On Food and Cooking

from this time. Domestic recipes for bread
begin to appear in cookbooks for the emerging
middle class, and already look much like
modern recipes. English and American
cookbooks from the 18th century on contain
dozens of recipes for breads, cakes, and
cookies. In England around 1800, most bread
was still baked in domestic or communal
village ovens. But as the Industrial Revolution
spread and more of the population moved to
crowded city quarters, the bakeries took over
an ever increasing share of bread production,
and some of them adulterated their flour with
whiteners (alum) and fillers (chalk, ground
animal bones). The decline of domestic
baking was criticized on economic,
nutritional, and even moral grounds. The
English political journalist William Cobbett
wrote in Cottage Economy (1821), a tract
addressed to the working class, that it is
reasonable to buy bread only in cities where
space and fuel are in short supply. Otherwise,