bakery can buy one of these

and this won't die, this doesn't complain

and this can work 24 hours a day.

We've got a new machine putting bakers out of business,

we've got customers changing what they want to eat

because they've got more money, so, pretty much, lots of change then.

Right, do you want to have a feel?

Erm, yes, we'll turn it off now.

And the mixer was just the first sign

of how much baking would mechanise in the 20th century.

I think I could do better.

-Go on. We'll let you do the next one by hand.

-Not on your Nelly!

By 1900, Britain had a handful of baking factories.

ABC and Lyons led the way in scaling up,

along with biscuit manufacturers.

Throughout the Victorian period,

bakeries had employed a steady average of three to four people,

but the days of the cottage industry were finally numbered.

Today, at least 80% of bread sold in Britain is factory made.

Another sign of technological progress in the 1900 bakery,

was the variety of loaf tins available.

-These are cool.

-Flowerpots.

British factories were mass-producing thinly pressed,

moulded metal at very affordable prices.

Bakers hoped that novelty-shaped tins

would help stem falling bread sales.

What we've got to do is really, really grease them up well.

We almost need to be frying the bread because, otherwise,

-they'll not come out.

-We have another horseshoe.

-Yeah.

Some bakers sold horseshoe loaves. Others favoured the musket.

And the hexagonal pot was also on sale at the time.

The nearest thing I've ever seen remotely like this shape,

is panettone. I mean, how can you get, if you're cutting a slice,

how can you get equal portions for everybody?

The Victorians also liked their cakes

to come in an ambitious range of shapes.

I've never seen a cake tin like this before.

Tin-plated copper moulds like these would once only have been found

on the shelves of aristocratic kitchens.

Even the bakery school manual admits that the Savoy shape is

"sometimes too fancy to be practical".

A tin like this that resembles a jelly mould, literally,

would only be able to get jelly out very easily.

So, I personally don't think

that we are going to do very well with these cakes

because I think it's going to be a right pain to get them out.

But we shall see.

-Oh.

-Wow!

-It's got a lovely colour.

Shall we get it on the table then, guys?

When Victoria first came to the throne,

bakers didn't use loaf tins at all.

In the middle of her reign, standard oblong tins became commonplace.

It was in the 1890s

bakers discovered the retail value of novelty shapes.

A baker of the time writes how these tins led to a very ready sale.

Tin technologies, all of this stuff was gadgetry to them, really.

And it's something they were embracing.

I reckon they must have been thinking, right,

we know how we make our dough, how wacky can we get?

It's a different weird, now.

Even factory owner, John, is sceptical about

this particular application of new technology.

What we've got, is robot eyes, uniform.

It's not right, these days, it's not what we are looking for.

We're looking to go the other way.

The more natural, more artisan looking, more homely,

more countrified, but in those days, their thinking was different.

The great advantage of novelty tins for the Victorian baker

was that they could sell a standard weight of dough for a higher price.

This is all great. This is fantastic because you've got a variety.

You know, it's not just about that. This is all right, I like that.

That's meat and two veg, but different shapes, sizes, textures.

If you're half a businessman,

you'll know you have to follow the trend.

Anything new, you're willing to do and you charge a premium for it.

The first tins out of the oven

contain Harpreet's moulded sponge cakes.

Oh, wow!

That has actually really picked up the shape of the mould

fantastically. I did not think that that would happen at all.

I thought I would have to, literally,

scrape most of the batter out of there.

Let's have a look at this guy.

I'm dumbfounded.

That is phenomenal.

This is an easier method than I would've employed in my kitchen now.

They clearly knew what they were doing

and I, actually, clearly need to learn a thing or two

from the Victorians.

Open the door, then.

The cakes might be a triumph, but can the curiously shaped loaves

be anything other than kitsch?

-Look at those beauties.

-Wow, look at that one.

They're coming out great. Absolutely fabulous.

I was really sceptical when I saw that tin and I was...

I thought, what on earth is that?

But, actually, I could sell that.

-Beautiful.

-Rather special.

Here come the sandwich boxes.

In an era before mechanical bread slicing was invented,

the musket loaf guided your bread knife with its grooves.

-The ridging is fantastic on those.

-How thick to cut each slice.

-Look at the colour and crust on that.

-I just love the shape.

It's really organic and it's kind of done its own thing

but we've got those perfect four edges.

These are showpieces in your window, aren't they, in a way?

Come in, I'm one of the best bakers around.

You don't want to go down the road, you want to come to my bakery.

I would put that on the dinner table

and, actually, as practical bread goes...

You've got the slices running round, yeah.

-Slice of good luck, isn't it, really?

-I think that's amazing.

I like that. A slice of good luck.

By 1900, it was no longer enough

for a baker to merely make their products.

They also had to display them.

Now they were competing with other shops for consumer spend,

they had to dress their windows

as elaborately as a clothing or department store.

So, how big a strip do you want to do?

According to the National Bakery School manual,

at the start of the 20th century, it was "quite the fashion to use

"velvets of different colours to produce a bright looking display."

There's nowhere to put any of this.

I actually think we should probably clear the window before we start.

-Take everything into the back and get it all set up here.

-I disagree.

-Well, I don't. Just carry everything out.

-All right.

Put your back into it, man.

The two John's quickly take a back seat.

Do you really want your shop window dressing

by a factory bloke from Barnsley?

MUSIC PLAYS

Yeah.

Harpreet's outside just shouting orders.

It's great not being able to hear her.

Yeah.

She's happy.

Right, I think that's a job well done, chaps.

-Look at that.

-That ain't bad, actually, boys.

It's now more than just the bread, it's more than just the wholesale,

it's now retail and we need to start dressing.

We need to entice people in.

Once, bakers could rely on steady customer demand.

Now, they had to drum up business in any way they could.

Hello, there.

-What do you think of the shape?

-Nice.

-That dog looks hungry.

He looks as if he wants some of our bread.

-Can I have this amazing horseshoe one, please?

-You can, yes.

Well, it's certainly not sliced, is it?

Like so much else in 1900, this new art of retail

took bakers away from what had been their core activity for centuries -

making bread.

Most bakers would be fairly unhappy, because for them to have to come

out of the bakery to start pushing their own shops to people,

may have been uncomfortable.

-Bake the bread AND be nice?

-Yeah.

-Oh!

The most tempting products for the shop window would be

colourful cakes. With that in mind, Harpreet is making fondant.

This was a task that would only be tackled

by someone with experience in confectionery.

It's time-consuming, painstaking and easy to get wrong.

We are at 235.

Now is the time for the glucose to go in.

Once the industrially refined sugar solution has dissolved,

the resulting syrup needs to cool down again.

Electric refrigeration technology wasn't invented until 1914,

so the Victorians used cooling materials - marble and steel bars.

Doesn't this look fantastic?

Although she runs a successful business in the 21st century,

Harpreet wouldn't have been able to do this in 1900.

In the 1840s bakehouse, even in the 1870s,

women wouldn't have been out of place.

By the time you get to the 1900s, almost all confectioners were men,

because this was perceived as the most skilful task

and a lot of women are increasingly pushed out to be the frivolous

sweet thing that is selling the French fancies in the front window.

Within my business, there is nothing that I cannot do

and I've actually never been told that I can't do something.

I can't imagine how soul destroying it would be,

to be a woman in this age, who would have a bright mind and abilities

and just be yearning to actually show that all off.

You'd almost feel like a caged bird.

Once the sugar solution has cooled, it needs to be creamed.

Even in late-Victorian times, some bakers bought factory made fondant,

precisely to avoid this slow and laborious process.

By working it repeatedly, you'd work air into it,

make it more malleable, make it more pliable.

Ah, my good man, John.

That looks hard work.

Harpreet displays the kind of management initiative

denied to women in 1900...

I think I might need some of your brute force.

Shall I try with this thing, here?

..and gets John to do it for her.

I think girl power is wonderful up to a certain point

and then you just need to find a man

to do your hard work for you, frankly.

I think a part of girl power is actually...

-Knowing when to delegate.

-Knowing when to delegate, yeah.

-Doing the management of it.

-Knowing which man to call to do it for you.

Oh, this is really tough.

I'll tell you what, this is harder

than kneading the dough by hand, this.

Do you know, I think the packet of fondant

that you can get in the supermarket is looking much more appealing now.

It's coming to fondant, now. Look at it. We have made fondant.

Oh, look at that!

Look, here's a flower for you.

-Thank you so much.

-A rose.

There you are, petal, have another one.

The fondant will be used to top the extravagant cakes

late-Victorians loved so much.

But bakers did, at least, now offer a healthier choice

when it came to bread.

The overwhelming consumer demand in the Victorian period

is for white bread. But you do start to get people realising

that white bread's definitely not as good for you as brown bread.

The problem, and the reason that bakers were a bit sniffy about it,

is that brown bread in 1900 has a kind of reputation for being...

not particularly appetising.

It is kind of ick.

Victorian wholemeal wasn't as finely milled

as the brown flour we now buy in supermarkets.

It's oatmeal, isn't it?

-Like oatmeal.

-Yeah.

It really is course, isn't it, that?

And to make a product which these days we think of as healthy,

the Victorians added some surprising ingredients.

Two ounces of lard, one ounce of sugar.

As well.

Lard has just got such a distinctive flavour,

that it isn't going to make a very good breakfast,

lunch and afternoon bread.

Wholemeal bread was generally described by the Victorians

as invalid food.

The people that would have eaten this

would have been the people who are of slightly iller health.

Are we suggesting it might be people who are a little bunged up?

-Yeah, well...

-In the bowel region.

-Yes.

So this is bread that will be enjoyed three times.

Once in anticipation of buying it.

-The other one in consumption. And the other one...

-Trust you!

-..in remembrance.

-Trust you to lower the tone.

I mean, we know this isn't going to make a decent sandwich bread.

It's a different product. You don't ever think you're going to get

the same rise out of wholemeal from this era.

We can deliver the health benefits - that's easy.

But delivering the health benefits

in something that somebody wants to come back and buy again

and eat on a regular basis,

you've got to just make it ever so slightly different.

How to make bread palatable as well as healthy

was a challenge the late-Victorians were grappling with.

And the person who cracked it

created a brand still very much with us today.

In 1899, one bread company published a guide to England and Wales

for users of the recently invented safety bicycle.

For the bread company,

cycling was a brilliant fit with its newest product -

a golden bread flour that they claimed was tastier

and healthier than anything currently on the market.

Its USP was wheatgerm, the vitamin-packed heart of the grain.

Victorian millers generally removed the wheatgerm,

because left in flour, it could quickly go off.

How could you put it back in the bread without having it go rancid?

Well, the answer came from here - Stone in Staffordshire.

Behind me is the mill where Richard Smith,

known as Stoney to his friends, was born and grew up.

He worked out that steaming the wheatgerm with a little salt

stopped the flour going off.

Stoney added his cooked wheatgerm back into the flour,

about a fifth wheatgerm to four-fifths flour.

Basically, this was a white loaf,

but just that little bit better for you.

Soon, he'd teamed up with a large firm of millers in Macclesfield

to mass-produce this new blend.

At first, they called it Smith's Patent Germ Flour.

It's not the catchiest of names, even by Victorian standards.

So, they held a national competition

to try and come up with a more marketable name.

It was won - £25, the grand prize -

by a student called Herbert Grime.

He took a Latin phrase, "hominis vis",

which translates as "the strength of man"...

..and made it a bit more catchy and modern.

How? By slicing it up.

Some might say it was £25 well spent,

given that the runner-up name was Yum Yum.

It was extensively promoted.

Bakers were only allowed to use Stoney's flour

in tins stamped with the new name.

The Victorians pretty much invented branding as we know it today.

Advertising and sponsorship during the era

became ever more sophisticated.

Which brings us back to our cycling map.

It was produced, of course, by Hovis, and they marked on it all the places

that a hungry cyclist could be guaranteed to get Hovis bread.

It was a brilliant piece of marketing.

It encouraged the cyclists to ask for the bread by name,

but it also encouraged potential places of refreshment to stock it.

By 1895, one million of Stoney Smith's loaves

were being sold every week.

He'd proved not just that bread could be healthier,

but that people liked the idea of buying a name they recognised

wherever they were in Britain.

Other firms rapidly followed suit.

These big bread brands,

they're going to be able to undercut the small bakeries,

and that must have been quite a worrying situation

for independent bakers.

I think it was a logical progression.

We've seen the Victorians

want to be industrialised and not localised,

and I think the branding would be exactly the same thing.

Big is beautiful, big is better.

I mean, I could see John Foster living in that era and loving it.

The bakers' own Victorian wholemeal is ready for tasting.

It's nice. I'm... I'm happy with that.

You know what? That...

Genuinely, I would put that in my shop tomorrow,

and it would sell really, really well with our client base.

You're seeing where the whole

"keeping the good stuff in" movement began.

People at last are kind of starting to show an interest

in their actual health.

I suppose it's the stereotypical quinoa-eating, yoga-doing,

yummy-mummy brigade from today, the equivalent of that in 1900,

are the people buying this.

And I must be a quinoa-eating yummy mummy,

-cos I like it. I would buy it.

-I do.

I would have read that recipe as a historian

and I would have thought, OK, brown bread at this point in time

was something that didn't taste great.

But tasting what you've produced in a Victorian oven

with Victorian flour, with Victorian techniques,

this is a revelation,

and I could never have got that from the documentary sources alone.

Bakers could now charge more for wholemeal than for white -

the opposite of what had been the case for most of history.

But the real money-spinner wasn't health bread.

It was cake.

Harpreet, do you approve?

-They look really good. Well done.

-That's high praise!

Making cakes to the standards demanded by Victorian customers

required a whole new level of skill,

especially from bakers more used to bread.

What next, boss?

For paniers en Genoises,

jam-coated sponge is dipped in a new invention of the 1880s -

desiccated coconut.

-Oh, they look fantastic.

-Do you want to try some?

Mmm.

The cake is then partially filled with buttercream

and the basket's handles

are made from a favourite Victorian ingredient.

-Wow, these look good.

-What is it?

-Angelica.

It's a kind of rhubarb-like plant, and it's been candied.

Haven't you noticed that this is, you know, as far away from

where we've just come from in the Victorian era -

brute force and ignorance, in some respects -

and now we're being very delicate and dainty.

As we already saw with the novelty loaf shapes,

the late Victorians set no store on things looking natural.

The more eye-catching, the better.

I am generally amazed.

Because I thought life was in black and white, absolutely...

And then this has come along, I mean, look at the colours!

It's enough to worry artisan baker Duncan.

I would suspect that with their love of kind of ingenuity

and productivity and everything,

all of the colorants used at the time would have been some kind of...

chemically based, not natural kind of colorant.

It's true that earlier in the 19th century,

colour could come from some very dangerous substances,

chiefly lead for yellow colouring, copper for blue and green,

and mercury for red.

Talking of garish colours, we have got this...

Shocking pink!

..slightly fluoro beauty. But it's all good.

A series of poisoning scandals

had led Victorians to introduce proper regulation of food colourings,

culminating in the Food Adulteration Act of 1899.

So at this point, food dye shouldn't have killed you.

Though looking at them might have made you a bit nauseous.

Fancy, fancy, fancy!

The three different colours of rolled fondant on top of the Genoise

are covered with melted chocolate fondant.

So you need to pour this on all the way down.

Actually, what we've got here is very complicated cakes.

-Indulging...

-They're coming up in the world, aren't they?

They want pretty, indulgent, luxurious products.

And yes, it takes the baker

or confectioner a while to produce them,

which means that they're going to change a fair penny for them.

-Keep pouring, cos we need to...

-I'm pouring!

-..do that quickly.

Although in 1900 Harpreet wouldn't have been doing this work...

God, you just can't get the staff these days, can you?

..the 21st-century businesswoman can't help but take charge.

-Were we this bossy with bread? I don't think so.

-Yes. Yes, you were.

The three of you waved your willies around for eight days.

-We helped every step of the way, we did.

-No, you didn't.

'I think today we saw just how hard cake decorators,

'pastry chefs and confectioners actually have to work.'

Whereas these boys have thought they're the real kind of

brutish guys that work with bread and knead stuff with their hands,

they have actually had to make pretty little cakes today.

Nice.

Duncan is making the filling that will sandwich together some sponges.

It's a mix of cherries, apricots and jam.

Oh, smell that.

And in another blow to the notion of Victorians

as people who didn't like to be amused...

Decadent!

..there's plenty of booze going in, too.

This is a far cry from the classic Victoria sponge

with just a layer of jam in there, look at this.

This is an adult's cake, for sure.

That is really strong.

Despite Harpreet's verdict,

Duncan decides you can never have too much maraschino.

That's better.

Let's go, now, cos we need to get this done.

To modern eyes, that filling might seem like more than enough.

Happy with that?

But then the recipe calls for sweet green icing.

Don't leave this cake out in the rain.

It's finished with custom-made meringue biscuit twists.

We've got langue de chat cones

filled with strawberry buttercream and vanilla buttercream.

Because obviously there just wasn't enough on there.

You know, it is culinary kitsch, but at the same time...

I don't know about you, but it does make me smile.

It's rather Victorian bling, isn't it?

It was called Gateau Souvaroff.

For the 1900 customer,

a cosmopolitan name was part of the appeal.

For the middle classes in late-Victorian Britain,

this is aspirational.

You kind of think, "I've got a bit of the aristocracy on my own table."

I mean, for me, it all looks very nice but it's all a bit pretentious.

You know, I mean, forgive me - give me a pork pie.

The late-Victorian era is when afternoon tea took the form

for which the British are still globally renowned.

So, on their final day as Victorian bakers,

the team are making a celebratory spread.

Half pound of butter and lard, mixed.

Starting with one of the vital elements.

"Scoans", darling.

-No, "sconns".

-It's a "sconn".

There's always debates, isn't there?

My philosophy is, whoever's paying says it the right way.

I don't really care what they call it as long as they pay!

Get on with your cement mixing...

If you were hosting a tea party in 1900,

you'd probably call on your local baker to cater for it,

much as offices today might order in sandwiches for a lunchtime meeting.

Though afternoon tea had started as an aristocratic ritual

back in the 1840s, it had become increasingly commercialised,

with unexpected political consequences.

By the late 1880s, afternoon tea had become established

as part of middle-class home life.

And with the various rituals attached to pouring the tea

and sandwiches and cake,

it was very much the province of the mistress of the house.

After all, have you ever heard anyone say, "Shall I play Father?"

The problem for Mother was that there were few places

outside the domestic sphere where respectable females could go.

Restaurants, coffee shops and public houses

were very much the province of men,

or of women who didn't have to care about their reputation.

They were certainly not for unaccompanied middle-class ladies.

That is until 1864, when the pioneering manageress

of an Aerated Bread Company shop began selling tea and cake as well,

and persuaded her employers to open a public tea room.

Within a few years, there were 50 ABC tea rooms in London alone.

From 1894, they competed with the mighty Lyons,

whose tea rooms came complete with smartly uniformed waitresses

nicknamed "nippies".

It's not surprising that tea rooms

became seen as intrinsically feminine spaces.

They were places where women could get together and meet

and talk about whatever it was that was most bothering them.

This fact was not lost on the women's suffrage movement,

who quickly adopted tea rooms as spaces where they could talk tactics.

When, in 1899, the International Congress of Women met in London,

they recommended ABC tea rooms

were the safest place for delegates to meet.

And it was from a Covent Garden cafe

that the Suffragettes later launched their attention-grabbing stunt

of smashing windows across the West End.

They were changing the world, one sandwich at a time.

For bakeries, the sandwich was a way

of boosting declining sales of bread -

an added-value product they could charge for.

I've brought along guidance

from a book written by Mr T Herbert in 1890,

which was dedicated to the subject of sandwiches.

Now, you might want to stop for a moment,

because Herbert has some advice on the thickness of your slices, OK?

He says here, "Remember, it should be

"as delicate in appearance as possible,

"and not one of those things which should be named mouth-distorters."

OK? So the popular doorstop sandwich that we love today,

that's not what we're looking for.

He actually goes on to stipulate

what the thickness of your slices should be.

So let's have a look at yours, John. How are you doing?

Herbert says a quarter of an inch.

And I'm sorry, John, that's not going to pass.

That's a third of an inch.

What about mine?

I'm afraid that's even worse, Harpreet.

Earlier in the Victorian period,

sandwiches were, more often than not, filled with ham.

But by 1900, the number one filling was something else.

Here we go.

What...?

-Nice!

-..is that?

-That's tongue.

-That is tongue.

-It is indeed tongue.

-Oh, my God.

That looks hideous.

Tongue was a particularly important ingredient

for late-Victorian sandwiches.

It was incredibly popular.

-Can I touch it?

-You can touch it, you can skin it.

Eww! God, it's hard! That's disgusting.

I am not skinning that. I think that's a job for one of the Johns.

LAUGHTER

-I'll do it, I'm happy.

-You're a taker, are you? Good.

-Yeah.

There we go. Look at that. Perfect.

If you look at that now, Harpreet,

that's quite a clean piece of meat, isn't it?

THEY GIGGLE

In the 21st century, a nose-to-tail approach to meat

is mostly confined to trendy restaurants.

But, for the Victorians, it was common-sense thrift.

Another popular filling was bone marrow.

I mean, this stuff isn't sexy.

But nasturtiums, on the other hand, I absolutely love.

Flowers beautiful, leaves edible...

This is another combination from Herbert's 1890 sandwich guide.

Victorians ate nasturtium leaves as often as we turn to rocket today.

-Can I?

-Peppery...

-Peppery...it's lovely.

-..flower.

You don't need a lot of it. It's got a bit of heat to it.

-A bit?!

-That definitely has a kick.

-Yep.

In those days, "tongue sandwich"

wasn't a euphemism for French kissing,

though the ingredient recommended to complement it

was highly continental.

Truffles? You know, we were so poor

not so long ago, we couldn't even afford flour,

and now we're buying, what, an £80 truffle? It's just ridiculous.

Everything on the table is just shouting to me

sort of high end, you know, money.

And books of the time suggest far more exotic fillings,

from pheasant, grouse and quail

through to oyster, eels and maid.

That's another type of fish, not your servant.

The notion that you'd buy your sandwiches pre-made

from the same shop that made your bread

was a relatively late Victorian development,

but one which bakers have profitably continued ever since.

Can you imagine if it hadn't been the Earl of Sandwich

that had sort of started it?

If it had been the Earl of Devonshire or something...

Or if it was a guy called Derek.

-Yeah, we could be eating dereks.

-"I'm having a derek for lunch."

Look at this.

It's not too bad.

Afternoon tea is served to family and friends,

and Crouch End locals.

So we've got a Neapolitan cake here.

We've got scones with clotted cream and jam.

-The scones are absolutely delicious.

-Mwah!

It's a chance for everyone to reflect on 63 years

of Victorian baking.

At every stage there were products that really surprised me,

and I'm shocked by how much I actually enjoyed having them,

so I think it's good to open your mind

and to think about some of the fantastic flavours

that have sadly got forgotten along the way.

You want to try some more cake?

Yeah. We got a yes. He likes it.

They're just fantastic products,

and they're really eye-catching,

and I can really see those entering onto the Swift counter.

If they were good for them...

with a slight change, maybe not so much sugar,

they would be good today.

We've charted a journey really from the small, from the local,

to the introduction of factory conditions,

and then sort of rampant consumerism as well.

And the pace of change, the way in which, as well,

so much that happens outside baking impacts on the food industry,

that is something that I'd never really fully appreciated

until I'd seen our bakers.

Watching, in that first 1840s bakehouse, pounding bread...

-Go on!

-..and moving to something where you can press a button

-and it happens for you.

-Mind the door.

WHIRRING

It's a really graphic illustration of the way in which the Victorian age

impacted on everyone. It's amazing.

But with progress came sacrifice,

of sometimes valuable traditions.

At the beginning of the Victorian era

we saw the close links that these kind of rural bakeries had.

You know, you knew the farmer who grew the wheat,

and that supplied the miller that then supplied the bakery.

Whereas, as we've kind of gone through the eras,

we've seen that relationship become more and more distant.

As time progressed, they had to fight harder to find customers,

to keep up with other businesses.

With more development and with more competition

comes a high level of stress.

Had I been a Victorian baker

I would have wanted to be an industrial baker.

You know, the industrialisation of the bread production

was what was responsible for an affordable price.

There's a lot of things

that probably didn't happen as a result of bakers' own choice.

A lot of what they've done is responding to demand.

At the end of the day, they're trying to run a business

and they're trying to make a living.

GRUNTS

The one thing I take from the Victorians is their ingenuity,

and thinking outside the box.

We think we're coming up with great new ideas -

in actual fact, they've all been thought of before.

They were thinking of retail, they were thinking of wholesale,

they were thinking of supply and demand.

It's a mirror image, it's just that they were wearing more clothes.

I think we've all learned something.

And I've certainly learned a great deal.

I had such a great time.

Using ingredients that would have been used back then,

wearing clothes that they would have worn back then -

there's nothing else that could have got you closer

to being a Victorian baker.

Each of us has become that baker from the past,

and in some ways bakery has changed massively,

and in other ways, it hasn't changed a bit.